Lieberman / Holding the key By Yossi Verter

[Jefferson23]

Tens of thousands of left-wing voters who recently decided to vote for Kadima instead of Labor or Meretz will wake up this morning to hear that Tzipi Livni is vigorously courting far-right leader Avigdor Lieberman.

Without Lieberman, Livni has no government. Even with the Yisrael Beiteinu chairman, Livni's ability to form a government is in great doubt.


Livni won a major victory yesterday. She beat Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud, which had been leading in the polls until the last minute. The election had boiled down to Tzipi vs. Bibi, and the public decided in favor of Livni. Even if Netanyahu does end up forming the government, he sustained a stinging blow yesterday.


article in full: http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1063142.html

[Grimm]

1. The weird thing is Lieberman does have some progressive ideas

And I highly stress some. Obviously his uber-nationalism is his party's key selling point, but he has some strong opinions against the religious authorities in Israel as well. Something that really surprised me was his position that religious authorities shouldn't be allowed to decide personal status laws (i.e. marriage and divorce) so that civil marriages, including inter-faith ones, would be allowed. He has also come out swinging against Shas (ultra-Orthodox party) saying the "no citizenship without loyalty" motto applies to Orthodox Jews just as much as Arab-Israelis who don't perform army service in Israel as well.

None of this is said to excuse his quasi-ethnic cleansing platform, but just goes to show the paradoxes and complexity that exist in Israeli politics. I'm curious to see whether it'll be his progressive or regressive idea he holds over Livni's head as a requirement for his party to join the coalition.