The talk in the locker room at the Jerusalem Pool has been surprisingly conciliatory since the election last week. Dani, who voted Meretz (after seriously considering Hadash) and Siman, who voted Likud, agree that the next coalition should consist of the Likud, Kadima, and Labor, under Bibi Netanyahu’s leadership.

When I pointed out that the foreign and economic policies on which Likud and Kadima would be hard to square unless one or the other party betrayed its principles, Dani and Siman insisted that the differences were negligible. So Kadima advocates cutting a deal with the Palestinians in which they’d receive nearly all the West Bank, whereas Likud promises that no such deal will be forthcoming. So Likud advocates tax cuts and a tight budget while Kadima’s program calls for a larger deficit and more government spending to stimulate the economy. When you get down to it, Dani and Siman insist, they’re really the same.

Why this yearning for the country’s large parties to rule together? President Obama has been learning some lessons in recent weeks about the futility of seeking bipartisanship when the ideological differences between the parties are real. Haven’t Dani and Siman been reading the papers?…

Read the rest on Jewcy–Comment there or here.

Soon after that, Feiglin and company decided on a new strategy for their radical group: They would seek to take over the Likud. It was a crafty decision. A well-organized group acting as a block can have an outsized influence in internal party elections. Feiglin encouraged his supporters to become Likud members. (There was no need for them to vote for the party of the mainstream right in general elections.)

Feiglin is patient. In 2003, the Likud chose its list of candidates for the Knesset in its infamous central committee. Feiglin ended up far down the list, at number 41. Then the Central Elections Committee disqualified him as a candidate, because he had a conviction for sedition, a crime of moral turpitude which carried a seven-year ban from elected office.

He didn’t give up. Benjamin Netanyahu doesn’t want him in the party. Netanyahu, whose expertise is marketing, wants to brand the Likud as a centrist party, though his own political goals amount to permanent Israeli rule over disenfranchised Palestinians (with some sweet nothings about “economic peace” thrown in).

I admit to feeling sorry for Netanyahu. As hard-line as he is, his views don’t come near the straightforward fascism promoted by Feiglin. An article on Jewish Leadership’s English website called “Is Democracy Jewish?” asserts the superiority of the organic nation over Western individualism, and posits the need for political “unification” in place of open debate. Elsewhere on the site, the group endorses all-out discrimination against Arabs in the workplace. Jewish Leadership’s Hebrew site is under repairs right now. In the past, it proposed a constitution for Israel that included a rabbinic council that, ayatollah-like, would have to approve all government decisions.

The results of the Likud primary yesterday suggest that patience and organization have payed off. Feiglin is No. 20 on the Likud list for the Knesset. Unless the party collapses in the next two months, he’ll be a member of parliament. Moreover, as sundry reports have pointed out, Feiglin successfully put the most right-leaning candidates high on the Likud list, cutting deals with sundry politicians.

Netanyahu is the candidate for prime minister; Feiglin controls the party. Both of them know it. The question is whether the electorate knows or cares. If it does, the primary will mark the moment when Bibi lost the election. If not, the election will mark Feiglin’s next victory.

• Moshe Feiglin, head of the Manhigut Yehudit (“Jewish Leadership”) faction in the Likud, has been touring the U.S., speaking at synagogues such as Congregation B’nai Yeshurun in Teaneck. Manhigut Yehudit’s website includes a draft constitution in Hebrew with such features as a rabbinical council that could overturn all laws. In an interview with the fawning Jewish Press, Feiglin said that “There is no such thing as innocent civilians” and said that as prime minister he would have responded to the Merkaz Harav terror attack last month by acting against the attacker’s entire village. Feiglin’s support in the Likud comes entirely from the far-right activists he has signed up as party members, to the embarrassment of the rest of the party. But what are American congregations doing hosting someone who can be called, with understatement, a fascist?
• Thank God for the farm lobby: Agricultural Minister Shalom Simhon told Ha’aretz recently that Israel’s farm sector “is built on exports to the Palestinian economy.” Simhon is therefore acting to increase food supplies to the Gaza Strip. If a concern for human rights won’t prevent the use of starvation as a weapon, at least some vested economic interests are at stake.
• More Hagee-ography. Rob Eshman, editor of the L.A. Jewish Journal, interviewed John McCain and asked him about his ties with Rev. John Hagee. McCain told him that Hagee supports an Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Writes Eshman (emphasis mine):

I started to correct him — Hagee and other evangelicals most certainly don’t support compromise on territory or Jerusalem, and McCain must know this. That’s when I got my first taste of the famous McCain technique: I’ll-talk-so-you-can’t.

“Look,” he cut me off, “I just have to tell you that we should be so grateful for the support of the evangelical movement for the state of Israel, given the influence that they have, beneficial influence that they have over millions of Americans, and then we’ll worry about a peace process later on…”

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