Sir, – If, as it seems almost certain that he will do so, Binyamin Netanyahu forms a new hard-right government, it will be a triumph for the politics of fear over socio-economic concerns after he created a national security paranoia in the last days of a bitterly divisive Israeli election campaign. The forthcoming coalition led by Likud will reinforce the paradigmatic, ideological change of a nation founded on the socialist-agrarian principles of the pre-war Yishuv, which oversaw the implementation of a constitution of equality for all citizens regardless of race, creed or political belief, into an insular society that in many respects resembles the Irish state of the mid-20th century.
Moreover, it also means the socio-economic political preferences of nearly half of the electorate who voted for the leftist coalition led by Yitzhak Herzog and Tzipi Livni and the new Joint List of Arab parties have been consigned to the periphery as Mr Netanyahu cynically exploited the psyche of a nation that has lived in constant fear of destruction since its foundation in 1948.
This will have profound implications for the national political project if Mr Netanyahu stands by his pre-election pledge that a Palestinian state will not come into existence under his leadership.
Furthermore, his alarmist and discriminatory focusing on the voting pattern of Israeli Arabs, who for the first time organised into an effective block vote, exhibited the worst discriminatory traits of Le Pen’s National Front, Farage’s Ukip and Greece’s Golden Dawn.
This has traumatised many of my Israeli friends who are proudly Zionist in their absolute loyalty to a Jewish state, but are also deeply committed to a just two-state solution to the tragedy of Israel-Palestine. This cohort is defined by a humanitarian commitment to its Palestinian neighbours, a commitment which has been distastefully portrayed as threatening the national imperative by Mr Netanyahu.
This block is most certainly not disloyal. Such people are the political descendants of David Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir, who prioritised above everything the security of Israel, but who also acknowledged the rights of the region’s Palestinian inhabitants. – Yours, etc,
Dr KEVIN McCARTHY,
Kinsale,
Co Cork.