Neither Kadima Nor Likud Can Make Peace With Palestinians

Israel's domestic politics have been thrown into turmoil with inconclusive election results. Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni's Kadima Party won 28 seats, just one more than Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud Party.

Both candidates are claiming victory.

Israel's politicians are an argumentative lot and a leader has seldom been elected outright to the 120-member parliament. But for once almost all Israeli politicians have agreed on something: that the country's election system just does not work.

Weeks of coalition negotiations are almost certain to follow during which Egyptian-led attempts to broker a truce between Israel and Hamas will be frozen. After all, what would be the point in Hamas inking a deal with Israel, if the incoming government moves to overturn it.

Political experts agree that the latest Israeli election results indicate an elaborate shift toward the hard line in the public mood. Rightwing and religious parties won a total of 65 seats, compared to 55 for center-left and Arab parties.

To make matters worse the final say in who will rule Israel might fall to extreme nationalist Avigdor Lieberman whose rightist Yisrael Beiteinu made four gains in the election to hold 15 seats. To give you a perspective here, Israel's Labor Party that ruled the country for decades only managed to win 13 seats.

Therefore the next government will be reluctant to talk peace with the Palestinians, and this will also spoil any chances of success for US President Obama's Mideast peace drive.

Israel's Shimon Perez is not a fan of Netanyahu. Perez has hinted in the past that he considers Netanyahu to possess too volatile a personality to govern with a steady hand, as it were!

Netanyahu wants to expand the illegal settlements. He believes talking peace with Palestinians is a complete waste of time and has vowed to crush the democratically elected Hamas government in Gaza.

Livni on the other hand, says she will continue peace talks with the acting Palestinian authority chief Mahmoud Abbas. But she is likely to allow Israeli settlement activity because she is not really a centrist at all. Livni was one of the advocates and main architects of Israel's 22-day onslaught against Gaza.

Mahmoud Abbas says he is willing to restart peace talks only if Israel commits to a settlement freeze. But realistically speaking, nobody really cares in Israel what Abbas says or indeed whether the man is willing to sit at the negotiating table.

Abbas is a nonentity in the game, the poor fellow!

In the end there is not that much between Livni and Netanyahu. The hardliners have always had the final say in Israeli politics, irrespective of which faction -the rightists, the centrists or the leftists- have been in government.

Israel has an agenda that it does not even attempt to hide anymore. Extremist Jews intend to create a homeland for the entire world Jewry in the Holy Lands. The problem is that the entire world's Jewry number in tens of millions and even if the whole Palestinian population is dislodged from its native homeland of Palestine, there will still not be enough land left to house the world's entire Jewish population.

And there are those who get pedantic with the above ballpark type of argument, but historical facts speak for themselves.

The Arab leaders allied to the West must be aware that their own territories are very much in danger of getting gobbled up. There is a time scale at play here. The main argument might well be to do with Palestine's fate right now, but in Israel's grand scheme of things the moment will arrive for creation of living space for more Jews arriving to claim their bit of the 'promised land.'

Therefore a negotiated settlement between Palestine and Israel is possibly the last thing on any Israeli leader's mind. The idea is instead to skillfully utilize the world media to demonize whoever stands in Israel's way and play for time until 'greater Israel' is a reality.

In domestic Israeli politics, whichever candidate deemed capable of getting away with murder while providing the grounds for stealing yet more Arab land is elected to head the government.

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