Ministers of no Grace

#NotAllLittleSnakes. Via Aqualand Pets Plus.

To those who said Binyamin Netanyahu didn't really mean he was opposed to the two-state solution for Palestinians when he said he was in the March campaign, you could take a look at the cabinet he finally put together seven weeks after the election, with minutes to go before a deadline would have given Isaac Herzog a chance to try forming a government. If Netanyahu really does favor a Palestinian state at some time in the future, he's the only member of the new cabinet who does, as Richard Silverstein says; every other single member opposes it, explicitly and publicly, and the incoming justice minister, Ayelet Shaked, has called for another solution, as Ali Abuminah has noted,

It is a call for genocide because it declares that “the entire Palestinian people is the enemy” and justifies its destruction, “including its elderly and its women, its cities and its villages, its property and its infrastructure.”

It is a call for genocide because it calls for the slaughter of Palestinian mothers who give birth to “little snakes.”

(The post where she said this has been deleted from her Facebook page.)

Not that the new government is going to carry out an actual genocide. They'll continue to assert that they have a right to punish Gazans for having a leadership from the wrong party by killing them in fairly substantial numbers, and may actually try to do it again in a year or two, should the government survive so long, when the PM's poll numbers start to flag, but they won't attempt to change the situation in any deep way at all. Just as they won't attempt to do anything good either, like resolve the housing crisis (not alleviated by adding more illegal housing in the occupied West Bank, which doesn't create nearly enough, though it does boost Israel's reputation for international banditry and make US support for Israel more difficult).

There's one thing this gang hates more than Palestinians, though, namely each other. Netanyahu, thrown into turmoil by the desertion of one rat faction, that of the Moldovan gangster Avigdor Lieberman, has had to make a truce of convenience with another one, Shaked's party, under the open racist Naftali Bennett.

The absolute nothingness we can look forward to in Israel over the next couple of years before this reincarnation of the previous mistake withers and dies is well (and objectively) summarized by The Economist. (For a more bracingly unambiguous treatment see Philip Weiss's devastating report.) Netanyahu has put the country through an unnecessary, expensive, and extraordinarily divisive election in order to stay in the same place he was in to start with, only a little bit worse.

The French government has been working, in the wake of the successful conclusion of the penultimate round of negotiations over Iran's nuclear program, on a (sort of) new project, a program toward Security Council recognition of a Palestinian state. Yesterday, just as Netanyahu was completing his negotiations, the neoconservative Israeli rumor mill Debka File reported an anonymously sourced exclusive story according to which the Obama administration has now given a green light to the Hollande plan. Debka doesn't often get things right (Wikipedia quotes Israeli intelligence officials as giving them a reliability rating of "less than 10%"), but once in a while it happens. Let's hope this is one of them, because really, nothing else is going to happen, or at least nothing else good, over the next two years.