A spokeswoman for Israel’s ruling Likud Party says parliament could vote as early as next week on a bill requiring a national referendum on any peace deal with the Palestinians. …read more
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A look at the makeup of the new Israeli government
Four parties will make up the new Israeli coalition government, adding up to a 68-seat majority in the 120-seat parliament. It is the first Israeli government in decades not to include any ultra-Orthodox parties and includes some staunch secularists. On security matters, its members range from hard-line hawks to the center-left. Here is a look at their main policies:
— Likud-Yisrael Beiteinu (31 seats): Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s hawkish Likud Party teamed with former Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman‘s ultranationalist Yisrael Beitenu for the election but the two parties have not officially merged. Likud is known for taking a tough line toward the Palestinians and for its conservative economic policies. It also advocates strong international action — possibly including a last-resort military strike — against arch-enemy Iran‘s nuclear facilities. Netanyahu has grudgingly accepted the idea of a Palestinian state, though his party traditionally claimed the West Bank and east Jerusalem for Israel. Yisrael Beitenu, which represents immigrants from the former Soviet Union, takes an even harder line toward the Palestinians. The party has a more secular following and rejects the sweeping draft exemptions granted to ultra-Orthodox Jews. Lieberman has been indicted on charges of fraud and breach of trust and currently cannot serve in the new government, though the Foreign Ministry is being held open for him until the conclusion of his trial — assuming he is cleared. Likud’s Moshe Yaalon, a former military chief, is slated to be the new defense minister.
— Yesh Atid (19 seats): Founded just a year ago by former TV personality Yair Lapid, the party represents secular, middle-class interests and surged to become the second-largest bloc in parliament. It has vowed to enact a universal military draft, ending exemptions for the ultra-Orthodox, and wants to cut the stipends they receive from the state. The party also advocates spending less money on Jewish settlements in the Palestinian territories. Lapid has vowed to make a serious effort to reach peace. Yet his campaign made little mention of security issues, focusing heavily on a social and economic agenda that favors investment in education and other issues important to the middle class. Lapid is slated to become the finance minister, a position with great influence over the budget. His party will also control the Education Ministry and three other minor portfolios.
— Jewish Home (12 seats): Although its core constituency is modern Orthodox Jews, the party surged in the polls on the back of a strong pro-settlement message and the appeal of its charismatic leader, high-tech millionaire Naftali Bennett, to secularists as well. Bennett is allied with Lapid on most domestic issues, but the two differ sharply over peace efforts and settlement building. A former leader of the West Bank settlement …read more
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Israel's comatose Sharon shows brain activity
Seven years after a massive stroke removed him from office and left him in a vegetative state, former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is able to process information and has exhibited “robust activity” in his brain, according to doctors who conducted recent tests.
Though some hoped Sharon might regain consciousness and resume his life, experts warned that was highly unlikely.
The medical team that tested him last week said Monday that the scans showed the 84-year-old Sharon responding to pictures of his family and recordings of his son’s voice. They cautioned, however, it is not clear how much he understood, stressing the chances of his regaining full capacities are almost zero.
“We were surprised to see such robust activity in his brain,” said Dr. Alon Friedman, head of the Zlotowski Center for Neuroscience at Ben-Gurion University in Beersheba. “The information is getting in and is getting processed. He hears what they are saying. To what extent he understands, we cannot say for sure … but there are encouraging hints that he does.”
Sharon was at the height of his political power in early 2006 when a devastating stroke incapacitated him. He has been in a deep coma ever since, connected to a respirator. His family has said he sometimes opens his eyes and moves his fingers, but little else has been disclosed about his condition. No one has suggested that his cognitive functions have returned.
Last week a team of Israeli and U.S. scientists performed a series of tests on him at Soroka Hospital in Beersheba, using a newly developed functional MRI to assess his brain function. Friedman said the two-hour procedure was among the first of its type to be conducted on someone who had suffered such a brain hemorrhage. It is also rare to perform such tests on someone Sharon’s age, he said.
Friedman would not disclose additional information about Sharon’s medical state or say whether there had been any physical reactions to the stimuli. He said the findings would provide solace to Sharon’s sons, Gilad and Omri, giving them confirmation that their father could hear them. Omri Sharon declined comment when contacted by The Associated Press Monday.
Raanan Gissin, a long-time Sharon confidante, said those close to the former leader were encouraged by the tests.
“The hope is not that he will return to be the leader that he was, but basically the hope … that Sharon will return to normal life,” he said. “The people of Israel really feel gratitude toward Sharon and they think he deserves to end his life like a normal person.”
Experts doubted that would happen.
Dr. Ilan Shelef, head of medical imaging at Soroka University Medical Center, sought to temper expectations from the results of Thursday’s scans.
“What is very important to understand is that we have a snapshot of what happened” during the test, said Shelef, who participated in the testing. “He received some stimuli from his family and he responded to these stimuli. It was a metabolic response in the brain,” he said. “Metabolic” refers to physical reactions.
“We don’t know what happened two years ago or four years ago and we have no idea what will happen in the future,” he said. “We just know that on Thursday evening there was a metabolic response in the brain of former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.”
Dr. Nicholas Schiff, professor of neuroscience at Weill Cornell Medical College, called the findings “interesting but ambiguous” and warned against reading too much into the tests.
Schiff, who did not participate in the testing and said he had not reviewed the research, said the FMRI is a widely used tool used for gathering data, but there is no consensus among researchers on interpreting the results. “In general, there are very few uses of FMRIs that unequivocally demonstrate awareness in patients that appear unresponsive,” he said.
Sharon was a highly decorated military officer who fought in three wars before entering politics in the 1970s and serving in a series of top ministerial posts. He was elected prime minister in 2001 and led Israel for the next five years until he was incapacitated.
Shortly before his stroke, he directed a unilateral withdrawal of Israeli troops and settlers from the Gaza Strip, ending a 38-year military occupation of the territory, bolted his hard-line Likud Party and established the centrist Kadima Party. He appeared on his way to an easy re-election when he suffered the stroke. His deputy, Ehud Olmert, took over and was elected prime minister a few months later.
Sharon had a first, small stroke in December 2005 and was put on blood thinners before experiencing a severe brain hemorrhage on Jan. 4, 2006. After spending months in the Jerusalem hospital where he was initially treated, Sharon was transferred to the long-term care facility at Sheba Medical Center near Tel Aviv.
After his second stroke, doctors performed several extensive emergency brain operations to stop cerebral hemorrhaging. After a long stay at the hospital, he was taken for a brief period to his home in southern Israel. He was rushed at least once into hospital intensive care for dialysis after his kidneys began failing.
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Rise of Israeli centrist raises hopes for peace
The unexpectedly strong showing by a new centrist party in Israel‘s parliamentary election has raised hopes of a revival of peace talks with Palestinians that have languished for four years under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Political newcomer Yair Lapid, the surprise kingmaker, is already being courted by a weakened Netanyahu, who needs his support to form a ruling coalition. Lapid has said he will not sit in the government unless the peace process is restarted.
But following a campaign in which the Palestinian issue was largely ignored, it remains unclear how hard Lapid will push the issue in what could be weeks of coalition talks with Netanyahu.
Tuesday’s election ended in a deadlock, with Netanyahu’s hard-line religious bloc of allies and the rival bloc of centrist, secular and Arab parties each with 60 seats, according to near-complete official results. Opinion polls had universally forecast a majority of seats going to the right-wing bloc.
While Netanyahu, as head of the largest single party in parliament, is poised to remain prime minister, it appears impossible for him to cobble together a majority coalition without reaching across the aisle.
Lapid, whose Yesh Atid — or There is a Future — captured 19 seats, putting it in second place, is the most likely candidate to join him. In a gesture to Netanyahu, Lapid said there would not be a “blocking majority,” in which opposition parties prevent the prime minister from forming a government. The comment virtually guarantees that Netanyahu will be prime minister, with Lapid a major partner.
Netanyahu said Wednesday he would work to create a wide coalition stretching across the political divide.
Speaking to reporters, he said the election proved “the Israeli public wants me to continue leading the country” and put together “as broad a coalition as possible.”
He said the next government would pursue three major domestic policy goals: to bring ultra-Orthodox Jewish men, who are routinely granted draft exemptions, into the military, to provide affordable housing and to change the current fragmented multiparty system, which often gives smaller coalition partners outsize strength.
But Netanyahu only alluded to peacemaking in vague terms, saying coalition talks would focus on “security and diplomatic responsibility.” He took no questions from reporters and immediately walked out of the room.
Netanyahu’s comments were clearly aimed at the 49-year-old Lapid, a popular former TV talk-show host who has portrayed himself as an average Israeli and champion of a middle class struggling to make ends meet.
Though committed to pursuing peace, Lapid’s campaign focused heavily on pocketbook issues, raising speculation that Lapid might abandon the peace agenda if he can extract other concessions from Netanyahu.
In an interview with The Associated Press last week, Lapid criticized Netanyahu’s handling of peace efforts, saying he was committed to restarting negotiations and would not serve as a “fig leaf” in a hard-line government.
Dov Lipman, a lawmaker in Lapid’s party, said Yesh Atid was serious about resuming talks with the Palestinians. He said the party’s strong performance “clearly says the people of Israel, while focusing on internal issues … do understand we have to be in negotiations, exploring solutions and have to be trying to get to the two-state solution.”
“We feel that with a sincere approach from the Israeli side, showing we’re serious, we can make progress,” he said. “We don’t feel it’s responsible leadership to be in a government which is not trying to move forward in negotiations.”
Talks have ground to a standstill during Netanyahu’s past four years in office, in large part because of his continued construction of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and east Jerusalem. The Palestinians claim both areas, captured by Israel in 1967, for a future state and refuse to negotiate while the construction continues.
Under Israel‘s election laws, President Shimon Peres must formally charge Netanyahu with the task of forming a new coalition within six weeks.
If he reaches a power-sharing deal with Lapid, it remains far from clear whether it would be enough to restart talks. While Netanyahu has grudgingly accepted the idea of establishing a Palestinian state, his Likud Party is dominated by hard-liners who oppose Palestinian independence.
Another potential coalition partner, Naftali Bennett of the pro-settler Jewish Home Party, has called for annexing large parts of the West Bank, the heartland of a future Palestine. Netanyahu will be hard-pressed to balance the competing visions of Bennett and Lapid, and resumption of negotiations would likely spark a revolt within his hard-line base of support. A continued 60/60 deadlock would trigger new elections.
On the other hand, Lapid’s positions, while generous in Israeli terms, still fall short of Palestinian demands for a full withdrawal from all of the West Bank and east Jerusalem. Lapid says east Jerusalem, home to Jewish, Christian and Muslim holy sites, must remain under Israeli control. He has also refused to say whether he accepts a freeze in settlement building, a key Palestinian demand.
In the West Bank city of Ramallah, Palestinian leaders said Wednesday they were pleasantly surprised by the strong showing by Israel‘s moderates, but remained doubtful that would soften Netanyahu’s policies.
“You are not going to have a savior suddenly producing instant peace,” said Hanan Ashrawi, a senior official with the Palestine Liberation Organization.
Opinion polls in Israel have indicated a majority favor establishing a Palestinian state alongside Israel. Yet during the election campaign, the need to reach peace was barely mentioned, reflecting widespread doubts, even among the dovish left, that peace is possible.
The outcome of Tuesday’s election shocked Israel, where Netanyahu had been forecast by all opinion polls to be cruising toward re-election at the helm of a hard-line and religious bloc.
Netanyahu’s Likud-Yisrael Beitenu alliance captured just 31 seats, down from 42 in the outgoing parliament. After the shocking setback, Netanyahu found himself answering tough questions about what went wrong.
Avraham Diskin, a political scientist from Jerusalem’s Hebrew University, said Netanyahu’s merger with former Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu turned out to be a huge error. The union was supposed to create a strong rightist bloc immune from blackmail attempts of smaller parties.
In practice, Diskin said, it backfired because the parties‘ constituencies have little in common. Likud appeals to traditional, religious Jews and those of Middle Eastern descent. Lieberman’s base are immigrants from the former Soviet Union. Lieberman’s indictment on corruption charges during the campaign also hurt the alliance.
“This was a harsh error. It was the deciding factor,” Diskin said.
Netanyahu made other gaffes. His campaign, including photo ops with young smiling soldiers and stops at Jewish holy sites, appeared to take victory for granted. An attack on Bennett, the settler leader, ended up rallying sympathy for his rival, and the last-minute appointment of a popular Likud Cabinet minister to a senior government post appeared to be a desperate attempt to win over voters.
In the background, Netanyahu’s tense relations with key allies, including the United States, over settlement construction also may have concerned voters. In the weeks before the vote, Netanyahu announced plans to build thousands of new settlement homes. Last week, President Barack Obama was quoted as saying Netanyahu was hurting Israel‘s own interests with the settlement construction.
On Wednesday, White House spokesman Jay Carney pushed back on the notion that Obama and Netanyahu need to recalibrate their relationship.
“No leader has met more often with or spent more time on the phone with President Obama than Prime Minister Netanyahu. That relationship is strong, and it is a relationship that allows for a free and open discussion of ideas and positions,” Carney said.
Sima Kadmon, a veteran political columnist for the Yediot Ahronot daily, said the election results did not represent a a major shift in ideology but rather disappointment in Netanyahu himself.
“There is no doubt Netanyahu is the tragic figure in these elections. Despite the huge advantage with which he set out … he ended up as, at best, a weak prime minister whose coalition will depend on the wishes of the big winner in these elections, Yair Lapid.”
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Associated Press Writer Josh Lederman in Washington contributed to this report.
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Israel Votes, but Little Mystery Over Who Will Win
By Evann Gastaldo 
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Newser – Home
Israeli PM faces tough choice if re-elected
After a lackluster three-month campaign, few doubt that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is on his way to re-election. But the makeup of Netanyahu’s next government remains a mystery.
If re-elected on Tuesday, Netanyahu will face a critical decision that will define his term.
He can form a majority coalition with the hard-line and religious parties he often calls his natural partners — or reach across the aisle and try to bring centrist parties into a broader-based government that might be more amenable to pursuing peace and ending, at least partly, the occupation of the West Bank and other territories.
His decision will have deep implications.
A narrow coalition of parties that oppose concessions to the Palestinians, while the easier option, would mean continued deadlock in Mideast peace efforts and increased confrontation with the international community, including Israel‘s key ally, the United States.
A broad coalition could force Netanyahu to give powerful Cabinet posts to more moderate figures as the price of their support, and would likely draw fierce opposition from within his own Likud Party.
In either case, the odds for a breakthrough in peace talks appear faint at best, because no Netanyahu-led coalition is likely to offer the Palestinians better peace terms than those they already have received and either rejected or ignored under previous governments. Netanyahu’s own positions fall far short of anything acceptable to the Palestinians.
Likud officials refuse to say which way they are leaning. Netanyahu’s campaign chairman, Cabinet Minister Gideon Saar, said Thursday that the party hasn’t even started thinking about building the coalition.
“This would send the wrong message that we’ve already won,” Saar told an interviewer on Channel 2 TV. He said the party is focused on capturing as many seats in Israel‘s fragmented Knesset, or parliament, as possible.
Under Israel‘s system, parties win a number of seats based on the percentage of votes they receive. No party has ever won an outright majority in the 120-seat parliament. The leader of the party with the best chance of cobbling together a majority is tapped as prime minister and gets the first chance to form a coalition.
All the polls show that Netanyahu’s Likud Party — in alliance with the more nationalist Israel Beitenu party — will win more than a quarter of the seats, and together with other rightist and religious parties should command at least a narrow overall majority. Although that can still change, the operating assumption in Israel is that Netanyahu will indeed emerge with a majority.
In part, this is because the opposition center-left bloc of parties has failed to rally behind a single dominant leader.
The conflict with the Palestinians and the fate of occupied territories, hotly debated in Israel for decades, has barely registered as a campaign issue.
Many left-leaning parties — including the Labor Party, which traditionally has led the bloc — have focused on internal economic issues or stressed the personalities of their leaders. This reflects the sense that Israelis have given up hopes of reaching a peace deal with the Palestinians, and stressing other issues is the best way of attracting support.
It has proven difficult, because among the current crop of party leaders Netanyahu is widely seen — even by some opponents — as the most plausible prime minister.
The 63-year-old prime minister has cultivated an image as a tough leader who protects Israelis’ security in a fast-changing region, helping draw world attention to Iran’s suspect nuclear program and responding forcefully to rocket fire from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip.
A Smith Research poll published in the Jerusalem Post Friday showed the Likud-Yisrael Beitenu alliance would win 33 seats compared to 14 to his hawkish rival the Jewish Home party and 17 to the Labor party. The bloc of religious and nationalist parties was poised to win 66 seats, according to Smith Research, which surveyed 800 people and had a margin of error of 3.5 percentage points. Other polls showed similar results.
A hard-line alliance would be the easy choice for Netanyahu. But it could also have negative consequences for his country’s international image.
While Netanyahu has professed to favor the establishment of a Palestinian state as part of a peace agreement, Likud is now dominated by hard-liners who oppose territorial concessions to the Palestinians. The leader of a likely coalition partner, the pro-settler Jewish Home, has gone even further, saying Israel should annex large swaths of the West Bank, the heartland of any future Palestinian state.
During a tumultuous four-year term, Netanyahu has drawn fierce criticism internationally for his handling of the Palestinian issue and his refusal to stop building Jewish settlements in the West Bank and east Jerusalem. More than 500,000 Israelis now live in these areas, which were captured by Israel during the 1967 war and are claimed by Palestinians along with Gaza for their state.
The Palestinians refuse to negotiate while settlements continue to be built, saying the construction is a sign of bad faith.
Netanyahu says talks should begin without any preconditions. He also says a partial settlement freeze he imposed in 2009 and 2010 failed to bring about negotiations, and says the real obstacle to peace is Palestinian intransigence.
Internationally, Netanyahu has found little sympathy. His allies in Washington and Europe have condemned recent settlement plans in unusually harsh language, and European countries have begun to hint of punitive measures against Israel.
In a sign of displeasure with Netanyahu, the U.N. General Assembly voted overwhelmingly in November to recognize a Palestinian state in the West Bank, Gaza and east Jerusalem. Netanyahu rejects a pullback to Israel‘s 1967 lines.
This week, President Barack Obama was quoted as saying that Netanyahu’s unwillingness to make concessions to the Palestinians is plunging Israel into diplomatic isolation. “Israel doesn’t know what its own best interests are,” Obama was quoted by columnist Jeffrey Goldberg, who is known to have good contacts in the White House, as saying.
Some Israelis have made similar arguments, concluding that the country’s very existence could be in question if it does not reach a peace accord with the Palestinians. The continued occupation of millions of disenfranchised Palestinians will turn Israel into an apartheid-like country with a Jewish minority ruling over what will ultimately be an Arab majority, they say.
This argument, once considered radical in Israel, has begun to go mainstream. Perhaps its most vocal proponent is former Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, who four years ago led peace talks with the Palestinians and recently founded a new party whose primary aim is to reach a peace agreement. “Netanyahu is leading us toward the end of the Jewish state,” she said recently.
Netanyahu himself alluded to the issue Friday in an interview with Israel TV.
“I am not in favor of a binational state,” he said. “We need to reach a solution. I don’t want to rule the Palestinians and I don’t want them to rule us and threaten our existence.”
However, he appears in no hurry to act accordingly, and the left and its supporters are increasingly bold in predicting doom.
Earlier this month, the recently retired head of Israel‘s Shin Bet internal security service, Yuval Diskin, criticized Netanyahu for failing to aggressively press ahead with peace efforts during a time of calm.
“If I cause the Israeli voter to think twice before choosing parties and leaders that are not worthy because they are actually not leading us where we should be going, I’ve done my part,” Diskin said.
Such criticism has fueled speculation that Netanyahu will explore the possibility of bringing centrist partners into his coalition. The likely candidates would be Livni’s new party The Movement and There is a Future, another newcomer led by former TV talk-show host Yair Lapid.
Both candidates have promised to drive a hard bargain. Appearing on TV Thursday night, Livni said she would join Netanyahu only if there are serious peace efforts and she is given a key role.
“I will not sit in a government that will continue the stalemate,” she said.
Lapid has indicated more flexibility, focusing his campaign primarily on the plight of Israel‘s struggling middle class. But he told The Associated Press this week that he would not be a “fig leaf” for an extremist government.
The winner of Tuesday’s election will have six weeks to put together his coalition. Netanyahu has sent mixed signals in interviews, saying that he wants a broad government to ensure stability but also saying that partners will have to accept his policies. The conventional wisdom is that the coalition will be even more hard-line than the outgoing coalition.
The prospect of another Netanyahu term has fueled a sense of despair among Palestinians, who fear that his ambitious plans for settlement construction over the next four years could kill their dreams of independence. Their hope is that Obama, emboldened by his own re-election, will put heavy pressure on Netanyahu to return to negotiations.
“The first strong impression is that peace is not on the agenda of the Israeli parties, and it’s clear that Netanyahu is winning,” said Mohammed Ishtayeh, an aide to President Mahmoud Abbas.
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Associated Press Mohammed Daraghmeh in Ramallah, West Bank, contributed to this report.
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