War For Cabinet Begins After Israeli Elections - Asia - Around the globe - World

Arabs in Israel have found themselves between Livni, who advocate attacking Gaza, and Netanyahu’s nationalists.

Analysts are calling the situation in the middle east a political stalemate, whose main characters are the big names of the elections in Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu with his rightists, and Tzipi Livni, the head of the left orientated Kadima.

Livni won 28 mandates in the Knesset, which has 120 seats, and Netanyahu has won 27. After all, Livni has less chances of creating a coalition cabinet, and proposed a cabinet of unity to Netanyahu, which he rejected. He is allegedly planning on leading a “nationalist camp” that would take control of 64 seats in parliament.

The main reason for the election win from the rightists was the great support from the rightist parties in parliament, which comprised the nationalist camp.

Former bouncer in control over nuclear weapons

Netanyahu’s defeat in 2006

At the last elections that were held in 2006, the then new party Kadima, which was created by separating from Likuda, took a great victory over its source party. At the time, Kadima took 691,000 votes, or 22 percent, and 29 mandates. Likud took fourth place after the labourists and the Shas party. Netanyahu then won 282,000 votes, or slightly less than nine percent. He had 12 mandates in the Knesset.

The most prominent amongst them is the ultra-nationalist third ranked party who are led by Avigdor Lieberman. Born in Moldova, Lieberman is a former night club bouncer, will most probably support Bibi (a nickname the Israelis gave Netanyahu), which the liberals are afraid of.

According to the Israeli media, nobody wants the ultra-nationalists’ finger over the button to launch Israel’s nuclear arsenal, and many Israelis voted for Livni only to stop the rise of the former bouncer.

So maybe Lieberman is the real winner of the elections, because he holds the key to forming a new cabinet in his hands, and whoever gets the authority to compile a cabinet will have to join them.

However, analysts predict that a rightist coalition would by dysfunctional after all.

The final decision rests with president Shimon Peres, who must give one of the two election winners the mandate to compile a cabinet.

Arab parliamentarians achieve Pyrrhic victory

Even though the pre-election public opinion polls showed that Benjamin Netanyahu had an advantage, it seems that the Invasion that Israel carried out on the Gaza Strip in order to stop the launch of rockets by Hamas towards Israel, which was strongly advocated for by the Minister of Foreign Affairs at the time Livni, brought her key political points, despite the international condemnation for the bloodshed that occurred.

Due to the popularity gained in that way, one fifth of Israel’s citizens which are Arabs are afraid of an election win for them. In the regions where the citizens are divided, which is inhabited by 1.4 million Arabs, voting was sometimes accompanied by conflicts, and the Arabs doubted voter turnout due to the conflicts.

However, the voter turnout was enough, and the main Arab parties succeeded, if not to increase their representation in the Knesset, then to keep it. However, it is disputable how much that “win” will help the Arabs in Israel, in a situation were the Arabs are between two fires.

On one hand there is Livni, a centre who was the “voice” of bombing the Arabs, more precisely the Palestinians in the Gaza Stip, and the other with Netanyahu and his “nationalist camp”.

Any way it turns out, it is predicted that there will not be peace on the Israeli political scene for some time.

The unsolved “foreign” issues like Hamas and the Palestinians in Gaza, who are awaiting the final outcome, or Hezbollah in Lebanon who up until recently (2006) was at war with Israel, might prove to be a boomerang for Livni, and the rightist Netanyahu.