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Feb. 25, 2021
Israel was established and ruled for decades by WASPs: White-Ashkenazi-Sabra-paratrooper. You’ve heard of them; think Moshe Dayan, Yitzhak Rabin, Ehud Barak or Ariel Sharon. It wasn’t just a matter of political leadership, but the dominance of a very specific kind of elite.
These WASPs also constituted the DNA of what was once “the Israeli left.” Labor governments led Israel from 1949 to 1977, shared power from 1984 to 1988, governed again from 1992 to 1996, and have joined a number of governing coalitions since (following the 2001, 2006 and 2009 elections). But they’ve been a junior partner with very limited impact on policies.
The not-so-mysterious death of the Israeli left, six weeks to the election. LISTEN
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This new and sophisticated claim aims at reforming the commonly-held opinion that, for narrow political reasons, Netanyahu and Katz sabotaged the Israeli economy in the midst of the greatest crisis it ever faced by preventing a budget from ever being submitted to the Knesset.
That stands in sharp contrast to the days when Netanyahu was finance minister. Then, in the midst of the economic crisis of the second intifada, the government of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon won approval for four budgets over the years 2002 and 2003. The latter two were managed by Netanyahu himself, who understood that the crisis required the budget to be revised over the course of the year.