The reason for the collapse of the Israeli left is that the multi-culturalist, third-worldist assumptions that sustained it have taken a 10 year beating from which they were never going to recover. Ever since Barak’s peace offers, brokered by Bill Clinton in 2000 and 2001, were flatly rejected by the ‘moderate’ Palestinian leadership in favour of violence and rejectionism the core argument of the Israeli left that the Palestinian cause was based on legitimate grievances that could be addressed via the ‘land for peace’ formula simply lacked credibility inside the Israeli electorate. And given that social populism — another facet of left-wing parties — is now almost as much a feature of several other parties in Israel, the Labor Party simply found itself with nothing to offer. Its implosion was thus inevitable.
... what applies in Israel is surely an augury of what is coming elsewhere in the West. Europe in particular is creaking under the strain of multiculturalist agendas that look less and less sustainable as the years go by. As the trial of Geert Wilders — the first political trial in post-Cold War Europe — for insulting Islam in the Netherlands illustrates all too clearly, it is now ever harder to argue that the assumptions of multi-culturalism are truly compatible with sustainable democratic societies. The collapse of self-belief that multi-culturalism implies, and the concomitant strategy of appeasement that it tends to bring with it, weaken western democracies to the point of collapse.
Europe does not yet face the kind of security and identity challenges faced by Israel. But Israel illustrates those challenges in bold relief.
Indeed. Israel’s politics are not ‘moving to the right’ – they are merely moving towards Planet Reality, where most ordinary people are living. The Israeli Left collapsed because its fantasy that Arabs committed to the extermination of Israel actually wanted to live in peace alongside Israel turned out to be a murderous mistake that cost thousands of lives.
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