On this week’s “Mideast News Hour,” I was joined by MK Amichai Chikli, the one member of Naftali Bennett’s Yamina Party who refused to abandon the party’s pledge to its voters not to form a left-wing government.
We discussed the moral and democratic basis for Chikli’s decision to remain in Knesset as a one-man opposition to the Bennett-Lapid government inside of Bennett’s party.
“You need to choose a side,” he explained. “And I think in terms of democracy, in terms of Jewish identity and Zionist identity, we must choose to stay within our allies within our national camp.”
Why politicians lie
We moved then to the question of why politicians lie to voters and how Israelis are supposed to recognize when a politician is lying to them.
“It’s not even the politicians who are lying, it’s the voters who are lying to themselves,” Amichai said.
From there, we moved to the November 1 elections and what hangs in the balance.
We discuss why it is that despite the experience of the past year, the Likud Party has not yet managed to break the juggernaut of the elitist right-wing voters who prefer a post-Zionist government to supporting the parties in the Likud-led nationalist bloc. The problem, as Amichai sees it, is anchored in identity politics, which serve as the subtext for, and sometimes dominate the public discourse.
“It’s not just to have a majority in the Knesset. It’s also who is with who and deciding what’s normal and what’s not normal,” says Chikli.
Iranian nuclear weapons
Finally, we moved to the announcement by Iran’s regime that Iran is capable of building nuclear weapons at will. We discussed the war quickly approaching Israel’s gates from Iran, from Hezbollah and Hamas, and from within as well, from the country’s Arab population.
Join Amichai and me for a spellbinding discussion that moves from the foundational concepts of Jewish identity and Zionism to the most pressing strategic challenges facing Israel.
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