#bibi netanyahu

Almost like Black and Jewish People knew the Free Palestine dipshits were only “ concerned” about Palestine just to fuck with the election.

I’m out of here after tomorrow but I truly wonder if the people I lost because of their Pro Palestine support think it was worth it.

After all, I didn’t see Rashida Tlaib, Jayapal, the other DSA dipshits protesting Netanyahu being welcomed by Trump. Guess it was about not electing Kamala Harris, the Black Woman who has a Jewish Husband, to the presidency over the “ concerns for Gaza”

I will never back down in speaking truth to power.

The apartheid government of Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians.

Palestinians will not be erased.

Solidarity with all those outside of these walls in the streets protesting and exercising their right to dissent.

Rep. Rashida Tlaib

If elections were held at any point in the last five months since this war started, not only would he not be PM, we'd straight up have a center-left government. My recent transformation into a Yair Golan stan account is a joke but also 100% real - according to polls from the last three months or so, if he does what he's campaigning to do, leading a combined avoda and meretz party, he'd get enough votes to have an actual influential left wing party in the government for the first time in decades. An unbelievable amount of Israelis are calling for bibi to resign, many of them not calling for it to happen after the war ends, but right now.

I am sourcing this information from polls conducted by channels 11 (kan), 12, and 13, as well as by the Israeli democracy foundation, all but one of our important news channels - channel 14, the last channel, is our equivalent of fox news, and despite their numbers often being extremely different due to what is in my opinion biased reporting and flawed methodology, even they at times have had to admit that gantz is currently leading in the polls.

(Disclaimer that I work for a company that provides subtitles for channel 13, but i do not directly work for channel 13. Channel 13 leans mostly center left, and employs several (self identified) Arab Israelis in front of the camera, including Lucy Aharish, who makes considerable effort to bring Palestinian and Bedouin perspectives to her show. It also employs at least one massive racist though.)

I write this post because I keep seeing an unsourced claim by goyim that there's a poll showing a high rate of approval - 88%! - of the destruction and/or deaths Israel and the IDF are causing in Gaza. I went down a rabbit hole and simply couldn't find a poll asking about approval of deaths or destruction, although maybe I was looking up the wrong keywords? As a result I have just... So many questions. Because with the information I have from trustworthy local news sources, from the news channels I mentioned above and papers such as yediot aharonot/ynet and Haaretz, it doesn't fit with current public opinion, including many recent protests for more efforts towards a ceasefire. So my questions are thus -

Who conducted this poll? Was it a think tank, a government agency, a paper, a news channel? If so, which one? Are they left leaning, right leaning? Was it conducted by an Israeli or foreign institution?

Who did they ask? Was it a sample of likud voters; all Israeli adults; did they include only Jewish Israelis or also Arab citizens (approx. 1.5 million out of our 8 million population), Bedouins, and other minorities?

When was the poll conducted? Was it in October, immediately after the Oct 7 massacre, before the death toll in Gaza grew? Was it conducted more recently?

What, exactly, did they ask? Did they ask about destruction in general, or about the death toll in particular? Did they ask about the attempts to rescue hostages with military means, or all military actions? Did they ask about the number of Hamas operatives dead, about their estimated ratio of Hamas to civilians, about the total deaths?

What was the size of the pool surveyed? Was it conducted on a few dozen, a few hundred, or a few thousand people?

Because without this information, that one, sole statistic is essentially useless. As Mark Twain said, there are lies, damned lies, and statistics. Always look at the source and ask: who asked the questions, who got asked, and what the questions were.

More specific statistics and sources under the cut.

Disclaimers:

I'm not Israeli. My understanding of Israeli politics is limited. I have no personal experience of Israeli political culture and I can't meaningfully read/understand news written in Hebrew except through machine translation. I encourage Israelis to let me know what they think I've gotten wrong.

I'm guessing you're American, @mrevilnemesis. Please forgive me if this is a bad assumption.

Parliamentary System

I think Americans struggle with this more than countries which also have parliamentary legislatures.

Israel's Knesset has 120 seats and uses proportional representation, so a party that gets just 3.25% of the national vote can win nearly four seats.

This situation produces many small parties, often based on religion, geographical history, or ideology.

No single party has ever won a majority, so governing requires the building and holding of coalitions. That means staying in power isn't about popularity as much as it's about negotiating and holding together the crucial 61+ seats.

Netanyahu is very good at that.

Bibi has managed to build stable right-wing coalitions, often with:

Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) parties who care mainly about religious funding, military exemptions, and education autonomy. Foreign policy or corruption charges seem to matter to them far less.

Far-right ultranationalist parties, like those led by Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich (may their names be erased).

Likud loyalists, many of whom owe their positions and careers to Netanyahu himself.

Even if a majority of Israelis dislike Netanyahu personally (and polls indicate that's the case), his coalition partners rely on him to stay in power and advance their own agendas.

Corruption charges

Netanyahu is on trial for multiple corruption charges. In previous eras, maybe this would have tanked a career in politics, but it has helped Netanyahu frame himself as a victim of a "deep state" conspiracy. If this reminds you of Trump, good. It should.

This narrative galvanizes his base, who see him as the only one tough enough to stand up to "leftist elites," the media, the courts, and US administrations which are critical.

So Bibi's supporters reliably turn out to vote.

To those supporters, judicial overhaul and cronyism are a feature, not a bug.

Netanyahu has been accused (among other things) of undermining the judiciary, appointing loyalists to key roles, and trying to pass laws that would let him override court rulings

This isn't just about staying out of jail. It's part of a larger right-wing project to shift power away from the courts and secular elites, which many on the religious right see as biased against them.

To these groups, Bibi isn't just protecting himself, he's delivering meaningful wins.

(Americans may also misunderstand that Israel's Supreme Court is much more powerful than the US Supreme Court, but that's a topic for another time and I've found it interesting to learn about how having basic laws instead of a constitution can be a real challenge.)

The opposition is fractured

In 2021-2022, a short-lived anti-Bibi coalition briefly ousted him. It included right-wingers, centrists, leftists, and even an Arab Islamist party (Ra'am)...but it collapsed within a year.

That failure made many Israelis hesitant to trust another "anti-Bibi" bloc, particularly in wartime. If opposition parties can't unite behind a single viable candidate, Bibi stays.

If it helps, remember that a majority of Americans don't support Trump, yet he's in power because his political strengths work for the system in which he operates. The same is true for Netanyahu.

Lastly, Israelis circle the wagons in times of war.

My impression is that many of those who loathe Netanyahu (including many who hold him partly responsible for October 7th) were/are okay with his staying in power until the war is won.

Focusing on ending the threat and rescuing the hostages is, I suspect, a part of Israeli character. Israel's reason for being is to protect Jewish lives because nobody else would.

Is Netanyahu extending the war for his own political survival? I don't know.

But if Bibi is removed from power, it isn't as though Israel will once again by governed by leftists. I think it's most likely it'll be governed by a different center-right/right coalition.