About two years ago I wrote a piece for the now-defunct magazine Betzedek in which I predicted that Netanyahu was going to lose the next election. The argument went something like this. Since taking office (the piece was written a year into Netanyahu's reign) Netanyahu had demonstrated that he was pursuing what I called Oslo Lite, which was basically a slightly watered down version of the Labor/Meretz program of the Oslo "peace process". Netanyahu had abandoned Hebron, which even Peres had not done. He was intent on continuing the process of one-sided Israeli concessions (notably later in Wye), and was not serious about conditioning these on PLO compliance, all rhetoric notwithstanding.

My conclusion was that Netanyahu offered the electorate a second-rate alternative incompetent version of Oslo, and that the Likud was trying to be, in fact had been trying to be for decades, nothing more than a Me-Too Labor Party. The Likud was appealing to voters by arguing that it stood for pretty much the same things as did Labor, but would pursue these things more skillfully than Labor.

Since no one in Israel considers the Likud more competent than Labor in ANYTHING, this reduced to offering voters a choice between an incompetent second-rate Labor Party pursuing Oslo half-heartedly, or the original classic true Labor Party. If offered such a choice, I predicted the voters would prefer the original.

In the short time the Likud held office, Netanyahu managed to achieve record levels of failure. Having been the victim of Labor's anti-democratic McCarthyist campaign before the previous elections, in which free speech (or "incitement") was declared by Labor to have been the cause of the Rabin assassination and Netanyahu accused openly by Labor of having been the murderer, the Likud did nothing to capitalize on its victimization after its 1996 victory nor to discredit the Left's McCarthyism. Instead, the Likud tried to out-McCarthy the Left, agreeing that yep incitement had surely caused the assassination but trying to claim that the Left was more guilty of incitement than the Right. In a sense this was true, but it made the Likud look idiotic, like the scene in Seinfeld where Jerry and his girlfriend are arguing over who is the bigger Shmoopy.

The Likud continued the prosecution of anti-Oslo dissidents, and the Zo Artseinu Two were actually convicted and served their time under Likud's reign, for "incitement and sedition", this for blocking traffic intersections. (Not a single conviction for "incitement" of anyone on the Left or any Arab took place under the Likud rule.) On election day, Haaretz carried a bitter letter from Moshe Feigin, one of the Zo Artseinu Two, expressing the view that there was no reason to vote for Netanyahu as he differed in nothing from the Left. The Likud victory in 1996 was in part thanks to the street protests organized by Zo Artseinu; then Netanyahu rewarded it by prosecuting its leaders for "incitement". Feiglin was a victim of Netanyahu's support for anti-Right McCarthyism, but not the only one.

In virtually all other areas of policy, Netanyahu pursued a set of Labor policies. Having run on a free-market platform, one of Netanyahu's first acts in office was to announce that no serious reform of the banking sector would be implemented, this the most essential reform needed in Israel. In privatization, things proceeded at the same trickle they had under Peres and Rabin. Deregulation, like the weather, was something to be talked about, except in telecom thanks to Limor Livnat, who came very close to ditching Netanyahu for the Center Party. And the one Netanyah achievement, inflation dropping to American levels, is generally (correctly) seen as the work of Bank Of Israel's Frenkel and not the Likud government.

Despite Netanyahu's campaign about how Barak would divide Jerusalem, despite the pyrotechnics of the last month of the campaign regarding Orient House, there was not a single day of the Netanyahu administration in which the PLO's illegal offices did not operate in Jerusalem under Netanyahu's nose, including Orient House and including the PLO "police".

The very worst crime of the Likud government of Netanyahu was the acquiescing in the conversion of Oslo into a national consensus. Until 1996, Israel was divided. After 1996, the entire world could insist that the creation of a Palestinian state and the return of Israel to its 1949 borders or worse was a matter of inevitability. There was no questioning of this within Israel, so how could there be overseas. And they would be right.

There was no longer any serious opposition in Israel to Oslo suicide. The Likud had adopted Oslo as its own policy and was trying to bypass the Labor Party on the Left. Netanyahu was pow-wowing with Arafat and his reps, including Feisel Husseini. Likudniks were talking openly of adopting Beilin's plan allowing the PLO capital to be set up in Abu Dis in East Jerusalem. Oslo became a matter of national consensus in Israel due to Likud vacuousness. Opposition to Oslo became moot and mute. This will be entered into the books as Netanyahu's contribution to history. The would-be Churchill of Israel decided to outflank Chamberlain in his own support for Munich.

The Likud over the past three years made it crystal clear that it was not the least interested in turning itself from a party of yahoos and hooligans into a party of ideas. It had no interest in the ideological vibrancy and rebirth that sent the Republicans of Reagan and the Tories of Thatcher skyrocketing to stellar victory and to social revolution. With all the ruckus over Tiki Dayan's comments about the "riff-raff" of Likud constituents, there is actually quite a lot of truth to what the bovine Baraknik said. The Likud is very much a party of anti-intellectual demagogues and incompetents. Most party activists and even Knesset Members are people who could not find gainful employment outside soft political jobs. The Likud is the party of unwashed cab drivers, talentless apparatchiks, and the urban unemployable. It is a party opposed to analysis and thought, a party based on screaming one-liners.

Despite some flirtation with intellectuals on the Right before the 1996 elections, such as those comprising the Shalem Center, Netanyahu had no interest in ideas or those who develop them once in office, and most of the rest of the subliterate Likud party leadership could not read a policy proposal if it were elaborated by comic strip characters. Most of the handful of competent people or politicians of depth abandoned the Likud long before the elections. Ehud Olmert was still nominally a Likudnik, but had abandoned Netanyahu when he and Milo were nudged out of the party leadership by Bibi in the early 90s. Milo is a cynical demagogue who ended up in Barak and Beilin's lap, trying to build a career as a Tommy Lapid clone. Olmert is a smart guy who built his own empire in the Jerusalem municipality and may now emerge as a the next Likud Prince Charming.

Among the Likud evacuees was Dan Meridor, who is rather dovish and was driven out by Netanyahu, not over Oslo but over Meridor's relatively competent running of the Treasury. Benny Begin, about whose competence I have as much doubt as I do over Bibi's, took the party's Right out into the wilderness, merging with the quasi-Kahanists of Moledet. Begin had been one of the few Likudniks who believed in something besides promoting his own career.

Limor Livnat was so enraged at Netanyahu that she faked Right, faked Left, and then stayed on with obvious reluctance. Sylvan Shalom was shoved to the sidelines. Moshe Arens, well past 70, is still a die-hard ideologue, someone with an agenda and ideology, and was brought back to fill the Defense Ministry for a few months after his fruitless challenge to Netanyahu in the primaries. There is almost no one else (beside Dr. Yuval Steinetz) with any integrity or an IQ above 85 left in the Likud.

Who is left? Very few Likudniks were left who believed in anything other than their own career advancements. Well, there is Tsahi Hanegbi, Netanyahu's lapdog, a corrupt little street thug trying unsuccessfully to persuade people otherwise. There is Arik Sharon, who is one of the most corrupt and least principled politicians in the history of the country. Netanyahu had to scrape so far down in the bottom of the Likud barrel to fill cabinet posts that he made the semi-retarded Yehoshua Matsa the Minister of Health and the illiterate Meir Sheetrit Finance Minister. (Fortunately Sheetrit was not in office long enough to do any real damages, but now plans to compete for party chief.) Netanyahu even made Shaul Amur, a know-nothing loyalist who is not qualified to be a janitor, into a cabinet minister. And Netanyahu could find no one at all to replace Mordecai as Defense Minister after he bolted.

The appointment of Itzhak Mordecai himself was testament to the emptiness in Likud ranks of people of quality. Mordecai in 1996 had wanted to run with Labor, but Labor had a surplus of generalissimos, and Netanyahu thought he could use at least one, so he gave Mordecai the Defense Ministry. This insane act came back to bite Netanyahu in the crotch with Mordecai taking out the Likud Left to set up the Center Party and then dropping out at the last minute to support Barak.

No one has ever gone bankrupt underestimating the sanity of the Israeli voter. The Labor Party of 1999 is far worse than that of 1992, when Labor still ran on a platform of Zionism and non-recognition of the PLO and determination to fight terrorism with force. Labor was not trustworthy back then, but convinced the public that its lunatic Left would be held in check by Rabin, a general thought to be tough and hawkish. In fact it became clear quickly after the election that the lunatic Left of the party controlled Labor and controlled Rabin, who joined it with enthusiasm.

Now 7 years later the public has chosen to make exactly the same silly gamble. The Labor Party is more extreme than it was before 1996, indistinguishable from Meretz and moving in the direction of the Arab anti-Zionists. Barak obviously had a deal with the Arab Nazi Azmi Bashara to drop out at the last minute, and we will be picking up the tab for this shortly, probably in the form of putting convicted Arab murderers back on the streets. Barak is a Rabin, in the worst senses of the term. Like Rabin, his entire career has been in the military (Rabin actually had a diplomatic post and brief stint as Prime Minister before 1992). Like< Rabin, Barak does not believe in anything, has no agenda besides holding power, and so will be easy roadkill for the ideologue Far Left within Labor, the Beilins and Ramons and Pereses. These will lead him by the nose, as they did Rabin.

When Labor takes power, it is all but impossible to dislodge it, due to the near-totalitarian set of controls it exercises. Labor has a hegemony over the media, over agriculture, the trade unions, the health system, the pension system, an alliance based on patronage with most of big industry and commerce, a near-monopoly over the chattering classes, including the universities, and a shallow and questionable belief in democracy. Its minions dominate the army elite and the police, and the courts. In its years in office, Netanyahu and the Likud did not contest Labor's control over a single one of these areas of power, and in fact continued to acquiesce to taxpayer financing of Labor's power bases. Netanyahu was reluctant to endorse any change in the media, despite his attempt to drum up support by grumbling about its bias. He never got around to fully legalizing the Arutz 7 radio station, whose closure will no doubt be among Barak's first acts in office.

It took the debacle of the Yom Kippur war to dislodge Labor from its monopoly perch the first time around in 1977. It took Shimon Peres' cosmic stupidity and exploding buses in Jerusalem to do so the second time. And it may take a blood bath of Jewish martyrs killed by Arabs and produced by Oslo to do so again. If there is a hell, I am sure it contains a special level reserved for those who assist the Israeli Labor Party in seizing power. Labor automatically gets the votes of Arabs because they believe Israel is more likely to disappear under Labor. Likud needs a large majority of the Jewish vote just to squeak through to victory, and this time Barak seems to have even taken a small majority of the Jewish vote.

When Adam was created in the Garden, God ordered him "Teemshol", govern. The first command given to humans was also the first order of the day to be abandoned by the Likud government of 1996. The Likud was committed to NOT governing, to promoting the Labor Party, to financing the partisan institutions of the Labor Party, to satisfying itself with putting a bunch of Likud hacks into cushy pork barrel jobs and then keeping the Labor ship it had inherited on its Labor-Oslo course.

Netanyahu has resigned as Likud party chief, and there is no one in Likud who is an obvious replacement. There are almost no people of talent or integrity left in the party. Benny Begin can look himself in the eye in the mirror, but has no chance of taking over the party and would be a disaster if he succeeded. The best alternative I can see is Ehud Olmert. He is smart, has an agenda, and has proved himself a capable administrator and politician. Remember that Labor feared even to put up a candidate against him in the municipal elections, this less than a year before Barak took it all by a landslide. But Olmert is haughty and has a mean temper. And the party machine dislikes him; most Likud rank and file and even party "leaders" would rather see Likud return to its 1950s Herut dimensions than lose their cushy party jobs. The Likud today is less of a political movement than it is a welfare office for the unemployable.

In other election items. The SHAS party increased its strength incredibly, despite (or because of) the conviction of its leader Arie Deri for bribery. My guess is that Barak and Ezer Weizmann will have the presidential pardon dry and ready for Deri within the month. Shas came close to passing Likud and becoming the second largest party in the country. The increase in SHAS is interesting. The head of the party is a crook, its chief Rabbinic sponsor is senile, and the party faithful in this "religious" party will fight to the death to defend party corruption and criminality. Its increased strength came, in my opinion, from the collapse of David Levy. Levy had once upon a time brought the Moroccan vote to Likud. In spite of Barak's fantasies, Levy could not deliver the same to Barak, and instead this vote went and joined SHAS. But part of SHAS' increased strength came from ARAB votes; yes that is correct. This is because the Arab voters are smarter than the Jews and figure Shas will again control the Ministry of the Interior with its control over the pursestrings of local-governmental finance. The number two item on the agenda of Israeli Arabs, after destroying Israel, is milking the system effectively for local funding.

Barak's "Israel One" strategy was a clear debacle. Barak had broadened the Labor list by adding a handful of outsiders and deserters from other parties, hoping to boost Labor's Knesset showing. But despite the landslide in the PM vote, and in line with predictions in these postings from a few months back, Barak got far fewer Knesset seats WITH his Israel One expanded party compared to what he had before the election with just Labor. I had predicted a few months ago that Labor would get LESS seats if it coopted David Levy and his fellow weasels than if it ran alone, and I think the evidence now proves me correct. Barak's expanded party - even WITH the two extra seats taken by Histadrut criminal Amir Peretz and his Pancho Villa trade union banditos (his entire campaign was funded by union dues) - is STILL weaker than was Labor before the election. The public was not voting FOR Labor, it was voting AGAINST Netanyahu.

All Barak accomplished in the end with his One Israel expansion was to enrage part of the Labor faithful by locking out some Labor honchos who lost their Labor Knesset seats to the outsiders, and by saddling himself with David Levy's team as a Moroccan hump on his back. Moreover, if Barak does not give Levy the Foreign Ministry, and Beilin wants it, Levy could well take his weasels and abandon Barak, leaving him with even fewer Knesset seats. Who says there was no poetic justice in this election?

The Arab fascist parties pretty much kept their same strength. The Russian vote was somewhat stronger. Netanyahu had pushed Avigdor Lieberman to challenge Sharansky's hegemony over the Russian vote. But this enraged Sharansky, who appears to have whispered orders to his constituents to vote Barak.

After all its hoopla, the Center Party of Mordecai came out with a pathetic six seats (out of 120), after earlier appearing to promise to get 20% of the vote in the polls. The National Religious Party lost its gamble; it had tried to place itself in the dovish center or further left, driving out the party Right, and lost strength. The party, which in living memory had 15 seats, is down to five.

One tragedy is the complete disappearance of the Third Way Party of Kahalani and friends. It did not make it into the Knesset. The party had run as a one-issue "Keep the Golan" list, and offered the prospect of a lobby within the Barak government for sanity regarding the Golan. The party, like disco, is dead, and there is no one to take its place. This raises the odds that the Syrian tanks will be parked next to the Kinneret before the end of the Barak government. The Rightist Tsomet Party of Raful also disappeared from the map forever.

All in all, the biggest change in the Knesset is the creation of an Israeli Ku Klux Klan faction in the Knesset with six seats. The Shinui party was defunct just a few weeks back, led by Avraham Poraz whose most notable agenda cause consisted of animal rights and protecting circus animals. A Meretz dropout, Poraz gambled by bringing in Tommy Lapid to head the party and convert it overnight into a one-issue party - bashing the Orthodox. Lapid is a foul-mouthed buffoon, but his screaming about how he was going to burn crosses on the lawns of the Orthodox rallied the Israeli secularist rednecks, and Shinui seized the "Center" away from the Third Way and to a large extent stole the constituents away from Mordecai and HIS Center Party. The same anti-racism laws used to disqualify the Kahanists will not be used to disqualify the Shinui Grand Wizard nor the Arab neo-nazis in the Knesset. Among the latter, the Hadash Stalinists lost ground to the more openly anti-Semitic "United Arab List".

The religious party block of Shas, NRP and Yahadut Hatora has 27 votes, almost a quarter of the Knesset, and will no doubt neutralize the new Klansters. Much of the debate in the next Knesset will be between Lapid and these parties throwing sandbox toys at each other.

In the rush to the Left, Meretz actually LOST strength, dropping from 10 to 9 Knesset seats, and the assorted Green Parties never even got close. Like I say, this was not a vote FOR the Left - it was a vote AGAINST Netanyahu.

And then there is the remarkable near-election of the "party" of the airhead Pnina Rosenblum. Frankly I think it would be worth having her in the Knesset in order to enrage the feminists. The Israeli feminists have never managed to get anyone into the Knesset on "women's lists", although have some weight within Meretz. No feminist party ever made it past the goal posts. Then along comes bubblehead Rosenblum with her platform of cosmetic correctness and comes within an eyebrow brush of taking TWO Knesset seats. The feminists must be pulling out their moustache hairs today!! The Waskovian "Green Leaf" Party, dedicated to good hashish and trance music, never even came close, despite polls showing it would take 4 seats; I guess I am not the only Israeli who likes to pull the legs of pollsters.

In Barak's victory speech, he promised a rapid unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon. Moments later the Hizbollah sent a barrage of Katyusha rockets crashing into northern Israel, sending the population scrambling into shelters. The Hizbollah was celebrating ITS victory and taking advantage of the interregnum confusion. Barak had the Jews packing and Hizbollah wanted to make their stampede run faster. Doe-eyed Labor supporters appeared on TV expressing their anguish in near tears: Barak has just promised a withdrawal from Lebanon, they cried, so why is the Hizbollah shooting rockets at us? I love it when Israeli Leftists answer their own questions.