As an Israeli citizen, I am outraged. For an entire month, Benny Gantz's Blue and White party wasted everyone's time by refusing to sit in any coalition that included Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose bloc received the majority of the mandates to form a government during the last elections. However, since Gantz has the mandate, all of a sudden, sitting in a coalition with Netanyahu is not as problematic as it once was.
Meanwhile, while Gantz put his self-interest before that of the nation, Israel is missing out on major opportunities because we presently lack a governing coalition.
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For starters, US President Donald Trump's "deal of the century," arguably one of the most pro-Israel peace plans ever presented, was never able to see the light of day. As prominent Middle East scholar Dr. Mordechai Kedar declared, "We are not sure if it will be published until the elections in the US, meaning a year and a month from today. The plan which people worked on for years was not published due to the elections in Israel and the US."
However, with talk of impeaching Trump in light of the whole Ukraine scandal and in light of Trump's unpopular Kurdish policy, it remains a huge question mark if Trump will be around to present the plan following the 2020 presidential elections. It is plausible that at this point, that historic opportunity was lost forever.
Meanwhile, as Israel is in the middle of an electoral crisis, our Kurdish allies in Syria are being threatened in the wake of the US withdrawal. As Syrian Kurdish journalist Tamr Hussein explained, "Turkey is in close alliance with Iran, which aims to control the land corridor to the Mediterranean Sea and the Turkish invasion made it move its proxy forces. The Kurds welcome the Israeli condemnation of the Turkish invasion for it left positive feelings among panicked civilians but most importantly, we want these words and statements to be transformed into actions like pressing the US on the matter."
While Israel has accepted Syrian Kurdish civilians into Israeli hospitals and did press Trump to keep some US troops in Syria, Israel has been unable to devote more resources toward helping the Syrian Kurds because we lack a governing coalition in order to make concrete policy decisions.
This has led to a strengthening of the Iranian axis, which is bad for Israel. In Syrian Kurdistan, the people fought and sacrificed their lives in order to see the extremists booted out of their areas. However, now, this great accomplishment is up in the air since the Americans forced the Kurds to withdraw 30 kilometers (19 miles) from the border and to have Assad's regime backed by Iran fill the power vacuum.
The US brokered this deal without consideration for the 300,000 Kurds who were displaced as a result of this decision. As Dr. Ben Gad noted, the Kurds believe Trump had betrayed them: "They say we fought with you against ISIS and now, you let the Turks do this to us."
Sadly, Israel was not able to pick up where the Americans left off due to our own political instability. As a result, it now appears to be only a matter of time before a third of Syria once again falls to the Iranian axis, merely so the Syrian Kurds won't fall victim to a Turkish genocide.
However, Syrian Kurdistan is not the only arena that Israel is losing ground on as we are locked in a political deadlock.
In Iraq, people are presently protesting in order to boot the Iranians out of their country. As Dr. Nakeeb Saadoon noted, there are now major protests aimed at toppling the Iraqi government: "People feel enough is enough. We are not going to be your puppet anymore. We have to get rid of Iran. The Iraqi people are ready to die to get rid of Iran. Our goal is to get rid of Iran for they run Iraq, steal the money and for the past eight years, most of the funding from Hezbollah came from the Iraqi Hasth d'Shabi. Maliki paid Hezbollah more than $50 billion for the past eight years. That is only money, not weapons."
"Weapons, rockets, heavy arms and light arms are going to Hezbollah too. Hezbollah is a threat to Israel and the peace of the Middle East, and is a threat to the Palestinians as well. If it makes war in Israel, all of the civilians will get hit as well. Israel for their security and their future must get rid of Iran from Iraq. If Iran is booted out of Iraq, Israel will have more security. There will be a cut in their funding. They will be weak."
Yet sadly, as the protests continue in Iraq, Israel is too preoccupied with its own electoral crisis in order to give much behind-the-scenes assistance to the Iraqi citizens yearning to reclaim their country from the yoke of Iranian oppression.
Furthermore, due to our own electoral crisis, we are missing out on another great historic opportunity: In Lebanon, the masses are protesting against corruption and poverty, and these protests can easily transform into anti-Hezbollah rallies. As former Israel Consul General Dr. Yitzchak Ben Gad noted, Hezbollah's strong presence in Lebanon has adversely affected the Lebanese economy. The plight of the average Lebanese person is miserable for there is an economic crisis, high unemployment, low salaries for the people employed and there are millions of Syrian refugees in Lebanon, who need to be fed, thus adding a further strain on the Lebanese economy. He argued that the sanctions placed on Hezbollah only make this already difficult situation even worse, thus transforming Hezbollah into a major burden for the average Lebanese citizen.
As former Likud Minister Ayoob Kara noted, "there is more and more emigration every day from Lebanon to the West from the Druze, Sunni, Christian communities, etc. Every day, the pro-Iranians have more and more power. The one thing that makes Hezbollah loses is if Iran loses. One thing that could give a chance for hope is that people agree in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, etc. that the ayatollahs are extremists and they do not value life and a good future, and they start to fight this fundamentalism."
This is precisely why Israel should assist not only the Syrian Kurds but also the Iraqi and Lebanese protesters.
If Iran is booted out of Lebanon and Iraq, it would lose its land corridor to the Mediterranean Sea. And if the Kurds could regain what they lost in Syrian Kurdistan, Iran would lose out even more. For this reason, Israel needs a proper governing coalition so that we can discuss what steps that we can take in order to fight against the Iranian menace and deal properly with other issues affecting our region. This is why Gantz's stalling tactics were a national disgrace. After all, religion and state discussions are non-issues compared to what we already lost by not having a proper government.
