We are 70 days out from an election, but it appears that nothing of substance has been debated on the airwaves.
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This means that strategic questions that could very well shape the future of our children and grandchildren are put aside while we focus on various electoral gimmicks and political fluff.
Just several days ago a barely noted decision was reported in the papers. The Knesset's Special Committee on Arab Society Affairs decided, with only one member present at the vote, to allocate tens of millions of shekels for a program that would help prevent violence and reduce disparities. Just several weeks earlier, that same committee (and its single member present) approved a budget of 200 million shekels ($60 million) for a small Arab town because some of the Arab MKs in the coalition made this a condition for their continued support of the government. With those two small steps, the taxpayers had to bid farewell to 250 million shekels ($73 million).
The attempts to put more strings attached to such budgets failed due to political pressure by Arab parties, essentially paving the way for crime organizations to win the tenders and get the funding.
The heads of the State Party Defense Minister Benny Gantz and Justice Minister Gideon Sa'ar said in their merger deal that the goal of the newly formed electoral bloc was to prevent a bi-national state. But they are part of a government that has given Palestinian nationalists unprecedented ministerial powers and has moved Israel in that very direction. Their party may want to create a more "stately" Isreal but in the process, they will make it much less Zionist.
Israel is gradually being reduced to what was originally planned under the 1947 Partition Plan, but this time it the government's own making. It is also because the Israel Land Authority, which decides on zoning matters, is blinded by its pursuit of profit rather than national interests.
It has made it all but impossible to expand Jewish communities in the Galilee, but at the same time greenlighted an unprecedented plan to bolster Arab villages and cities in the same area. The Arab city of Sakhnin will double in size by 2040, as will several other Arab communities nearby. Meanwhile, the applications by Jewish communities to develop their by expanding their urban footprint have been rejected time and again. In southern Israel, polygamous marriages between local Arab residents and Palestinian women have sucked the state's resources for funding of social services, with fake divorces that follow.
Most of the Israeli public is not fully aware of the extent of the land grab of the Palestinian Authority in Judea and Samaria, nor are Israelis aware of the massive funding the EU provides for elements that promote this effort, with the goal of establishing a Palestinian state on the majority of the land there.
If Israel doesn't wake up, its eastern border will be Route 6. The so-called "security-oriented political center" have been warning of a binational state but in practice has been championing of a policy that would keep Jewish presence largely along the coast rather than have a contiguous Jewish presence on the real eastern border, the Jordan Valley, and the Judea Desert.
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