Right-Wing Parties In Israel Unite, Rejecting Fringe List

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FILE - In this Sunday, Nov. 24, 2019 file photo, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, left, and Defense Minister Naftali Bennett, visit an Israeli army base in the Golan Heights, on the Israeli-Syrian border. Bennett is ordering plans for new settler housing in the volatile West Bank city of Hebron. In a letter sent by his office to defense officials Sunday, Dec. 1, 2019, Israel’s new pro-settler defense minister called for “planning processes to be advanced” for new Jewish settler housing. (Atef Safadi/Pool via AP, File)

JERUSALEM (AP) — Religious-nationalist parties in Israel joined forces late Wednesday ahead of the country’s unprecedented third straight election in one year.

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The parties came together after weeks of jockeying and shut out the fringe Jewish Power party which said it would run independently. It did so in the previous elections and did not garner enough votes to make it into the Knesset.

Jewish Power’s top candidates for the Knesset are successors of the late rabbi Meir Kahane, who advocated the forced removal of Palestinians and a Jewish theocracy. Kahane’s Kach party was banned from the Israeli parliament in the 1980s, and the U.S. classified his Jewish Defense League as a terrorist group.

The bloc, whose constituents are hard-line religious Israelis, many of them West Bank settlers, has been riven by traditionalists who tend to follow the conservative policy directives of rabbis and a more liberal stream, led by Defense Minister Naftali Bennett who has sought to broaden his party’s appeal. Bennett will head the right-wing union going into the March 2 vote.

Bennett broke off from the Jewish Home party because of those disagreements, forming a list called the New Right which failed to reach the electoral threshold in the first round of polls in April. For the second vote in September, the religious-nationalist parties united under one banner, with the popular hard-line former justice minister, Ayelet Shaked leading the list.

Israel will vote for the third time in under a year in March, after the two previous elections ended inconclusively, with no party leader able to form a governing coalition.


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Educated Archy
Educated Archy
4 years ago

Gosh the AP has such a fake news way of saying any story. What a piece of garbage. Sure its all facts. But the way they web the story together. They make it sound like these are complete radical Al Bundy kind of fringe crazies. Like the wild west. What a fake fake fake news. Time for Trump to call out these liars once and for all.

Heshy chulent
Heshy chulent
4 years ago

I hope Ben gevir of the kahane party gets a few seats even it’s not four it will teach a lesson to these fake right wingers who many are anti chareidi. There won’t be a government. Get ready for election number four after this one.

PaulinSaudi
PaulinSaudi
4 years ago

Jewish Power Party? Never heard of them.

Absurdity
Absurdity
4 years ago

Another liberal fake news article, twisted and corrupt. The only real right wing party is the Jewish Power Otzma Yehudit party and the rest compromise and sit with liberals and are not actually Torah based parties. Their platforms include compromises with terrorist based societies that mur de r Jews and it’s really sad that whoever wrote this twisted the Torah law to remove them from Israel as “fringe”. Add into that the reference that the USA labeled JDL a terrorist organization and the spin is complete. Literal trash being written by liberal Vos not news.

Rolling eyes
Rolling eyes
4 years ago

This is Another liberal fake news article, twisted and corrupt. The only real right wing party is the Jewish Power Otzma Yehudit party and the rest compromise and sit with liberals and are not actually Torah based parties. Their platforms include compromises with terrorist based societies that mur de r Jews and it’s really sad that whoever wrote this twisted the Torah law to remove them from Israel as “fringe”. Add into that the reference that the USA labeled JDL a terrorist organization and the spin is complete. Literal trash being written by liberal Vos not news