Reply #47: The Likud Party was not in power itself during Operation Cast Lead

[Ken Burch]

Nonetheless, Likud values were driving the war(as well as desperate attempts by Kadima, itself a breakaway faction from Likud and not that different from it on many many issues, and Labor, fighting yet another election under the most right-wing leader it could possibly have chosen, to "out-Likud Likud" during the run-up to an election).

The notion that this dispute can be settled by "crushing Hamas" or "defeating the Palestinians" is very much a Likud notion, as is the insistence on continuing to build more West Bank settlements so that any Palestinian state would have too little fertile land to be viable. The "non-Likud" parties in the last coalition were working, at least subconsciously, under the Likud analysis of the situation, an analysis that still argues for pushing for "Eretz Yisroel" and forced transfer of the Palestinian Arab population.

So the term "Likudnik" is still very valid in the way the poster used it.

And "the harm" is the continued oppression and immiseration of the Palestinian Arab population in both Gaza and the West Bank, the daily humiliations they are subjected to as a group(whether or not the individual Palestinian in question in any situation has ever harmed anyone). This harm is in both the continued injustice it inflicts upon the Palestinians AND the danger that the anger unavoidably stoked and intensified by this treatment creates for the Jewish population of Israel, who end up being put in riskier and riskier situations due to the ugliness and brutality of the Israeli government's "security" policies, the word "security" being placed in quotation marks here because it is the last thing such policies actually create.