I have been watching the Middle East for decades especially the Israeli-Palestinian conflict………the 1st Intifada got the Palestinians lots of international attention….the images of kids with rocks facing off against soldiers with auto rifles and tanks……then the 2nd Intifada was a bust…it started off like the first and then the militants got involved with rockets and violence and any international support the Palestinians had eroded……

I have been saying that the violence is getting the Palestinians nothing but death and sorrow….I understand the anger but throwing violence at the Israelis is doing NOTHING…….I keep saying that protests non-violent ones would do more than a rocket fired into Israel……I said that all parties on the Palestinian side should find a way to work together from many different angles….this would be more successful and limit the violence so the world would see that the Palestinians are serious about their freedoms…..

BiBi’s final words before the election were ones that could help the voting bloc win some prestige………

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made it plain today on the eve of a snap election in Israel: If he wins, there will be no Palestinian state, the New York Times reports. “I think that anyone who is going to establish a Palestinian state today and evacuate lands, is giving attack grounds to the radical Islam against the state of Israel,” he says in an interview with the NRG website. “Anyone who ignores this is sticking his head in the sand.” He was asked to clarify whether that meant no Palestinian state will be forged if he wins re-election, and he replied, “Correct.”

AFP depicts his comments as “a last-ditch effort to woo rightwing voters” while Netanyahu’s Likud party trails the center-left Zionist Union in polling; voting in the Israeli election starts tomorrow morning at 5am GST. Netanyahu’s stance on Palestine reverses his support for the two-state solution expressed in a 2009 speech, which Haaretz reprints here. Netanyahu said earlier this month that his 2009 position is no longer workable because of unrest in the Middle East, Bloomberg reports.

Today is the beginning of the Israeli election process….it differs from the US and it may take weeks even months before a PM is found……but this time around the Arab-Israelis are playing it smart……

“My answer to racism.” This is not a typical campaign slogan for a national political party, but the Arab Joint List party (“Joint List”) in Israel is not a typical political party. And the upcoming Israeli election next Tuesday is far from a typical election, considering that this Arab-led party may very well decide who will be the next prime minister of the Jewish state.But what might truly surprise some is that the Joint List party, per many polls, is either the third most popular party in Israel or just a few points behind the left-of-center Yesh Atid party headed by Yair Lapid for that spot.The fact that the party is polling so well may lead some to ask: what is the “racism” that the Israeli Arabs (actually ethnically Palestinians) who comprise the Join List talking about with their campaign slogan? After all, Netanyahu bragged in his 2011 to Congress that of the 300 million Arabs in the Middle East, “less than one-half of one percent are truly free, and they’re all citizens of Israel!”