The main term in the Likud Party's talking points list, and in the scare propaganda of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his party’s ministers, is "Hamastan." On Dec. 20, the prime minister’s office warned that if Labor Party leader Isaac Herzog and his leadership partner, former Minister Tzipi Livni, win the elections, “they plan to withdraw and enable the creation of a second Hamastan in Judea and Samaria.” The next day, Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon knowingly said it was “clear to all of us that if Tzipi Livni and Buji Herzog had been in power, there would already have been a Hamastan in the West Bank a long time ago.”
Once, they had Iran with which to sow fear. Now, as reported on Dec. 22 by Laura Rozen, there are growing indications that the Iranian nuclear threat is about to be removed from the agenda. Not only that, it is hard to convince the Israeli voting public that if Herzog restores the Labor Party to power, he would give up what is known as Israel’s “qualitative edge,” or, to quote foreign sources, Israel’s exclusivity in the field of nuclear weapons in the Middle East. After all, the people who led the Labor Party were the ones who gave the world the policy of exclusivity.