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We rethink the week with Jeff Feingold, Editor at NH Business Review; and Mark Fernald, attorney and former candidate for Governor of New Hampshire.
We discuss the upcoming election in Israel, where Prime Minister Netanyahu is playing to the extreme right-wing. He has formed an alliance with a racist party which had, for decades, been considered prohibited from participating in elections because of their anti-democratic KKK-like tactics. And yesterday, Netanyahu declared his intention actually to annex to Israel the entirety of the West Bank, Golan Heights and Gaza Strip — even though resolving the borders has, for 70 years, been a subject for negotiations among the Israelis and the Palestinians and has been left as one of the “final status issues” to be negotiated as a package among the parties.
This annexation would violate international law, a series of treaties made by Israeli governments from multiple political parties, and Israel’s own agreement with the British and the UN in 1948 when the British Mandate was divided between Israel and the Palestinian people. Annexation also violates the Israeli Declaration of Independence (which is the equivalent of the Constitution in the U.S.).
We also discussed developments in the race to become the Democratic nominee for President of the United States. The issues are complex, the candidates are numerous, and it is difficult to articulate what it means to be “electable,” especially in a campaign against Pres. Trump. Who can predict how much weight voters will give to “the facts,” to the message that the candidates communicate to them, or to the voters’ own emotions/fears/perceptions.
Health care is one example of this complexity. What policies a voter favors depends on his/her personal experiences; what’s been learned about the options currently available to them vs the new options being proposed by the candidates; and the depth of the voter’s decision-making process (e.g., the effect of a policy on the first day it is implemented might not be the same as the way the market evolves over a longer period of time, as economic incentives cause employers to change the nature of the health insurance plans that they offer to their workers).
