Category: The Landau Report

This issue is probably the longest I’ve ever written. Its sole focus is regional geo-politics, covering the developments in recent days as well as those of recent months, and also those I expect to take place in the coming months. Yet, despite its length, there is no coverage of Syria – with all due disrespect to Assad, Putin, Trump and Erdogan and due sympathy for the Kurds, this is an Israel-centred newsletter and there have been no important developments in Syria that impact directly on Israel. The same holds true for Libya, where important things are happening, but Israel is only very tangentially involved. Had there been nothing else to discuss, maybe I would have related to the Turkish operations in Syria, and in Libya, and much else – but that is hardly the case…

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September 19, 2019
The Israeli election of 2019 turned out to be a match with two ‘legs’. For people who don’t follow football (soccer in the US), let me explain what that means: the teams play each other twice, once at ‘home’ and once ‘away’ (at the other team’s home ground). The result is the cumulative outcome of the two legs.

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August 30, 2019
This issue was intended to be focused on the economy, highlighting the growing problems in key areas of policy, as well as the major social and economic issues that are of concern to most voters, but are not being discussed in the election campaign. However, as so often in Israel, urgent developments demand immediate attention and thus take precedence over longer-term issues. The discussion of fiscal and monetary policy, of stagnant exports and of the woes of the health, welfare and education systems will be deferred, but not for long – since none of those problems will disappear, but rather they will wait to greet the next government and demand its attention.

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July 8, 2019
This issue is a direct continuation of the previous one, devoted to developments in domestic politics – despite the fact that the general public, which saw no reason to have another election, has shown no interest in the campaign to date Indeed, there is very little substance to generate interest. Yet nevertheless the wheels turn, decisions are made, party leaders rise and fall and the wider political process moves ahead.

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June 2, 2019
The Israeli general election of April 9th generated two key outcomes. One was the arithmetical result, in terms of how many votes each party received and how many Knesset seats these votes translated into. That was the focus of the bulletin of April 14th, entitled “Plus ça change”. The second was the political result, in which Binyamin Netanyahu won far more votes than predicted and thereby achieved a more dominant position than ever within Likud and the Israeli political arena.

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February 26, 2019
There is a plethora of topics to write about — more than has been the case in quite a few years. The most obvious and seemingly urgent is the political arena and the election campaign underway. In that area, however, I am primarily using verbal communication channels — conference calls and individual conversations — if only because the pace of events is so rapid that written analysis suffers from almost instant obsolescence.

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