MK Ksenia Svetlova of the Zionist Union on Monday will participate in a special conference at the Knesset titled Children Under Occupation, which will to discuss the effects of the Arab-Israeli conflict on the Arab children living in Judea, Samaria, Gaza, and eastern Jerusalem. This is the first time a member of the Labor party is joining the Joint Arab List in one of its conferences – Ayman Odeh and Dov Khenin will be on hand, along with Michal Rozin of Meretz. Several anti-Zionist NGOs have been invited.
Using the familiar language of PLO propaganda, the conference announcement said it would focus on “the different aspects of the lives of children under the Israeli occupation—poverty, movement restrictions, lack of electricity, water and education facilities, as well as children’s detentions under discriminative laws that make it difficult for families to reunite, and the influence of the blockade in the Gaza Strip.”
That’s some Zionist message coming from the Moscow native Svetlova, who was imported into the Zionist Union as part of MK Tzipi Livni’s Movement. Perhaps now that Livni has been threatening to leave the ZU if it denies her the job of Leader of the Opposition, held until recently by Isaac Herzog, this latest pull to the left would drag the faction down to single digits in the polls.
“The Zionist Union has lost it,” MK Yair Lapid tweeted Sunday morning. “They’ve joined the Joint [Arab] List and invited Breaking the Silence, B’Tselem and all BDS supporters to the Knesset to the ‘Children under Occupation’ conference. What a gift to the enemies of Israel.”
Needless to say, Lapid, who is the founder and chairman for life of Yesh Atid, stands to gain significantly from pushing his enemy on the center-left all the way to the left in the public’s mind.
Svetlova quickly tweeted back: “Look at this great member of the opposition, who abandoned all his old slogans – social justice, burden equality (what is that?), and now supports the no-enlistment law together with Likud in order to save the Netanyahu government. No fake attack against the Zionist Union would return the trust of Lapid’s voters who are tired of his political bellwether that does not stop turning in any direction that seems to be paying off at any given moment.”