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Monday, December 21, 2009

Who are the Seven Ship-Jumping Kadima MKs?

Frankly, I don't really have a problem with Kadima disintegrating. At least, so long as Yair Lapid (or someone with views similar to those he expresses in his Ynet column) actually seizes the void and get a party together to do the things he mentions in the linked column (the column itself is kind of a Debbie Downer, unless it's read as a (crosses fingers) precursor to !!!זאת עכשו
.

Seven Kadima MKs are apparently about to jump ship to the Likud, though the Post notes that every MK they asked (they didn't specify how many they did ask) denied such a thing. Unforunately, even counting the Labor rebels, it's still not enough to allow him to ditch Shas and UTJ and actually get something done.

I would assume Tzachi Hanegbi and Othniel Schneller are one of them, since I'm still not entirely clear why they joined Kadima in the first place. Schneller was Secretary General of the Yesha Council in the 1980's, and still lives in the West Bank, in Ma'ale Mikhmas. While Ma'ale Mikhmas is not one of the 20 settlements I've identified (with a combined population of about 25,000, maybe a bit less) that Israel can't possibly hold onto under any circumstances even under the most minimal contiguous Palestinian state, it is one of the 20 or 25 in the "next lowest ability to hold onto" category.

Hanegbi pretty much only jumped to be with Sharon in the first place.

But who knows. I could be wrong about the two of them, and anyway even if I'm correct, there are five others. I guess we'll see ...

But that doesn't tell us who the other g