If you had told me one year ago, however, that the "good" outcome of the Israeli elections would be a reenergized Netanyahu emerging as the centrist alternative to a crypto-fascist strain of racial populism, I would not have considered you an optimist. -- Ezra KleinI've been thinking more about the Israeli elections. The best I can come up with is that at the very least Likud underperformed its polls, and more people actually wanted Kadima to keep power than any other group. Still, one cannot shake the notion that Israelis have just voted against peace for the time being, and giving Avigdor Lieberman power is even worse, as it symbolizes a sort of knee-jerk anti-Arab sentiment is taking hold in some quarters in Israel.
On the bright side, though, it is now highly unlikely that there's going to be another pan-Arab war against Israel. As Gaza showed, Arab countries are simply not willing to wage war on behalf of Palestine. They might be willing to demagogue against things like Gaza but basically you're not going to see any nukes lobbed around. This is because, ultimately, the other Arab countries don't really care about Palestinians and, often, actually loathe them, as the Palestinian refugee populations cause headaches for bordering nations. And pulling off a peace deal with Syria would be a real coup--the likelihood of a significant Arab-Israeli war would be at best marginal if a deal could happen. Not that people will stop breathlessly obsessing about such a war, but my impressions from the study I have done on the region back in college are that Arab nations have generally moved on from wanting to wipe Israel off the Earth, and that such an option isn't even seriously considered in most countries these days. It won't change the neocon obsession with Iran getting a nuclear bomb, to which I say--what do I care? We have 10,000 of them, and Israel has over 200. And ours can go anywhere on the planet, while Iran's almost certainly wouldn't.
