[Orig to FB]
Painting of Mar Saba to make you look.
My hot take on the Israeli election: Netanyahu being ejected from office is the necessary precondition for any positive change. It isn’t sufficient, not even close; and the other leading parties are disasters in their own right. But nothing good can happen while he remains in office, so ejecting him is the first step — and, behind and beneath the coalition-building process (which could drag on for months) quite a few movers and shakers will be looking for ways out.
American commentators can be ignored almost en bloc because the US’s two-party system is, in many ways, antithetical to parliamentary systems, which are much more subtle and fluid. Moreover, a huge segment of the people weighing in will be far more concerned with performing their own “antizionism” than making well-informed, well-considered, relevant observations. So, for example, when the entire Levant doesn’t morph overnight into some idyllic landscape, they’ll complain bitterly that no change is possible. In a sense, that’s true — the change they want isn’t possible — but their demands, however virtuous, have no basis in reality. Or at least no more than the US deciding to repatriate a major urban center to the Native Americans who were driven out of it.
Unfortunately, there are very, very few people who have a sophisticated grasp on Israeli politics but no inherited skin in that game — one of the downsides of a religious ethnostate, I guess. So most of the deeply informed commentaries we do see in the ~West will be biased one way or another. That, then, is the challenge: maintaining a hope that’s grounded in fact without getting played, whether deliberately or not.
All of this will be additionally complicated by developments elsewhere: Trump & Co’s grip on power will slip and rats of every kind will be fleeing from their sinking ship as officials do now — by disguising themselves as talking heads. The Democratic Party will be consumed by internal fights, fueled in no small part by pro-Israel ultras — who will continue to threaten to defect to the GOP, and in doing so align themselves with an objectively fascist party. Much of Europe will be moving in a nearly opposite direction, embracing increasingly rightist and even fascist parties and locked in struggles to position their countries and multilaterals WRT Ukraine and Russia. And Iran? Who even knows how they’ll navigate this, except using their growing leverage to f— the US, Israel, and some of their key allies.
There are other immense unknowns, too: economies spinning out of control, the mounting impact of Trumpian policies, Iranian power, and Ukrainian agriculture on key commodities (mainly oil and fertilizer), China’s rise as the 21C’s default superpower. None of these things point toward any clear resolution of Israel’s status and role.