Oh well

Via.

Not the worst thing about the Israeli election results, but one of the most disheartening to me, is what the takeaway might be over here for Likud's US allies in the Republican Party, that Netanyahu's craziness on the last day, promising that there would never be a Palestinian state as long as he is prime minister and calling his supporters specifically to counteract the behavior of certain Israeli citizens who were Voting While Arabic in larger than expected numbers as if that were somehow indecent or unaccaptable, is what brought him over the line at the end, and that doubling down on violence and racism in the last hours of a campaign is a great way to win an election in general.

Thomas P. Friedman, better known as Thomas L. Friedman, mystax aegypticus, released from the need to talk sense to the Israelis and engaged once again with the voices in his head, thinks it isn't all that important that Netanyahu's finally admitting publicly that he opposes the two-state solution:

As the Yediot Ahronot columnist Nahum Barnea wrote: Netanyahu’s promises are like something “written on ice on a very hot day.” But the fact is a good half of Israel identifies with the paranoid, everyone-is-against-us, and religious-nationalist tropes Netanyahu deployed in this campaign. That, along with the fact that some 350,000 settlers are now living in the West Bank, makes it hard to see how a viable two-state solution is possible anymore no matter who would have won.

He could easily change his mind at any moment, and besides it's too late? I totally might decide to marry you after all, and in addition I can't get a divorce.

Also, in a truly acrobatic bothsiderist gesture, Friedman asks us not to blame Netanyahu for winning the election that he should better have lost because it's the Arabs' fault:

It would be wrong, though, to put all of this on Netanyahu. The insane, worthless Gaza war that Hamas initiated last summer that brought rockets to the edge of Israel’s main international airport and the Palestinians’ spurning of two-state offers of previous Israeli prime ministers (Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert) built Netanyahu’s base as much as he did.

I'm pretty sure there's no way of arguing that the Hamas organization initiated the last Gaza war unless you use well-known lies as premises. I won't try to relitigate the question of what happened with the Barak negotiations of 2000 (except to note that Dennis Ross himself has given a major share of the blame to Barak) or the Olmert plan of 2008 (which the Palestinians still have not, in fact, ever rejected—and Olmert has laid its failure to Barak, Tizpi Livni, and Condoleezza Rice in any case), but is Friedman saying Abbas not making peace seven years ago is responsible for Netanyahu not making peace now? Hey, I guess Netanyahu would have been off the hook, indeed.

What's important there from the standpoint of the US is that Netanyahu confirmed this week what many of us have long believed, that he opposes the two-state solution and intends to continue reducing the West Bank to a collection of tiny Bantustans scattered around the Jewish colony (on which the Israeli government spends more money, including money donated by the US, than it does on housing its desperately needy citizens within its legitimate territory). He is an express enemy of the past 40 years of bipartisan US policy. (Then again, I guess so is the US Congress at this point...)

And worse, that the majority is more or less with him. They'd rather live in fear than live in decent apartments. It juices them up. The obnoxious old Sabra-socialist Israel was bad in its own way, but this this fear-maddened Republican Israel, cowardly and corrupt, is far worse.