Benjamin Netanyahu faces a world of trouble

Even before this latest Israeli election, Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu faced no shortage of critics, but after the election there is a growing crescendo of criticism both within Israel and without. Max Fisher over at Vox recently wrote a devastating article about the fate that lies ahead for Israel's democracy. He focused on the words of Israel's first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, who at 81, largely ignored but come out of retirement to do so, bitterly opposed holding onto territory occupied by Israel in 1967. Ben-Gurion correctly predicted that the occupation would corrupt Israel, and that it could even "destroy" it.

Critically, Fisher wrote that Ben-Gurion said, during a speech three weeks after the 1967 'Six-Day War' war was over, that Israel must relinquish the territories it occupied during that war, in a war that historians largely agree was started by Israel. Fisher notes that the speech was barely covered at the time and obviously it went unheeded because the occupation, long illegal by moving colonists out of Israel into occupied Palestine (4th Geneva Convention), has lasted for nearly a half century during which several major wars around the world have been fought and have passed into history.

Israel has fledged into a partisan political issue in the United States, with Republicans vying for the GOP nomination for president jumping into the fray with abandon like the younger brother of former President George W. Bush, Jeb Bush. In an op-ed in National Journal, Jeb Bush writes, "The Obama administration treats announcements of new apartment buildings in Jerusalem like acts of aggression." Perhaps not noticing that even a majority of Republicans recognise some portions of international law. On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton has a strong following of American Jews garnered from Bill Clinton's time in the White House as "America's first Jewish president" and her years serving as a Senator in New York.

Hillary Clinton firmly supports the Two State Solution(tm) yet that position in 2016 seems no longer tenable. The idea of two states, and the very compact that the nascent state of Israel made with the world in 1948 by agreeing to the UN partition resolution, included two states. But this chimera has faded even as politicians vying for votes either maintain the fiction that it is possible, or those on the Israeli hard right (and some in the US), that the Palestinians don't even exist; to them a state of Palestine is worse than a summer case of poison ivy. Unless President Obama recognises the state of Palestine, it's hard to even conceive the idea of a viable Palestine in 2016. Under Benjamin Netanyahu, the Palestinian Authority (PA) is far more likely to disintegrate.