There are serious people in the John Hagee corner who wants things to go to hell.
Even Ill give Nethanyahu that.

We’re powerless to stop Netanyahu, and we’re powerless to stop Ahmadinejad. Do these cancel each other out somehow?

For those of you keeping score at home, Israeli foreign policy is held hostage by a loose affiliation of extremists who are constantly at war with each other. Of course, I’m talking about Arial Atias and Eli Yishai of Shas.

I kid, I kid! It’s Nir Barkat’s fault, too.

Maybe now we can stop pretending that Netanyahu has even a bisele control over his own Cabinet? Right now Avigdor Lieberman looks like the responsible one in authority — which is a good indicator of how low the bar has fallen — and it’s not going to get any better.

There are two lessons in recent history for Bibi: the first is 1990, when conflicts with the H.W. Bush administration took down the Likud-Labor coalition and eventually led to Shamir’s fall; the second is 1999, when Netanyahu fell from power when the far right decided he was too soft(!).

I don’t think Kadima can play the role Labor did in 1990 (Lipni has all the popularity Peres did at the time, but they don’t exactly have a Rabin waiting in the wings), and Netanyahu’s position is pretty secure as long as he keeps his right wing happy. So expect housing and settlement decisions to remain under hard-right religious control, foreign policy to continue to alienate allies and encourage isolation, and Netanyahu to keep his position but not much in the way of political power or dignity. For anyone who gives a damn about Israel’s future, it’s going to be a dark road ahead.

I’ve struggled to find a clear way of explaining the outsize influence that the hard-right factions play and the opacity with which it can appear that Netanyahu really is held hostage by them and the way he sometimes appears to cultivate that image of helplessness. You might have just hit it on the nose, so thanks.

Also, keep in mind that the hard line on the settlements are not only the result of dynamics within Shas, but also of inter-party dynamics between the religious parties and Yisrael Beitenu. Not only are the parties competing with each other for the immigrant vote with housing, settlements, and handouts, but there’s a cultural war between them as well. In fact, if there *were* any relaxation on the settlement issue, it’s hard to see how a militantly secular party like Yisrael Beitenu could stay in the same government with Shas and HaBayit HaYehud — and there goes Netanyahu again.

The good news, such as it is, is that if Netanyahu’s government collapses from the weight of its contradictions, Likud won’t be able to form another one without Kadima: Kadima plus Labor is more than enough to give Likud a coalition government, and there have been signals from Kadima’s leadership that they disagree with Livni’s decision to keep Kadima out of the government.

So there’s a path, unlikely as it is, down which Netanyahu forms a more moderate government; it’s possible that the White House is hoping that they can create political facts on the ground that lead Netanyahu to such a result. But such hopes are slim, Israel’s political dynamics are not kind to coalition governments, and I’m bearish on the odds any Israeli government can make (or that the Palestinians can take advantage of) the kind of concessions necessary to stabilize the Israeli-Palestinian situation.

Did anyone catch Barak telling Charlie Rose that the government basically has no control over settlement expansion? http://haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1158662.html

Sounds like they got themselves an anarchy down there

Spencer, if you think twbr has the comparative advantage in explaining the actual dynamics in Israel, maybe you could revert to your standard role of explaining the upshot for clueless Americans. How does/should the fact that the Israeli PM (or is it just Likud PMs?) hold little control over various government offices affect the way we conduct diplomacy with them? Does this fact confer some obligation for forbearance on us? Or is the point that it just makes dealing with the government like trying to get one of one’s cats to vouch for the others that they won’t come after one’s dinner? And if that is the point, then I’d ask again how are we supposed to deal with them?