Benjamin Netanyahu’s desperate bid to avoid election defeat

Benjamin Netanyahu, facing defeat in today’s Israeli elections, has made a final pitch to his right-wing base. Over the weekend, the Likud leader said that, if re-elected, he would apply Israeli sovereignty to both the settlement blocs and isolated communities deeper inside Judea and Samaria. ‘From my perspective, each of those settlement points is Israeli,’ he said. ‘I don’t uproot any, and I won’t transfer them to the sovereignty of the Palestinians.’ 

And so the final hours before an Israeli election were counted down in the traditional manner (at least since Bibi has been on the scene): the Europeans and the American left screeching ‘apartheid’, the settlers rounding up votes like the land of Israel depended on it, and Bibi huddled with his pollsters hoping the voters would fall for it again. Bibi clearly knows how to play to voters’ dark recesses. As Anshel Pfeffer documents in his biography of Israel’s ninth prime minister, Bibi isn’t Trumpian, Trump is Bibian. The strongest indication that Israel has no intention of annexing Judea and Samaria is Netanyahu promising to do so.