Netanyahu may yet make respectable, democratic Israel disappear

‘He’s a magician,’ the crowd chanted as Benjamin Netanyahu took the stage at Likud’s victory party. The man now on course to become Israel’s longest-serving prime minister had, as has become customary, pulled off a seemingly impossible eleventh-hour win. Despite the centre-left coalescing to form Kahol Lavan, an anti-Bibi alliance, Netanyahu held onto the crown by pandering to right-wing voters on territory. In the dying days of the campaign, with polls putting Kahol Lavan on top, Bibi pledged to assert sovereignty over the settlements, a bewitching incantation for Israel’s national-religious sector. The major settlement blocs close to the 1949 armistice line would become part of Israel under almost all iterations of the two-state solution, but Bibi promised to incorporate isolated communities too — a nod and a wink to voters who oppose a Palestinian state.

Another cruel defeat has left the Israeli and diaspora Jewish left listless and angry. Labor, which governed Israel for decades, has been reduced to six out of 120 seats in the Knesset and the leftist Meretz to just four.