Israeli Election

Israel will have an election in a few days. The news reports tell us that at this moment the center-left Zionist Union Party of Herzog and Livni seems to have lined up more votes than Netanyahu's Likud or any other party. That should give them the opportunity to try to form a coalition government. Netanyahu as always stands for doing as little as possible towards finding an agreement with the Palestinians and appeasing the extremists on the right including support for West Bank settlement expansion and giving the impression of looking tough. A potential coalition of parties that are amenable to moving forward on coming to terms with the Palestinians actually represents the majority in Israel. The problem is that a number of those smaller parties have interests other than the security needs of Israel that conflict with each other. But at this point in time, those parties need to at least temporarily reach compromises on those issues for the sake of the larger issue on which they agree, namely the time is ripe to move forward on offering the Palestinians a path to a fair arrangement. The surrounding Arab countries that invaded Israel in 1948 because they saw it in their interests to do so at that time, now see that cooperation with Israel is in their greater interest at this time. But the problem between Israel and the Palestinians keeps this new cooperation under the table. Movement toward accommodation will give the Arab nations the opportunity to move cooperation to the top of the table and would also take the wind out of Iran's sails in regard to Israel. A Zionist Union victory would immediately repair the difficulties between Israel and the USA created by Netanyahu. It would also repair Israel's relations with the American Jewish community. Netanyahu's speech in the US Congress put us in an awkward position by intruding in our politics. We will not abandon our support of our fellow Jews in Israel because of Netanyahu, but we might do it with less enthusiasm. So let us hope that the politicians in Israel will put things into perspective and make the painful compromises needed to promote the security of their constituents.