David Remnick is alarmed by the alliance between Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, which was announced last Thursday:
Political insiders in Israel know that Netanyahu and Lieberman distrust each other, but their newfound alliance makes it almost impossible for a center-left bloc to win in January. Their leaders are, to the last, extremely weak. One of those centrist leaders, Tzipi Livni, told the Jerusalem Post that if Lieberman were to get a post like Defense Minister in a new government, disaster was inevitable. “We are talking about an existential threat to the State of Israel,” Livni said. “Netanyahu is losing his senses and is gambling with Israel's security out of political and survivalist considerations.” She continued, “Lieberman was the one who threatened to bomb the Aswan dam. Is this the Defense Minister that Israel needs right now?”
Karl Vick reports on the significance of the coalition:
Even if Likud and [Lieberman's] Israel Beiteinu gather fewer total votes as a single list than they might have separately, the amount will surely be more than the Likud would have gained alone, and hence all but assures Netanyahu will emerge from the election atop the faction with the largest number of seats in the Knesset, likely assuring he will return as prime minister.
What’s far from clear, however, is whether what’s good for Bibi is all that great for either party. In embracing Lieberman, Netanyahu has hitched his fortunes to starkly polarizing figure, an admirer of Vladimir Putin whose previous campaigns were striking for racist appeals targeting Israel’s own Palestinians, who account for 20% of the population. “There’s no question that in the old days the founders of the Likud would never have gone anywhere near someone like Lieberman,” Bradley Burston, an editor at the liberal daily Haaretz, tells TIME. “They would’ve seen him as someone that could infect the party with all kinds of anti-democratic elements that they were determined to, at least, formally disavow.
Adam Chandler weighs in:
[T]his is massively significant because there has not been a party so dominant in Israeli politics in decades. It would also force the hand of factions on the center and left to form a super-party of their own to survive compete. This means trotting out all the failed challengers, old corpses, and aspirants of the left and center and getting them to agree to work together without their egos interfering.
He adds:
My first (not particularly earth-shattering) instinct is to say that this is not only about inoculating Netanyahu against a challenge from the center-left by someone like Ehud Olmert, but also ensuring that the issues like Iran and the economy get pushed in the next term. Oh, and I can’t imagine it means anything hopeful for the two-state solution.
The Dish 