Netanyahu's Extraordinary Win Gives Him Bold Mandate

 

IBDEditorials.com

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu greets supporters at the Likud party's election headquarters in Tel Aviv on Wednesday. AP

Israel: However the professional dissemblers try to explain it all away, Benjamin Netanyahu just won the right to concentrate on defending Israel — against both Iran and the "peace process."

Nearly everyone expected Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu either to fail to be re-elected on Tuesday or to be in the politically precarious position of begging other parties to form a parliamentary coalition with his conservative Likud party.

Instead, Netanyahu decisively won his fourth election as leader of the Jewish state, and his third in a row. The margin was comfortable, with the Likud taking 30 Knesset seats, well ahead of its left-wing rival, the Zionist Union, which secured 24.

But what is of greatest significance is how Netanyahu did it, and how dark it was before the dawn.

The contemporary American equivalent to what he did might be if a Republican presidential nominee, trailing his Democratic opponent on the eve of the election, decided suddenly to announce his support for a dream agenda of the party's conservative base — say, a 10% flat tax with a zero capital gains rate, or perhaps abolishing several unnecessary Cabinet agencies.

In his speech early this month to a Joint Session of Congress, Netanyahu played Winston Churchill, warning America and the world of the Nazi-like gathering storm in a soon-to-be-nuclear-armed Iran.

In this case, however, it was an American president, not a British prime minister, playing Neville Chamberlain's role of appeaser.

Like Churchill, Netanyahu received little love for his cries that the "tough diplomats" were actually being played for fools by Tehran at the negotiating table.

President Obama and many, if not most, congressional Democrats clearly revile the man, and yearned to see him relegated to the political wilderness.

But he refused to stop saying it.

Then, already acting as Israel's unsuppressible preserver, the prime minister doubled down and declared he would never establish a Palestinian state, reversing a position he had held since 2009.

As extreme as it may have sounded, for most of the history of modern Israel the U.S. took the same position. It only began to crack late in the Reagan presidency, when Secretary of State George Schultz supported interim autonomy for the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

The truth is that "two states for two peoples" has always been a vision seen through rose-colored glasses. A Jewish state that returns to the 1967 borders — as few as nine miles wide in parts — is impossible to defend.

The Israeli people just proved at the polls that they know that, that they recognize Bibi Netanyahu as the man who recognizes and speaks such truths, and that their homeland is under long-term mortal threat.

Now Netanyahu has a mandate from his people to act. No more pretenses about a "two-state solution" that solves nothing. And no holding back on preventing a pact with Iran that will do the opposite of what it claims — give Tehran nukes.

The Israeli voters have let Bibi be Bibi. It should be very liberating for him.