RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Israeli election that looked like a cliffhanger when the polls closed on Tuesday had turned into a decisive victory for Benjamin Netanyahu and his Likud Party by Wednesday morning. With at least 29 seats in the parliament compared to 24 for the main center-left party, Israel’s Prime Minister should be able to put together a ruling coalition of center-right parties that is more manageable than his last majority.

The victory is a remarkable personal triumph for Mr. Netanyahu, who is now Israel’s second longest-serving Prime Minister after David Ben-Gurion. He gambled that he could assemble a more stable center-right coalition, as well as by giving a high-stakes speech to the U.S. Congress on Iran two weeks before the election, and in the final days stressing above all the security themes that must be Israel’s abiding concern.

Mr. Netanyahu and Likud were trailing in the polls in the final week as the opposition stressed the rising cost of food and housing and an economy that had slowed to about 3% growth from near 6% in 2010. But in the closing days Mr. Netanyahu played up that foreigners (read: President Obama) wanted him defeated, and he rejected statehood for Palestinians, reversing a position he had taken in 2009. The reversal gave the impression of opportunism, even desperation, but it also rallied conservative voters who had hinted at growing “Bibi fatigue” after his long tenure as premier.

One senator wants to know if former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton deleted her emails regarding the very delayed designation of Boko Haram as a terrorist organization — and if a very well-heeled donor influenced that policy.

The query is not new for Sen. David Vitter (R-La.), but it’s now reflected in some additional disturbing lights: the admission by Clinton that she used personal email while the nation’s top diplomat and screened which ones to keep or discard, and the ascension of Boko Haram to an ISIS affiliate.

In June of last year, Vitter questioned why the State Department, under former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, “misled” Congress on the threat posed by Boko Haram.

He cited 2011 evidence on Boko Haram presented to the State Department by the National Counterterrorism Center, followed by a delay in the group’s terror designation until fall 2013.

Is there dancing on Rabin Square?

I keep having this nightmare. People rushing to celebrate a Leftist victory at the center of Tel Aviv find that it’s been renamed Arafat Square.

The two-state solution has been done and Hamas is directing traffic with rifles.

It gets worse, this nightmare, but at the moment my TV says it’s okay, we can calm down, the Jewish State still belongs to the Jewish People.

Can I get me an Amen to that?

So, at the moment at least, if the news is correct, it’s a gap of several seats between Benjamin Netanyahu and Yitzchak Herzog.

*Daphne Netanyahu, an attorney, is editor of Mar’a International Journal.

As of now, in Judea, Samaria and Gaza there is a sort of embryonic state, or “Arab state in progress”. And just as with pregnancy, it is possible, with ultrasound, to see the embryo’s organs and know generally, what shape the fetus will be when it is born, it is so when speaking of a country as well.

This embryonic state carries out – in schools, in mosques and in the media – brainwashing on an entire generation. It puts into the heads of its youth the idea that “there is no solution to the Palestinian problem other than by means of “jihad.”

If a Palestinian state is born, it will have control over its borders, and nobody would be able to prevent this over the course of time. It would bring millions of Arabs into the territories of the Land of Israel that were under its control, and with them, tens of thousands of jihad fighters.

We are just past the end of this year’s “Israeli Apartheid Week,” actually two weeks in the United States, from February 26 to March 12. As the very name implies, Israeli Apartheid Week seeks to persuade students and others that Israel is a pariah regime deserving of the same isolation that apartheid era South Africa faced.

No nation other than Israel has a day, much less a week, devoted to destroying its reputation. That Israeli Apartheid Week (IAW) is part of the higher education landscape, largely unchallenged and sometimes supported by professors, is shocking.

IAW has been around since 2005. Mock checkpoints and walls are erected and speakers brought in to present Israel as unfavorably as possible. At UC Berkeley, you can watch as actors playing Israeli soldiers sexually harass an actress playing a Palestinian woman. At Montclair State University, you can hear from this activist, Tvia Thier, of Jewish Voice for Peace, who thinks that “Israel is a monster.”

At Tufts University, Thomas Abowd, a lecturer in Arab culture, doesn’t focus on Israel alone. The United States, the audience learns, has always been an apartheid state, and, moreover, “we have apartheid right here on this campus.” Israel, the United States, and Tufts: that’s three apartheids for the price of one. Who says college isn’t a bargain?

You’d swear that Benjamin Netanyahu was Mephistopheles in disguise and had magically wangled a victory by hypnotizing the whole Israeli electorate! The New York Times, the Washington Post, David Axelrod, Barack Obama, are all mystified, their panties in a twist over Netanyahu’s landslide triumph! It must have been electoral chicanery! Dishonest sleights-of-hand! Netanyahu must have cast an alchemist’s spell on the Israelis! He must be in alliance with….Satan! He must have channeled Shirley MacClaine! The Iranians must have engineered Netanyahu’s victor! Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank were duped into voting for him! Or something!! It was a result of climate change! Martians stole the election for Netanyahu!

Call us Harvey Wallbanger! We don’t get it! We did our best – we, the Obama administration – did our best to scuttle this arrogant man’s bid for continued leadership, and interfered in Israeli politics by backing his opponents, we poisoned his wells and poured sugar into his gas tanks – but he won anyway! It’s not fair!

That Israelis wish to continue to live and not be sliced-and-diced by a Palestinian state and overrun by hordes of Muslims who love death more than life – this is a notion alien to the New York Times and other anti-Israel entities. The Israelis voted for a man who stymied Hamas in Gaza last year and who is in earnest to preserve the Israeli state and protect it from harm or destruction.

The Iran nuclear deal has the same political weaknesses as the Affordable Care Act

The Iran nuclear deal is going to be the ObamaCare of arms-control agreements—a substantive mess undermined by a failure to build adequate political support.

Next Tuesday is the deadline for completing the “political” terms of an agreement with Iran. “Technical” details arrive in June. From news reporting on the negotiations, it appears the agreement is turning into a virtual Rube Goldberg machine, a patchwork of fixes that its creators will claim somehow limits Iran’s nuclear breakout period to “a year.” Which is to say, it’s going to be another ObamaCare, a poorly designed mega-project others will have to clean up later.

Just as ObamaCare was a massive entitlement program enacted with no Republican support (unlike Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid), the administration’s major arms-control agreement is bypassing a traditional vote in the Senate. Instead, it will get rubber-stamp approval by, of all things, the U.N. Security Council.

Obama’s indifference to Israeli security concerns clarified matters for voters.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appears to have won a handsome election victory following a grueling campaign, complete with foreign government money, including indirectly from the U.S. State Department, going to his opponents.

In order to win, Netanyahu is held now to have reneged on his 2009 in-principle, hedged commitment to reaching a peace agreement with the Palestinian Authority (PA) encompassing a Palestinian state. This is actually untrue.

Largely unreported is Netanyahu’s explanation, in which he stated clearly that, under prevailing conditions, establishing a Palestinian state is a folly. This was not a blanket retraction; it was a statement of current geostrategic realities.

With Egypt in distress, the Obama administration’s behavior is strange.

Again, those disturbing questions about whose side the president is on.

A disturbing report [2] by Avi Issacharoff, one of Israel’s leading Middle East analysts, notes that Egypt is now under assault by ISIS from two directions—from its own Sinai Peninsula to the northeast and from the state of Libya, or what’s left of it, to the West.

It was last month that 21 Egyptian Coptic Christians living in Libya were kidnapped by ISIS and subjected to a mass beheading [3] on a beach. In response to that violent episode, Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi ordered airstrikes against ISIS in Libya.

And in Sinai, Egyptian forces trying to tame the region have been hit by at least three ISIS terror attacks just last week. The trouble, Issacharoff notes, is that “precisely during these difficult days for the Egyptians, Washington is delaying military assistance deliveries to Cairo . . .”

The Obama administration has held a deep grudge against the government ever since Sisi, backed by a massive popular revolt, overthrew Egypt’s short-lived Muslim Brotherhood regime in July 2013. The administration reacted by embargoing arms—even though Egypt had been a longstanding U.S. ally and Sisi’s is a nonradical, anti-terror government.

At the Iran nuclear talks, U.S. negotiators have been aiming for a deal that would involve a so-called breakout time of one year — meaning a deal structured so that the Tehran regime, should it cheat, would still need at least a year to be able to produce nuclear weapons. The idea is that this would be a period long enough for inspectors to detect the cheating, and the international community — presumably the “world powers” now negotiating with Iran — to do something about it.

At a background press briefing, held Monday in Switzerland on the sidelines of these nuclear talks, an American senior administration official was asked by a reporter, “Why did you pick one year, instead of nine months, or 15 months?… What’s the reasoning behind that?”

The senior official replied that the U.S. arrived at this goal of a one-year breakout time by using a secret, proprietary model to run “very complicated calculations, which have been validated by our labs and by outside opinion leaders with security clearances because these calculations are based on classified information.” This model, and the information, and the calculations, are all so secret that according to this official the U.S. has not discussed the details with its P5+1 negotiating partners — Britain, France, Russia, China and Germany. They all have their own models, and they negotiate with each other over how to haggle with Iran over arrangements that could yield some collectively acceptable margin of breakout time.