I was supposed to attend a conference for American academics to debrief on the recent Israeli elections. American Airlines did not cooperate and what was supposed to be a five or six hour trip to Milwaukee with a connection through Dallas looked like it was going to turn into a 17 or 18 hour day with additional stops in Dallas and Chicago along the way. Needless to say, I canceled the trip. The meeting is going on without me, and I’m back home having lost most of the day going to and from the airport.

That said, I have opinions which I summarized in a thread on Bluesky. I would have liked to share these thoughts with colleagues at the conference, whose organizers are very plugged in to Israeli society, having supported study tours for professors to the country for many years.

As I write, the full results from the Israeli elections are still being tallied, but the general results are pretty clear. Here is a summary of my thread, with some additional editorials.

It looks like the Israeli election may not prove to be a decisive moment in ending Netanyahu’s hold on the country. Unless the opposition parties are prepared to join with Arab parties, it’s hard to see a path forward based on the results to dislodge Netanyahu from power.

The US has now been dragged into two disastrous wars by Netanyahu. Netanyahu’s over-reaction in Gaza has delegitimized Israel internationally. The Iran war has been a catastrophic failure. The United States needs to do what is in its interests, not what is Netanyahu’s interests.

I think international relations would call this a classic instance of “chainganging” which was one of the reasons World War I became as deadly as it was, as allies got dragged in to support unrestrained partners. Netanyahu is a cancer and dragged down Biden’s presidency and is doing the same to Trump’s.

In a visit to Israel in June, Rahm Emanuel provided some tough love to Israelis. He delivered the news:

The Prime Minister and his government have led Israel into a dead-end. For too long, American policy toward Israel operated under 2 the assumption that the best thing Washington could do for Jerusalem was to blindly and silently stand behind your government, without conditions, without demands, and without consequences when we disagreed. That has been our mistake.

If this is where he is, you can only imagine where the center of gravity is now among Democrats.

The choices Israel faces are similar to the ones I wrote about in August 2023, shortly before the attack of October 7. I wrote at the time that Israel was putting itself in an untenable situation with creeping annexation and settlements in the West Bank.

Whether you call that apartheid or imperialism matters less than the fact that a one-state solution where Israel occupies that territory and annexes but does not provide citizenship and voting rights to Palestinians would be unjust and undemocratic.

I concluded my piece with a warning:

I don’t know if that’s realistic, but it seems like there is quite high tolerance in Israel for the status quo with the Palestinians. Abbas’ age will inevitably set in motion a succession sooner rather than later. The Palestinians are getting restless and there are attacks and low-level clashes all the time. Something will likely give way, and we shall see if Israel figures out what it wants to be going forward.

Since then, Netanyahu responded to the horrific attack of October 7 with a war in Gaza that killed tens of thousands of civilians. Whatever you want to call it, it went well beyond self-defense and was a form of sustained collective punishment for Palestinians in Gaza. The United States under President Biden and Trump provided permission and military support for those atrocities to occur before the Trump administration finally helped bring it to a close.

The Netanyahu government immediately set about initiating a wider regional war with Iran and Hezbollah in Lebanon, roping in the United States again. As my colleagues and I recently documented through surveys of the public and U.S. foreign policy leaders, the war in Iran is wildly unpopular among Americans.

Meanwhile, the Netanyahu government, bolstered by extremist political parties in his coalition, is allowing settlers to continue to erode Palestinian territory in the West Bank, putting a two state solution further out of reach and making a peaceful settlement of the conflict less likely. If you followed news of late of Palestinians’ efforts to harvest olives alongside international supporters, you will have read accounts of foreign journalists and politicians being beaten up by violent extremist Israeli settlers, often with the complicity of the Israeli military.

The ongoing mistreatment of Palestinians in the West Bank underscores how out of control the Netanyahu government and radical extremist settlers are. When Mike Huckabee, the US Ambassador to Israel and a long time evangelical champion of Israel, calls those settlers who engage in violence terrorists, you know the situation is even worse on the ground.

I am a friend of Israel and count Holocaust survivors in my family on my mother’s side, but it pains me to see what has transpired in Israel. This is not a perspective fully shared by my extended family, many of whom are instinctively protective of Israel’s right to self-defense. I get that, but…

It is not America’s interests to be lashed to Netanyahu cheek to jowl. He has brought ruin to Israel, and I fear we may yet see a wider regional war recommencing in the coming days as both Trump and Netanyahu seek to do something to change the dynamic vis a vis Iran.

There is no military way out with Iran. There has to be a negotiated settlement of sorts, most likely on terms favorable to Iran as they can likely survive as they have since the war’s start. The US has already spent nearly $50 billion on this war. That doesn’t include indirect costs on US economy. Americans have already spent more than $120 billion in higher fuel costs because of the war. The costs on other countries have also been enormous, with countries adopting shorter school and work weeks, with emergent shortages in fertilizers and other problems.

While Israeli opposition previously said that they would not try to form a government with Arab Israeli parties, I hope that get over themselves and make common cause with the Arab parties to form a government. Anything other than that at this point seems like slow motion national suicide. It also likely means the continuation of a wider regional war, with the United States alongside.

If and when politics change in the United States, the American people’s patience and support for Israel are in danger so I hope Israeli opposition leaders, for all our sakes, make some thoughtful and difficult choices in the days ahead.