The top US diplomat was instead making an accurate assessment of an important, and dangerous, shift in Israel’s domestic politics. With the country’s left wing hobbled by electoral losses and bitter infighting, Netanyahu believes his biggest political threat comes from the right, not the left. That’s leading him to adopt precisely the sorts of hawkish policies — like overseeing a massive increase in the population of Israel’s West Bank settlements — that prompted Kerry’s speech, and that have left Israel more isolated at the United Nations than ever before.
“Bibi is not concerned at all with anyone from the center left,” Gilead Sher, a former Israeli peace negotiator and chief of staff for Prime Minister Ehud Barak, tells me in an interview, using the prime minister’s nickname. “He’s concerned about far-right politicians inside and outside his own party that are totally against any division of the land or agreement with the Palestinians. Those are the only people that he thinks could push him out of office.” [...]
The dramatic change in Israel’s domestic politics has shaped Netanyahu’s handling of the moribund peace process with the Palestinians, the primary focus of Kerry’s blistering speech on Wednesday. Netanyahu has publicly committed himself to a two-state solution to the decades-old conflict. In practice, though, he has overseen a massive expansion of Israel’s web of West Bank settlements, which now house more than 500,000 Israelis and occupy so much territory that it would be almost impossible to cobble together a contiguous Palestinian state. [...]
The election also continued the right wing’s historical political dominance. Sher notes that of the 17 Israeli governments in the past 39 years, just two were led by left-wing prime ministers: the 1992 government of Yitzhak Rabin, who was assassinated by a far-right ideologue, and the short-lived one led by Sher’s former boss, Ehud Barak, after he beat Netanyahu in 1999. Even the left-wing, Nobel Peace Prize-winning Shimon Peres, whose death this year prompted mourning from leaders around the globe, ran for prime minister five times but never won an election outright.
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