Bibi Netanyahu’s historic win in last week’s Israeli elections — a record fifth term setting him up to become his nation’s longest serving prime minister if he reaches Ben Gurion’s 13 years and 127 days in mid-July — will change very little but still have lasting consequences.
Two extreme possibilities are almost certainly not going to happen.
Netanyahu is not about to become a peacemaker and strike some deal with the Palestinian leader Abu Mazen. In reality the status quo ante — or the way things were before — will continue.
There will be no two state solution and the Palestinians will have to suffer under a form of Apartheid in all but name, with few rights to freedom of movement, restricted ability to own property, constraints on any electoral franchise and strictures on expression and civil rights.
At the same time, Netanyahu is almost certainly not going to follow through with his doomsday threat to annex Jewish settlements in the Palestinian West Bank. It’s clear he made that suggestion so he could corral support on his extreme right in case he needed a couple of extra coalition partners to compensate for gains the Centre Left’s Blue and White team, led by Benny Gantz might have made.
Read the article by Dennis Atkins in The Courier-Mail.