If Barack Obama believed before that “Israel doesn’t know what its own best interests are” — a remark he’s said to have repeated several times in private recently — Benjamin Netanyahu’s election yesterday to a third term as prime minister will only reinforce the president’s view.
Yes, Netanyahu’s party lost some support, winning just 31 seats in the 120-member Israeli Knesset. The biggest surprise was a late surge of votes for a new centrist party that finished second on a platform focused almost exclusively on domestic concerns.
So it wasn’t the overwhelming mandate he’d hoped for, and his coalition will have to adjust accordingly.
Even so, it helps to remember the context in which Israelis went to the polls. They have just come off a Hamas-provoked war in Gaza. Iran is unbowed in its pursuit of nuclear weapons. There is a civil war in neighboring Syria. Egypt has a president who hails from the Muslim Brotherhood.
Not to mention that Jerusalem’s closest ally will likely soon have as its secretary of defense a man who has taken a soft line on almost all these issues.
We’re hardly surprised to learn that President Obama believes he knows what’s best for the Israelis. After all, this is a man who thinks he and his government know what’s best for everyone.
Yesterday, voters in the Jewish state made clear that Israel has a very different— and, we believe, more realistic — idea of what is in “its own best interests.”