Pete Butts, and the future of presidential candidates

"Yes. Mayor Pete is really that special." These words, reinforced by the following "Wouldn't it be great... if we had a president who was really smart? I mean really, really, really smart?" left a double taste. How, in a time of unspeakable, yet spoken stupidity and a drop in the sophistication of argument and political debate to the simultaneously academic and vernacular, could someone not be endeared by the promise of a highly educated (and with the speak, interests and grit to show for it, as opposed to a mere diploma and perfunctory letters) war veteran who endeared - to the tune of 80 % landslides - a middle-size post-industrial lackluster Indiana city as well? Adding to his gay (in at least two senses) image, pragmatic hand and aim and willingness to engage that could not suppress certain reminiscient images of the 2008 campaign, a multilingual renommé that seemed to challenge unchallenged vices of the intellectual candidate as well as every European preconception of Americans as stupid, prejudiced, inflexible, and equally lackluster as the gravel they rose from, Mayor Pete seemed only limited by the title of his office (and arguably his age) from sweeping up the coming 2020 primaries in a similar fashion, and go on to bring a wind of change to the Democratic party, the country it once governed as its own, and the world.

But what change? Buttigieg, as is his full name, and one of the Johnsons or Roberts' of Malta, has paraded a heterodox, conciliatory and quirky brand of political reform much in line with his own image. His healthcare plan, Medicare "for all who wants it", has been lambasted by more ambitious elements since release, but . In a country divided between those who would prefer to hold onto expensive plans with elusive but estimable benefits over the xenophilic abstraction of a federally mandated, government-run national plan, and those who worship "change" and "for all" in a manner equal a matter reminiscient of economic growth. Buttigieg's concept, akin to the cobble-work Affordable Care Act we have grown to love, endorse, hate, accept and nearly unanimously wants to shun one way or the other, may well stand scrutiny as a technocratic attempt to reconcile the dream of coverage for those who need it (arguably a position supported by most Americans) with the tranquility and integrity of freedom of contract for those who prefer their current masters (arguably an American argument supported by some) but rhymes bad with the chants of a political climate more polarised than since decades. In short; who wants it?

On foreign policy, Buttigieg has essentially accepted the axioms of the post-Truman, post-Soviet order and the United States' central role touted by the military-industrial-academic complex (or the globalist-imperialist elitist cabal, if you prefer) rather than indicating a will to demolish it, but also acknowledged the need for withdrawal. In this, he may prove a greater hawk than Trump, or in a different way. I doubt a major confrontation with the Truman order is about to take place within the Democrats, who with either Sanders/Warren or Biden/Harris is certain to endure, if under looming and possibly less than splendid isolation.

The ultimate problem, however, is a failure to produce any candidate of both the grit, persona and thought of Buttigieg and the wider experience of, say, Biden or other (ex-)senators not considerable this time, and it echoes back to the Democratic party. Personally, I would hold him in high esteem if only for his executive experience, which is an odd thing these days, and sorely missed. In the past, the American people have held up three senators for the presidency; two dead within their third year, and one with a full eight-year tenure against mounting divisions and a legacy of either momentous or (given the expectations) scant importance. Within both camps, the throng of senators is thick, and full of words spoken with less eloquence and substance than on the senate floor. Promises are racked for the next term, but seldom accumulated in the form of past efforts. This toxic culture, call it a curse of you will, may not be eternal but has clearly grown in insistence to lock a hold on primaries and conventions which will not bode well on the promise to deliver once the campaign is behind, the promises made, and all that is left the reality of government. For the same reason, the capitulation of Governor Inslee is a pity, if not to be mourned for long. In the future, especially after a loss against the Orange one, the not-going-to-be president of the next term as well as the current one, it may be that the rather than the nomination falls (again) to an unlikely governor of humble origins, or - less likely - a mayor or (a decreasing possibility) former Vice President, rather than a scion of the fantastically personal. (Or maybe, in line with the trend embarked, a CEO of nil political experience to counter another. I would not mind it.)

In this, Mayor Pete may have found, or been forced by circumstances into, a strange balance of an unlikely breed: Truly special, but with a mind to getting things done. We may see at a later date, but not likely at any in 2020.

Or, who the heck knows? Will this election year be yet another repeat of 2008?

Bashir's Last Waltz

This week, the Algerian high command, in supposed synchronisation with the country's ailing, failing and visibly disgruntled president Abdelaziz Bouteflika, who surged to the supreme office in the wake of the Islamist rebellions of the early 1990s, which in fervour and vicariousness were no second to the groundbreaking violent rebellion and afterbirth of the revolution against French and pieds-noir domination. Within days, the second - and most deserving - of the umarah of the Arab world previously beleaguered, but ultimately victorious against the pressures of the 2011 wave, Sudani strongman Omar al Bashir, would face downfall amidst intense popular protests and the typical (late) intervention of the armed forces. The ladder turned on its benefactee, posed not even with the question of how graceful the checkout, after long-overdue eviction. The coincidence of Mr. Assange's, as it were, ejection with its less than dignified elements would seem to draw all of the attention one might want (as well as attention) that would rightly have been drawn from this man.

Domination, of this - for a long time - conglomerate of two grand peoples, ironically named condominium during the Anglo-Egyptian era, has been Bashir's pregorative for a long time, and for all but the last years including the Bantu Sudanis of the south, now embroiled in a civil war of their own outside his grasp. The cruelties inflicted in particular on these, and more so upon the people of Darfur, would face unkeen international antagonism for otherwise patiently tolerated autocrats prevailing within the region. With a personal stash of slaves, of the most literal and in an Anglo-American dominated interpretation of history (but fitting to an Arab one also, largely) gruesome kind, a record of ethnic cleansing of those not fitted for the new republic, and continuing the islamisation of what could - and certainly to some extent had been - a multicultural (as well as by design multi-ethnic) country over the rest by continuing and strengthening the policies timely set out by Jafa'ar Nimeiry, Bashir earns a place as one of the cruelest, crudest and most retrograde of rulers in the Arab League. He will leave it as eventually exiting as the longest republican custodian, barring only three Gulf monarchs and the Sultan of Oman, the longest. Also, after a nigh-thirty year reign (self-installed the month of the Tiananmen massacre) presiding over the poorest in the league after Somalia and Yemen, by virtue of anarchy, endemic tribal warfare and the timely (if not too generous) contributions of the Saudi airforce. But unless he leaves his country, now without the guise of protection of his unearned garb, it is far from certain the warrant of arrest issued - finally - a decade past, he is uncertain to face justice already overdue by supra-Italian proportions.

His legacy could not be more distorted, and did - it must be said - sully the image of the ostensibly washed and reformed African Union beyond redemption. His crimes may soon be more clearly articulated, lest one is to miss the chance of indulging in great expectations. The forces which eventually engineered his downfall, a typical cataclysmic muster of both disgruntled elite and immediate and daring expression of demotic disapproval, seems more conservative than what one might have hoped for in the decade ripe with, if nothing else, heavy-rocking and momentous change, but a wider popular rebellion seeping into the legal political process, akin to that in the northern colonial power Egypt in 2012 (and the other one in 2016). But for an overthrow of now only Bashir, but the system which made him, a more positive vision that the typical Arab rebellions - so much more the French revolution (as Zhou, after all, might have called it) of 1968 than of 1789 - is sordidly required. 

Above all, Arab - and African - intellectual life must acquire both a sense of integral independence and intellectual libertarianism. Something akin to Adunis, at home and not from a pervasive exile, is required, against which the embedded framework of penal shari'ah will pose a just as suppressive mechanism than the armed forces. The first step, which ought have been the first, for hopeful alteration in 2011 must be followed by another separation, whose fate will rest in the battle of the streets and for the institutions in Khartoum, against which rural communities and wills are almost certain to clash. A free press must be established, at the spill of blood as well as ink (and computer code), and particularly cable. Support for these institutions in their independent variety, and not the double scourge of direct economic aid to the coup-makers, and independent civil society are key if the north, in the end, is to outshine the south. With this drive, some forces within the old oligarchy are almost certain to pose sympathy, at least on the onset.

For all these uncertainties, with Bashir's passing we may see the closing of an era unlike any previous tumultuous moment of 1979, or 1989 (which hardly seeped into the reek of the region's whitherto growing strongmen) or even 2011, where an angry knife plunged into the cavity in symbolic rejection of the state of his country replaced a near-half century of amiriyyah and eccentric cruelty, but also of stability and a life of luxuries - the freedoms from, above else - now undeniably craved for. Without even taking the refugee crisis, itself strong enough to sway events of this kind (and of which I will write shortly) into the narrative. For with the fall of the last of the last of the pre-2011 Arab leaders, bar the more illustrious but eventually less well fated monarchic systems, Sudan had turned its back not only on a period of horror, needless conflict and the hurtful altercation of the near and distant past, but opened a door to a future of even greater uncertainty. And this time, unexpected as it had somehow not been amidst the cries of joy (and else) at Tahrir, it was the people who finally broke down the door.

Few have earned arrest so much. Few of the sordid kleptocrats of the Sahel - and their yet-privileged Gulf cousins - wielded it with the same penchant for cruel displacement and a lesser eye for the changing vicissitudes of his long and unglorious reign. Few, I hope, blunders by the now entirely disgraced Zuma, now enjoying his last weeks of presidency had he not been ousted in his own right, will be as sordidly spat and, I hope, never forgotten as the failure to live up to his international obligations and orchestrate the renewal of the image of the African Union - and his own too, I think -and arraign Bashir's exit by a legal arrest, and strike fear into his more inglorious colleagues as well. Whether you like it or not, their reckoning is coming, and the waltz which Bashir has now been called to will leave him as sordidly mute as the fate of more awe-striking voices, fearful or pleasant. This Bashir, this Bashir. Take this Bashir, with a clamp on its jaws. (And, as one might be tempted to add while straying from the subject, first we take Khartoum, then we take Arabia.) But never, for an instant, consider forgiving its sturdiness or the record it set, being indicted years before its time was finally limited, let alone the woes it inflicted, for long after the day this immediate fate of the dictatorship was settled. For whatever the future may bring, and however grim, the Sudanese may rightly rejoice over the departure of the worst tyrant and kleptocrat not immediately affected by the shockwaves unleashed in the cradle of this decade of so many disappointments. 

We will die if we do not create gods / 

We will die if we do not kill them. 

Adunis, proud national socialist and true voice of Syria (by virtue, not birth) 

Already an image on the wall. The uprising, also deemed as iconic as the ones in Egypt, Libya and Syria long before, has managed in toppling the most incredulously cruel and everlasting of incumbent Arab emirs and tawagit (yes, I'm borrowing the quasi-Caliph's nomenclature whenever he is right) bar the sultan, turning the existing image of Arab nationalism and politics on its head, yet again. This time, rather than asking, "Will it last?", ask this: What will be said of it in ten, one hundred years to come? How will it last? How may she retain significance? 

The First Prime Minister, ve Likud haHadash

"Israel has never had a better friend than you." The statement, more gross had it been made in the Prime Minister's native Hebrew, would seem cheap to the point of absurdity made in a sheer guise of flattery, in a private situation caught by one of the many handheld macrofiers veering into, and preying on the private life. But officially stated by a man so calculated as the Rosch haMemshala, now only months from a record longevity in that job and in that sense having earned being identified with the institution itself, to any man or woman living. Just stop for a moment, and think of the great patrons of the persecuted and beleaguered state-nation, from Cyrus to Bolesław, Raoul Wallenberg and - surely - the great Robert Kennedy and Anwar Sadat, who both took bullets in the wake of explicit and, in starkly different ways, groundbreaking support for the Zionist cause when its polity was truly beleaguered, and decidedly more deserving of sympathy. And let's add to that her domestic friends and patrons, such as the great native son Yitzhak Rabin, christener of the Six Day-War (whose simple but awesome logic my brain could not comprehend for many years), twice Prime Minister and the last to talk seriously of Shalom as less than something of a convenience or necessity - to the same fault. I draw no distinction between gunmen of different nationalities or ostensibly rivaling causes, of the different sons of Jacob by the zealotry of shared Biblical antecedent warrior-prophets. But there is something in the cocksure and yet servile statement, "never had a better friend than you", directed at the Orange one, the trumper of the other great office of better beholders, fitted with an eery splendour to the times. O tempora, o verbi.

No better friend than you. Of all time. Whereas the bond of friendship has lasted, to be strengthened, the result emerging under its grace is contentious, including among American Jewry, most of whom support the Democratic party. As Thomas Friedman put it, and well before, the emerging de facto one-state solution will displace either the notion of demos, of self-government, or the core identity of the Jewish state, so recently affirmed in spite of crass realities.

More upsetting, once you think about it, are the patrons absent from this proclamation, and the diplomatic, social and politico-cultural upset implied, with striking veracity, by this statement. Surely the record-breaking Chancellor of Germany, who never opened her lips but for praise and solemn defence of the integrity of Israel, or of Macron, equally staunch crusader in lieu against local enemies, or of previous presidents, more eloquent or consistent in Christian duty and upholding the great truth set by Speaker Pelosi, that on matters of Israel, Democrats and Republicans may still, in the end, share a common opinion. Not anymore. Though the bonds may last for this statement to remain valid, the breaking between Likud leadership and Democrats in the twilight of Obama's departure, a solid but not unconditional friend, will prove as apparent as those with Europeans, and force a new ground of diplomatic realities which may hurt as much as groundbreaking. For this reason as much as the 2016 election, there was reason to follow the resulting contest of yet another ragtag coalition of the progressive and liberal forces of Israel, now united under the soldier and gentleman Benny Gantz, struggling to muster enough against Likud, previously out for count in the wake of its very historic, and very groundbreaking - no matter the truth or plausibility of Sharon's last gambit - split.

Dual victors? Gantz, a virgin in politics but with a long, harsh and faithful service spanning many governments seemed, if for a moment, to have cleared the seemingly unassailable task of surpassing the party of power of the post-negotiation era. Could - however unlikely - the executor of the Gaza onslaught of 2014 wrestle power from its architect, and restart the era of hope and duality - however unrealistic?

Now, for the fourth consecutive time and with a predictability also fitted to times of supposed great upsets, the steersman of the fate of the most dynamic and state of the Middle East, takes the stage to proclaim victory. The election seemingly elevating - I should say confirming - Netanyahu to the state of Ben Gurion, not merely in the chronological, but also as the architect of her state for a generation. The confirmation of Likud as the party of power, rather than a contestant as strong as Ben Gurion's Mapai (and its successor haAvoda, "Labor") once was, will sear the diplomatic and geostrategic conditions for the maturing state definitely. We know, since 2009, that a Prime Minister Netanyahu has been ready to capitalise on the peaceable intents of Mr. Sharon in his sanguinary, if eerily promising term in office, since 2013 that he was prepared to offer terms to extremists of any shade that, in the European theatre, would at least then seem conspicuously dystopian, and since 2015 that he was to disown openly - unfathomably - the two-state fiction upon which the mainstream has relied for the generations since Israel transformed from a beleaguered state indeed, a David surrounded by Philistines of awesome strength and conspicuously foul intentions, into an occupier-protector of the displaced, disowned and disenfranchised Palestinian nation, or the bulk of it at any rate (at any time). For the first generation, realistic to the point of cynicism but modest in the mold of Herzl to contend with the one, and slightly smaller piece of a tripartite jigsaw puzzle set to replace the anachronistic British Palestinian mandate. The refusal to reject annexation of Arab lands to form the Israel of 1949 was only barely made, from the historic background of the immediate, and very brisk, rejection of any lands for a Jewish homeland. This has been traded, in part an achievement of Arafat as rare as any, for a mirroring David - now grown astute, powerful and scarred - and Yalut, and an in many ways more chilling rejection by the new political alignment (deliberate choice of term) by the reality, as much as in name, of Palestinian statehood. Whereas, when Netanyahu - previously one of the relatively pathetic, unstable Roschim of the 1990s, only to be ousted from party as well as power by his much older, more hedonistic rival - entered the premiership, one could detect the shades between the smart, soft-spoken, diplomatically astute leader and his foul-mouthed cronies, now one cannot. Whereas Netanyahu won't cheaply denounce be here will be no serious talks of peace, and the proposal - previously glinted at - that there will be no realisation of the Arab piece of the puzzle, however mauled, under his leadership, has grown into that there may be no two-state solution forever, the stage already set for a set of competing versions of the one-state, binational solution. Within this framework for all its simplicity and with an unsheltered eye to the demographic question, liberals can only accept one conclusion, and it is the one Netanyahu, and his predecessors, has sold as the cold and irreconcilable alternative to his politics. As Thomas Friedman succinctly put it, there can be no Jewish state, if it is also to maintain its unique status as a democratic one (for a brave, if often deplorable, argument against this three-prongs-be-made-two dilemma, see this spirited debate).

With the alleged patron-enabler of 21st century Hungarian fascism, in the garden of Raoul Wallenberg, protector of the Jewish nation. While relations between his and the land of so many that he saved have crumbled, largely due to diplomatic insensitivities but also a drastic rightward shift best embodied in this pose, the moment felt may not be forgotten. A legacy to outshine his own, of an accomplishment to best even the better Netanyahu. 

How, to discuss this possibility in a paragraph, one is to contend with a Jewish authoritarian (let's leave the comparisons with post-1948 South Africa and its overused, over-mispronounced epithet out for now, as pre-1969 Rhodesia is a finer comparison and yet utterly obscure) state, whether governed by an orbanised Israel, an ethnocracy dominated by Likud coalitions and tightening security measures for at least a generation or a semi-militarised, technocratic hybrid regime - once you think about it - is interesting as well as eery. For what, having accepted the death of Fukuyama's version of history (as he himself has, and at least contended in his 1992 volume) may be exciting to the calculating beholder than this turn of events, just as the current challenges - democratic in substance, if not beholden to a liberal-democratic (or, if one is more critical, "liberal-authoritarian") framework - to the supposedly unbreakable Western European family of values? For one, I conclude that the new, third Israel will pose as interesting a challenge to follow and scrutinise, if not for the inexorable path towards a diplomatic realignment in the path of a political one. One is as a, roughly speaking, liberal forced to contend critically in either case, as the relative benefit of citizens - Arab as well as Sephardic, Ashkenazi and Mizrahi, and the Druze recently forced to conclude their allegiance to their "new" tenant both permanent and preferable to Assad's now very rheumatic embrace - weighs light against the doom proposed, even if compensated with unlikely material improvement, by the permanence of the Likud peace theorem and the paradigm it has allowed to arise, or allowed its conclusion. There will never be a just state for the de facto subjects or denied citizens (let us call them thus) of the Western Bank without a change in the leverage exerted against the government reluctantly in responsibilities asserting itself over them, and - at the same time - no genuine security for the Israelis, including of their more entitled brethren, but without a peace process aimed at compartmentalisation. I am not an adherent to the Eurabia (or, more absurdly, "New Muslimania" in the case of an Australian volunteer crusader) hypothesis proposed by Western masochist-chauvinists and conspiracy theorists, its antonym of brutal white tutelage over the "new" citizenry after a complete breakdown of civil society being far more likely than a peacefully established monolithic Swedish (let alone French) Khilafah rid of Kurds, Iranians and Sami as well as the dispossessed hosts... not to speak of the neighbouring Finns and NATO-hosting Norwegians. Only one infected with the Jihadi mentality could plausibly believe it, within half a thousand years, and I for one will not live to see it, obey it, submit to it, if that needs to be said. In the Israeli case, one is forced to contend with real numbers, and realities of parties and actors pursuing their goals rather openly. Israelis will never subject themselves to a majority similar to that in Palestinian 2006, or Egyptian 2012 elections, as much as we may be forced to conclude that outcome in a truly unitary democratic state. Perhaps, thus, the challenge posed by the new paradigm, and the price it will exact from (rather than flowing unilaterally from) Netanyahu, the pimp of policy as well as other currency, will be a real one to contend with, for Western evaluation as well as Palestinian reality. The briskest commentary will be a sordid one, which will unmake the great effort of Ben Gurion and others, the sacrifice of so many more, to accomplish a state worthy as well as open to (I will reserve from using the term "reserved for") Jews of all lands gentile. In this, by attempting to resolve the conflict by ignoring it, Netanyahu may have buried the great door opened by political Zionism turned reality, the grandeur of a democratic secular nation state, of aspiring citizens flowing in by the thousands and millions to build the shining city in a desert; political, social and cultural as well as geographic. It still stands this test, but as the wells of Arab autocracy and a band of emirates (including those donning either more superb titles or the desperate chant of Jumhuriyah) are quaking in despair before whatever is to follow, the uniqueness of Medinat Yisra'el, so modest in its name, is threatened as much from within as by outer aspirations and hopes. For this, one may hope the grand villains are not to be forgiven, if they cannot be snubbed by their own designs, as values, legacy and institutions are grazed and may crumble yet.

Melekh haYisra'el... seemingly so impossible a title. But who could displace him, from without - or within? The growing influence of religious right in a once secular, quite radical young democracy is an old truth, but the current of religious politics has, if arrested, seen a lock on power for the most conservative and irredentist hard right, as well as its hardening. The support to the parliamentary right has shaped both its aspirations and identity. Having done that, will it last, or find a better patron? Even in the most tribalised democracy, loyalties live on a strain of demand.

What about the challenger? Mr. Gantz, erstwhile commander, has vowed on almost every point to uphold a hawkishness not unfitted to his past, including the contentious issue - in Israel, not so much - of the Iranian nuclear program, and even settlement annexation. The last question may be necessity as much as proclamation of enmity as far as the peace process is concerned, lately enamoured - well, let's be fair and say tolerated - by Lieberman of Yisra'el Beiteinu, the hardline imago of Israeli hard right-wing (res)sentiment of my mind, now in a shift not unlike that of a Hungary also realigned between a moderated, sense-speaking Jobbik of the valiant opposition and a gradually slipping Fidesz, the party of power. Perhaps, in reading Gantz' prospect of the seemingly inhuman task previously - if infinitely - accomplished by Barak and Sharon, of displacing the strongman before his time, the mutual realignment of Beiteinu, Shas or haTorah haMeuhedet for the usual currency of its scions; representation and cash payments, will shift the stage conversely and break the seeming unassailable broadness of the Likud establishment. At the same time, the story of shift towards the hard and relentless right is the same old one, of birthrates and migration of Jewish communities more recent, dispossessed but strong in faith, hard placated in the want for peace, and gradual devouring of all forces decent or reasonable. The other strong factor, however, capable of swaying the most hardline of any representative polity, is the support form abroad. With perhaps the first cost-free, subsidised occupation paid by US support and a crazed (in its ineptitude if not in substance or geostrategy) downfall to relentless, far-from-Bush Sr. (requiescat in pacem) cause of messianic, and often apocalypse-chanting rightward debt to the Jewish state. This sentiment, for all its stubbornness, is younger than my parents, and may yet see revision and - if not - the destruction of its beneficiary (the close, after all, the messianic Christians crave).

The mathematics, at any rate, do not favour an alternative short of the de-alignment so dearly craved, by Israeli democratic integrity if not by a divided electorate. Gantz, or rather the quadrivirate, would have to court Arab parties, successfully drawing out the foulest commentaries Bibi has yet made public, to receive the blessing of President Rivlin for any sustainable majority, thus making the result - if contending with the other small but vital actors on an emerging two-party scene - either extraordinary as well as extraordinary weak, or outright impossible. Either result is likely to fail, and certain only to be frail. The affairs of the Jewish state, even in the high times of the Mapai, the party that literally build the land, has always been one of rocky roads, contentious coalitions of many bumps, ejections and hitchhikers and to a goal of no certainty, and the seeming stability recreated may rather spell out downfall of the Israel we thought we knew, or an establishment of the illiberal democracy looming in Europe from both a technocratic center and the authoritarian right.

But fail Netanyahu is also far from certain not to, and from more precipitous heights (one may well, in a twinge of Schadenfreude if not outright bliss, think of David Bar Giora, defender of Jerusalem united and eternal). With looming court cases, the ridiculous - as well as outrageous, once brought onto the table - proposal to elevate the Prime Minister to a Roman-style immunity, after the fact, it is possible - and perhaps to be desired, even without another seat transferred in the government - that his fall will come sooner and as the sacrifice of this supposedly momentous victory. Likewise, it may even with the most heinous crimes in- and outside the verdict, be far less desirable in face of what this party, the brainchild of Begin - Begin of the garrote and the letter-bomb - has become. For now, it is only known that nothing is known of what is to come. But will the institutions of power unelected uphold their duty? If nothing else, Israel is a state of press and judiciary eager to snap its jaws at the government's feet and shins, and hold it out for the voters for inspection. Previous holders of the office, and the highest one, and with a certain predominance of this first Prime Minister's party comrades, have faced disgraceful fall and the jail sentence so relatively absent in European democracies, certainly in Sweden. All to no avail, even after a momentous career. The question of guilt, with demands even from within that normalcy is impossible and a hard four-year mandate not secure, is impossible to escape. The question is, when the opportunity arrives, will the voters care - after all this?

"The program speaks for itself." Shaded in green, Moshe Feiglin's hard last-ditch effort to court voters above an altering, and ignominiously raised threshold apparently failed a possible state of deal-breaker. In addition, or perhaps as a starter to the core points of annexing the Palestinian territories as well as Israeli-administered territories (such as settlements), expelling Palestinians and building a grand Third Temple, Zehut's prime electoral and supposedly non-negotiable pledge to legalise cannabis fell short. In a political landscape rapidly shifting, where the first two options are never the same as last time, Zehut boasted a peculiar heterodoxy that reached eager, but inadequate ears... or noses.

What is then to follow? Without a part in government, and perhaps as likely with such a turn, the left will fragment again, the center unable to hold. In a healthy democracy, as well as some decidedly unhealthy ones, the shift of power yanked eventually, and sometimes aggressively, by an unappeased electorate is a premier quality, always undercutting the ambitions of any strongman. By an Erlanderesque finesse, if not the grace and neuroses or his humor of this fine length of a premier, the first Prime Minister of Israel may serve for yet another term, and then perhaps another (invested with the Kohl-like grandeur of a second political lifetime, having finally "united" the uneasily divided homeland) before retirement. It would be preferable to see a vacancy, followed by hard negotiations, the peek of a something else, even if it is unlikely to hold and may thus doom the settlement of any viable rival to the new Likud as the Labor of this century.

A snap election may not be impossible. A grand coalition, less likely but not to be overlooked. And after, with or without Yonatan's brother (one must, whatever next to pass, imbue in the name some great etch of honour and duty) at the helm, and whatever the state and composition of the rivaling flagship, whatever the platform held up against the emerging new ethnocracy, and its hardline political baggage, and the religious zeal sustaining the walk of the occupation into eternity (though unlike Xinjiang and Tibet, it cannot reach a decisive point, its crude facts undercutting its own weight) there will be time, as well as reason for old allies to reconsider, and perhaps new - less salient - ones to be found. In this, I have a hard time wishing the alternative, the officer-gentleman, a nice try or even the best of wishes, though it would be well to remember the hardness of this new reality may be disowned by those at its very midst. The satisfaction of the voters will never be reached, and the dynamism and sustained opposition of the Jewish state will never fade, so with the last half century fresh in mind, and the darkest expectations for the next, we can turn the page and expect as much as wait. No Messiah could ever ask for more. A Messiah he is not, and the likes of Kahane better fit the mold of David. This is conservatism at its worst, and at the same time most ingenious, and any alignment will eventually find its just as stubborn rival. As Victor Hugo observed, and stronger than any army, is the idea fitted for the time. As the time of Melekh Bibi passes into the pages of history, of the sublime number but want of any great victories or achievements beyond his own, it may be as good to ask already what content that idea will bear.

The young and the old, but both bearers of the new. With Likud solid on the right and a myriad of "progressives" of uncertain ground on the left, and a new paradigm rising - its unquenchable loyalty slipping, if equally in want of something new - on the other side of the Atlantic, the future is up for grabs. With either in, or on top of either government, how will policy shift in the land of common heritage?