Surveying the results of the Tuesday’s election, Liel Leibovitz draws several lessons, including one about the demise of the country’s left:

In 1992, the year before the Oslo Accords were introduced with much fanfare, Labor and Meretz, the twin pillars of the Zionist left, won a staggering 66 seats in the Knesset, giving them a strong mandate to pursue their peace plans. This week, Labor and Meretz eked out a combined ten seats, far less than the ḥaredi parties, which won sixteen, and exactly the same as the two Arab parties, Ḥadash-Ta’al and Ra’am-Balad. Considering the fact that Benny Gantz’s party, Blue-and-White, had very few, if any, substantive disagreements with Netanyahu’s Likud, the meaning of this is stark and simple: the left, as it has existed for generations, is thoroughly, unequivocally, and irreversibly dead.

Having run for decades on poses rather than policies, [the Israeli left] failed to produce a coherent answer to the question that was foremost in most Israelis’ minds, namely, what to do when the so-called partner for peace, the Palestinian Authority, giddily and unabashedly cheered on and paid for the murder of innocent Israelis. Instead, the left talked about identity politics—a favorite of Meretz’s new leader, Tamar Zandberg—and invested more and more of its communal resources in addressing audiences in Berlin, London, and New York but not in Netanya, Petaḥ Tikvah, and Beersheva.

It’s likely that the slew of nongovernmental organizations that make up the contemporary left’s beating heart—many with robust funding from European governments and other foreign sources like George Soros’s Open Society Foundation—will continue to campaign anywhere but at home, with the political parties that support them continuing to pay the price.

Yesterday, the Iranian foreign minister flew to Geneva to meet with European diplomats. President Trump, meanwhile, indicated that cease-fire negotiations might soon begin with Iran, which would presumably involve Tehran agreeing to make concessions regarding its nuclear program, while Washington pressures Israel to halt its military activities. According to Israeli media, Iran already began putting out feelers to the U.S. earlier this week. Aviram Bellaishe considers the purpose of these overtures:

The regime’s request to return to negotiations stems from the principle of deception and delay that has guided it for decades. Iran wants to extricate itself from a situation of total destruction of its nuclear facilities. It understands that to save the nuclear program, it must stop at a point that would allow it to return to it in the shortest possible time. So long as the negotiation process leads to halting strikes on its military capabilities and preventing the destruction of the nuclear program, and enables the transfer of enriched uranium to a safe location, it can simultaneously create the two tracks in which it specializes—a false facade of negotiations alongside a hidden nuclear race.