In a political climate where Israel’s left is relatively weak and the Likud’s major electoral competitor is the centrist Blue-and-White party, Benjamin Netanyahu found himself unable to form a government because he could not get one of the smaller right-wing parties to join his coalition—forcing a second round of elections in September. Such factional squabbles, argues Akiva Bigman, led to the defeat of the right in 1988, when hard-right splinter parties (none of which endured) broke from Yitzḥak Shamir’s Likud after he decided to form a national-unity government with Labor:

The office of the European Union’s president, along with several member states, have made clear that they will consider taking punitive actions against Jerusalem should it go through with plans to extend its sovereignty over parts of the West Bank. In the assessment of EU diplomats, Israel has no legitimate claims to land outside the 1949 armistice lines—the so-called “1967 lines”—and any attempt to act as if it does violates the Fourth Geneva Convention. But, to David Wurmser, this entire argument is based on a poor reading of the law: