Following Israel’s most recent election, the Likud party finds itself at a disadvantage in comparison with its situation after the earlier elections in April. Evelyn Gordon contends that center-right voters defected to other parties or stayed home on election day because of mistakes made by the Likud’s leader, Benjamin Netanyahu:

I’ve defended Netanyahu for years against false charges of anti-democratic conduct. . . . But during the latest campaign, he unquestionably adopted undemocratic tactics.

Take, for instance, . . . his proposal to allow cameras in polling stations to monitor voter fraud, which he tried unsuccessfully to ram through the Knesset a week before September’s election. The idea itself wasn’t illegitimate; even some leftists support it in principle. But the timing undeniably was.

[Netanyahu] also forgot the critical distinction between the Arab parties and the Arab electorate. The parties are a collection of Islamists, Communists, and radical Palestinian nationalists whose Knesset members actively work to undermine the Jewish state. . . . But most ordinary Israeli Arabs aren’t anti-Israel; in fact, 65 percent say they’re proud to be Israeli. . . . And while identity politics still drives most to vote for Arab parties, the majority are dissatisfied with those parties. Thus, not only do they not deserve to be tarred as enemies, but Israel has an interest in encouraging them to desert the Arab parties.

Instead, Netanyahu drove them straight into those parties’ arms by repeated invective against “Arabs,” which Arab voters naturally interpreted as referring to themselves even when he presumably meant the parties. . . . As a result, 82 percent of Arab voters backed the Arab parties’ Joint List, up from 70 percent in April [for the two separate Arab lists], and Arab turnout soared. . . . That Netanyahu’s behavior didn’t cost Likud even more votes is because he has been a superb prime minister.

For the past 36 hours, I’ve been reading and listening to analyses of the terms and implications of the recent hostage deal. More will appear in the coming days, and I’ll try to put the best of them in this newsletter. But today I want to share a comment made on Tuesday by the Palestinian analyst Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib. While he and I would probably disagree on numerous points about the current conflict, this analysis is spot on, and goes entirely against most arguments made by those who consider themselves pro-Palestinian, and certainly those chanting for a cease-fire at all costs:

When a cease-fire in Gaza is announced, Hamas’s fascists will do everything they can to frame this as the ultimate victory; they will wear their military uniforms, emerge from their tunnels, stop hiding in schools and displacement centers, and very quickly reassert their control over the coastal enclave. They’ll even get a few Gazans to celebrate and dance for them.

This, I should note, is exactly what has happened. Alkhatib continues:

The reality is that the Islamist terrorism of Hamas, masquerading as “resistance,” has achieved nothing for the Palestinian people except for billions of dollars in wasted resources and tens of thousands of needless deaths, with Gaza in ruins after twenty years following the withdrawal of settlements in 2005. . . . Hamas’s propaganda machine, run by Qatari state media, Al Jazeera Arabic, will work overtime to help the terror group turn a catastrophic disaster into a victory akin to the battles of Stalingrad and Leningrad.

Hamas will also start punishing anyone who criticized or worked against it, and preparing for its next attack. Perhaps Palestinians would have been better off if, instead of granting them a temporary reprieve, the IDF kept fighting until Hamas was utterly defeated.