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.

Israel will likely respond directly against Iran after yesterday’s attack, and has made known that it will calibrate its retaliation based not on the extent of the damage, but on the scale of the attack. The specifics are anyone’s guess, but Edward Luttwak has a suggestion, put forth in an article published just hours before the missile barrage: cut off Tehran’s ability to send money and arms to Shiite Arab militias.

In practice, most of this cash comes from a single source: oil. . . . In other words, the flow of dollars that sustains Israel’s enemies, and which has caused so much trouble to Western interests from the Syrian desert to the Red Sea, emanates almost entirely from the oil loaded onto tankers at the export terminal on Khark Island, a speck of land about 25 kilometers off Iran’s southern coast. Benjamin Netanyahu warned in his recent speech to the UN General Assembly that Israel’s “long arm” can reach them too. Indeed, Khark’s location in the Persian Gulf is relatively close. At 1,516 kilometers from Israel’s main airbase, it’s far closer than the Houthis’ main oil import terminal at Hodeida in Yemen—a place that was destroyed by Israeli jets in July, and attacked again [on Sunday].