As Benjamin Netanyahu is poised to begin his sixth term as prime minister, Shany Mor and Einat Wilf consider some of the dire predictions about his premiership, and place them in historical perspective:

Since the electoral upheaval of 1977, in which the possibility of a change in government in Israel became real for the first time, every elected government has been received with utter shock by the defeated side, which conjured up scenarios of horror and failure to come in the immediate aftermath of electoral defeat. But only two governments since 1977 have justified the nightmare scenarios illustrated by the other side: the Menachem Begin government of 1981 and the Yitzḥak Rabin government of 1992. The Netanyahu governments have never justified the threat the defeated side attributed to them, especially after the 1996 and 2015 elections.

In all of his governments, including the one formed in 2015 that was considered extremely right-wing, Netanyahu—unlike any prime minister before him, except perhaps for [his fellow Likudnik] Yitzḥak Shamir—evinced a clear tendency to contain and to de-escalate violence. His terms of office stand out as years of relative security in which the number of Jewish and Arab casualties from violent conflict was one of the lowest in the history of the conflict. In domestic matters, the years of Netanyahu’s rule were generally characterized by economic prosperity, the expansion of the circle of participants in the Israeli economy, and the expansion of the secular liberal space.

For decades, the left has had alternating demons: Begin, Ariel Sharon, Avigdor Liberman, Naftali Bennett—the political success of each of whom was seen at the time as the end of Zionism. Today every one of them stars in one way or another in the gallery of heroes of the left. But Netanyahu remains a demon whose political victory instills an atmosphere of raging pessimism on the defeated side.

Established in 2012 and maintaining branches in Europe, North America, and Iran, the Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Network claims its goal is merely to show “solidarity” for imprisoned Palestinians. The organization’s leader, however, has admitted to being a representative of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a notorious terrorist group whose most recent accomplishments include murdering a seventeen-year-old girl. As Arsen Ostrovsky and Patricia Teitelbaum point out, Samidoun is just one example of how the European Union allows Iran-backed terrorists to operate in its midst:

The PFLP is a proxy of the Iranian regime, which provides the terror group with money, training, and weapons. Samidoun . . . has a branch in Tehran. It has even held events there, under the pretext of “cultural activity,” to elicit support for operations in Europe. Its leader, Khaled Barakat, is a regular on Iran’s state [channel] PressTV, calling for violence and lauding Iran’s involvement in the region. It is utterly incomprehensible, therefore, that the EU has not yet designated Samidoun a terror group.

According to the Council of the European Union, groups and/or individuals can be added to the EU terror list on the basis of “proposals submitted by member states based on a decision by a competent authority of a member state or a third country.” In this regard, there is already a standing designation by Israel of Samidoun as a terror group and a decision of a German court finding Barakat to be a senior PFLP operative.

Given the irrefutable axis-of-terror between Samidoun, PFLP, and the Iranian regime, the EU has a duty to put Samidoun and senior Samidoun leaders on the EU terror list. It should do this not as some favor to Israel, but because otherwise it continues to turn a blind eye to a group that presents a clear and present security threat to the European Union and EU citizens.