That's it then. The victory of Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud party has slammed the door on a Palestinian settlement and opened the way for yet more instability in an already deeply unstable Middle East. The pundits were once again caught out by opinion polls which suggested that Likud was heading for a fall. Even the exit polls turned out to be wrong, indicating either that the methodology was flawed or that people who had voted Likud were, as they left the polling stations, either too nervous or too devious to say what they had done. Netanyahu has vowed that he will form a coalition within two or three weeks. The speed of this exercise suggests that he is already pretty sure that he can win over right-wing parties to join his new government. The clincher for them was undoubtedly his announcement in the closing days of the hustings that he would not countenance a separate Palestinian state. Instead, he promised to build thousands of new settler homes in East Jerusalem and the Occupied West Bank, in defiance of United Nations' resolutions and, more importantly, in defiance of the Obama White House. This is surely now a turning point. As Netanyahu settles in for his fourth consecutive term, which will make him the longest-serving Israeli leader, the Europeans and the Americans need to review their slavish indulgence of his policies which, from the start, have been designed to frustrate a genuine end to Palestine's agony through the creation of a viable two-state solution. There have been mounting signs that European states are thinking again about their benign treatment of an intransigent Israel. The new EU foreign affairs chief Federica Mogherini has been briefing that the Europeans can no longer tolerate the unjust status quo. The appalling treatment of the people of Gaza has scarred European thinking. One senior EU commissioner is reported to have said that the biggest blunder was the refusal to recognize the 2006 election victory of Hamas. Pressurized by the Bush White House, Brussels agreed to ignore the result of a free and fair democratic vote. It accepted the perverse Bush reasoning that since Hamas was branded a terrorist group, it could not be part of the political process, even though it had put aside the gun in favor of the ballot box. Had the international community accepted the result, it would have put immense pressure on Israel to admit the right of the Palestinian state to exist in return for the abandonment by Hamas of its own refusal to acknowledge the existence of the Israeli state. But instead of politics, thanks to the hypocritical Bush White House and the craven attitude of the Europeans, we have seen another nine years of bloodshed, misery, instability and injustice. The key of course is going to be the response of President Obama to Netanyahu's win. Has he the strength, the will and indeed the time to use the lever of US military and financial support to force Netanyahu to change tack? The chances have to be that he has not. Instead, Netanyahu is set to conspire with Israel's many friends in Congress to ensure that whoever succeeds Obama will stay off his back and allow him to continue with policies that are inimical to any sort of Palestinian settlement and are packed with danger in terms of further regional instability.
