Netanyahu sank into the moral gutter – and there will be consequences

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/20/inyamin-netanyahu-israel-election
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Israel’s prime minister won re-election with a combination of belligerence and bigotry. His opposition to a Palestinian state is a stance the world should not accept

The result was not the worst of it. Indeed, buried in the detailed numbers of this week’s Israeli election were odd crumbs of consolation. No, what made Binyamin Netanyahu’s emphatic win so dispiriting were the depths he plumbed to secure victory.

He made two moves in his desperate, and ultimately successful, effort to woo back those Israeli rightists who had drifted from Likud into the hands of more minor nationalist parties. Netanyahu reassured them that they could forget the lip service of the past few years, the diplomatic niceties he had served up since returning as prime minister in 2009: there would be no Palestinian state on his watch.

On election day itself, he sank lower still. In a Facebook video, he posed in front of a map of the Middle East, as if in a war room, and used the idiom of military conflict to warn that “Arab voters are advancing in large numbers towards voting places” and that this was “a call-up order” for Likud supporters to head to the polling stations.