Israel’s recent election clearly indicated a marked rightward shift in the electorate, and a corresponding decline in the traditional left-wing parties. This has reinforced the secular right-leaning Likud and Yisrael Beitenu (Israel Our Home) parties, as well as the conservative religious parties.

Kadima, the “third force” left-center-right party founded by Ariel Sharon, under Tsipi Livni surprisingly won the single largest number of parliamentary seats (28), probably because supporters of Labor (13 seats) and Meretz (3) shifted their votes to her. President Shimon Peres therefore asked Likud’s Binyamin (Bibi) Netanyahu (who received 27 seats)  to form a government, since his “natural” coalition has 65 votes, four more than the simple majority needed, while Livni’s fell far short of a majority.

Yisrael Beitenu, a secular-right party led by Avigdor Lieberman, polled an unexpectedly strong third with 15 seats, and holds the balance of power. Its leader, Mr. Lieberman, while urging a national unity coalition with Likud and Kadima, nevertheless will support a Netanyahu-led government.  And the support of the nationalist religious parties (Shas, United Torah Judaism, National Union, Habayi Hayehudi), which totaled 23 votes, would be crucial to a right-wing coalition.

Souring on ‘land for peace’

Israel’s electorate moved rightwards because of general disillusion with the “land for peace” stance of previous Labor-left coalitions, continued by Kadima under Ehud Olmert and now Ms. Livni.

This policy was discredited through the failure of the Oslo Accords, Yasser Arafat’s rejection of generous peace offers at Camp David II and Taba, and the terrorism of the second Intifada. It was undercut too by the failure of the four-power “Road Map” initiative and of the Annapolis conference, and the rise of Iran-backed Hezbollah and Hamas (including the latter’s coup d’etat against Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah and the Palestinian Authority after Israel’s unilateral 2005 withdrawal from Gaza).

The Lebanon war in 2006, followed by Hamas’s mounting rocketing of southern Israel, culminating in the recent Gaza war, put a cap on the collapse of Israeli tolerance for the “land for peace” idea. Indeed, the related “two-state solution” concept, pushed by Condoleezza Rice in the dying days of the Bush administration and at the Annapolis conference, is also dead insofar as most Israelis are concerned. Given the deep gulf between a weak West Bank Fatah-P.A. led by Mr. Abbas (Arafat’s former lieutenant) and a relatively strong Islamist and clearly rejectionist Hamas ensconced in Gaza, there is no strong and credible pro-peace Palestinian state-in-formation with which Israel can even begin serious negotiations.

Further, Israel is focused these days not on making risky sacrifices for an improbable peace with the Palestinians, but on the ever-deepening existential threat posed by a soon-to-be nuclear-armed, and programmatically genocidal Iran. This threat exists in large part because of the failure of the U.S., the UN, and the “international community” to impose really serious sanctions on Tehran that might have halted its drive to nuclear-weapons capability.  With the accession of President Barack Obama in the U.S. and his making good on campaign promises of seeking diplomatic contact with Iran, it is now abundantly clear to Israel that military action alone will prevent Iran’s nuclearization, and that if and when such action is taken it will be the Jewish state, acting alone, which will take it.

Hillary’s support for the Palestinians

If, then, the issue of a Palestinian state has become nugatory for most Israelis (and, by the way for most Palestinians who, according to recent polls, favor a “one-state solution,” i.e., the elimination of Jewish Israel), this is not the case for the U.S. The new Obama administration remains committed to the “two-state solution” of its Republican predecessor, and to support for the supposedly “moderate” Mr. Abbas. And this, given Israel’s recent election, with its probable return of a right-wing Netanyahu-led coalition government, puts Jerusalem on an inevitable collision course with its greatest, indeed only, international backer.

Hillary Clinton, on her first visit as secretary of state to the Middle East, carried $900 million in U.S. funding for the Palestinians to the recent Egyptian meeting on rebuilding Gaza. U.S. policy continues to support Mr. Abbas (whose PA media continue their wildly anti-Semitic delegitimation of Israel, and whose PLO “Covenant” still proclaims the goal of destroying the Jewish state).  Mr. Abbas’ term as president of the Palestinian Authority ended in February, but he continues to postpone elections for fear of losing them, again, to Hamas.

American policy, of course, is in part calculated to appeal to the Arab world and the “international community,” to show that Washington cares about the Palestinians. But the policy may be out of synchrony with much of the Arab world, since the Gaza war demonstrated that even many Arab states (Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan) blamed Iran-backed Hamas for the war. And these states fear the extension of radical Iranian Shiite power across the Sunni Arab world. (Egypt especially fears Hamas, because it is in fact the Gaza extension of the powerful Islamist, and anti-Mubarak, Moslem Brotherhood in Egypt.)

Israeli insiders fear that Washington under Mr. Obama and Ms. Clinton, trying to hold on to their “two-state solution” idée fixe, might—intentionally or inadvertently—effect a de facto recognition of Hamas by backing a “reconciliation” between Hamas and Fatah. Since the U.S. and the European Union regard Hamas as a terrorist organization and refuse to deal directly with it, such a “paper” pact between inexorable enemies would enable monies to be channeled to Gazan reconstruction through a “unified” Palestinian administration.

Such a “fix,” which could begin the “rehabilitation” of Hamas, would be of a piece with the new administration’s diplomatic overtures to Iran and to Syria, the principle backers of Hamas (and of Hezbollah—indeed, U.S. policy has passively accepted growing Hezbollah, and hence Iranian-Syrian, influence in Lebanon).

Destabilizing Netanyahu’s coalition government?

At the same time, various liberal American media sources and commentators are indicating that Mr. Obama and Ms. Clinton would be less than happy to have to deal with a “narrow,” “right-wing,” and “anti-‘two-state solution’” Israeli government under Mr. Netanyahu. (Ms. Clinton clearly and repeatedly noted American support for a “two-state solution” while visiting Jerusalem on her recent Middle East junket.)

Given the fact that coalition negotiations are still ongoing in Jerusalem, such leaks and statements can be seen as constituting interference in the Israeli political process (not a new phenomenon—President Bill Clinton helped destabilize Mr. Netanyahu’s first  government, just as George H.W. Bush and James Baker did in regard to Yitzhak Shamir previously).

Such views certainly reinforced Kadima’s Ms. Livni in her resistance to Mr. Netanyahu’s “national unity” overtures.  If Mr. Netanyahu finally is forced to form a “narrow” right-wing coalition government, it could well be inherently fragile, if not unstable, since Mr. Lieberman’s secular “Our Home” party, which would be a key component, campaigned on its readiness to negotiate withdrawals from Judea and Samaria in return for a reinforced Israeli presence in high-density Arab areas like the Galilee, and this is anathema to the nationalist religious parties which are also crucial to such a coalition.

A clearly negative American relation to such a government would work further to destabilize it. Mr. Netanyahu, of course, who experienced precisely this kind of circumstance in his first, largely unsuccessful prime-ministership, has been trying to reassure the Americans about being forthcoming on peacemaking, even as he tries to entice Ms. Livni into entering a national unity government under his leadership (not least by promising her the post of Foreign Minister).

But if she continues to refuse, seeing a role as leader of the main opposition as a relatively rapid stepping-stone to her own government, Mr. Netanyahu will be forced to constitute a right-wing coalition, however fragile or unstable it might be.

He himself, both reflecting and playing to the rightward-shifting national consensus, has talked about abandoning the “two-state solution” framework, and making peace gradually, from the bottom up as opposed to that framework’s so-far failed top-down approach. Putting economic development and building a civil society first, he argues, would finally give the Palestinians a concrete stake in good-faith negotiations leading to a real and enduring peace with Israel.

And although this would take time, perhaps a decade or more, there is in any event currently no one with whom to negotiate: Hamas refuses to recognize, and is committed to destroying, Israel, and Mr. Abbas and Fatah are too weak to make binding, enforceable agreements.

But since the religious parties Mr. Netanyahu would rely on in a right-wing coalition have pledged to bolt if he negotiates the status of Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria, or makes any move to negotiate the status of Jerusalem, Mr. Netanyahu, under American pressure—and despite majority popular support—could find himself paralyzed politically.

Here the worsening situation vis-à-vis Iran comes back en revanche. Mr. Netanyahu’s coalition was strengthened electorally not only because of the peace-process’s failure, but specifically because of the Olmert-Livni Kadima government’s repeated failure to act against Hamas’ steadily increasing (in numbers and range) rocketing, over several years, of southern Israel. Mr. Netanyahu presented himself, and is seen by Israelis, as a tougher, more decisive leader, than Ms. Livni, readier to play the military card.

Here the negative conjunction between Israeli and American political-diplomatic dynamics poses potentially serious dangers—for Israel and for the U.S. and, as well, for Europe and the Middle East. Precisely the fragility of his narrow coalition, combined with American pressure not to act, might constrain Mr. Netanyahu from moving forcefully against the Iranian nuclear threat.  And should, therefore, Tehran succeed in building a bomb (deliverable by steadily improving middle-to-long-range rocketry), this would prove an incalculably dangerous threat not only to Israel’s, but to relatively moderate Arab regimes’ (Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia) and to the West’s, existence.

Hence, a good deal more is at stake in the evolving Israeli political situation than the fate of one or another coalition government. American destabilization pressures, leading to the weakening and/or fall of a right-wing Netanyahu government, could have disastrous effects given the looming Iranian nuclear accession. Hillary Clinton in Jerusalem, like Barack Obama at AIPAC during the election campaign, repeated the absolute support of America’s government for democratic Jewish Israel. But whether this will include both working closely with a right-wing, anti-“two-state” government, and supporting a possible attack on Iran’s nuclear production sites, remains a moot question—one with evident world-historical implications.