I’ve been keeping a sharp eye on the outcome of the elections in Israel mostly from shock that a complete genocidal maniac like Leiberman would even be placed into consideration.

But just as I was starting to lose faith in the people of Israel (like when Arab parties were banned to participate in the election), they go ahead and shock me with the incredible triumph of Tzipi Livni.

All day I was trying to get used to the idea that Bibi Netanyahu would be the next Israeli Prime Minister as he was the most favorable of all candidates.  I tried to get comfortable with the notion that there would be continued aggression in Gaza…. that the settlements would continue to expand which would continue to spur Arab retaliation.  I told myself that President Obama would just have to wait two years until the next Prime Minister was elected and he could finally get to work on a peace initiative in the Middle East.

Well, I can breathe now.  The Israeli people have spoken… twice (she was elected last year to replace Olmert as PM).  Yay for Democracy!

Now, who can guess how long the losers will drag the ballet counting out just to make the process harder, dirtier, and annoying?

UPDATE:

No surprise…  Bibi Netanyahu’s reaction after the polls closed:

He smiled as he gave a victory rather than a concession speech close to 1 a.m. He was greeted by large cheers from the crowd. They clapped their hands and yelled out, “here comes the next prime minister.”

Netanyahu told them that while the true elections results had yet to be calculated but that even if they exactly replicate the exit polls, “there is no doubt about their meaning.”

“The real question is not what do the polls say, but how do they translate into reality,” he said.

I’m not sure which reality you’re hoping to extrapolate from the polling numbers, Bibi, but in my world, if you have the lesser of the numbers, the reality is that you lost.

Chicagoans are the toughest bastards when it comes to surviving vicious winters. Just ask President Obama:

P.S. Ms. Missive’s also a Chicagoan.

[via Oliver Willis]

Michael J. Totten just posted a great article about his meeting with Israeli officials last week. While the title reveals his ultimate point (The Mother of All Quagmires), I think his discussion and realization about Westerner’s (or more precisely, America’s) perspective on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is especially astute. We are simply too optimistic.

Most Americans are inherently optimistic and think just about any problem in the world can be solved. We put a man on the moon before I was born, but that was easy compared with securing peace between Israelis and Arabs.

[...]

Americans aren’t the only ones who have a hard time grasping the idea of an intractable problem. “Unfortunately we Westerners are impatient,” said an Israeli politician who preferred not to be named. “We want fast food and peace now. But it won’t happen. We need a long strategy.” “Most of Israel’s serious problems don’t have a solution,” said Dr. Dan Schueftan, Director of National Security Studies at the University of Haifa. “Israelis have only recently understood this, and most foreign analysts still don’t understand it.”

And he gives an especially clear explanation of the problem from the Palestinian perspective:

Far too many Westerners make the mistake of projecting their own views onto Palestinians without really understanding the Palestinian narrative. The “occupation” doesn’t refer to the West Bank and Gaza, and it never has. The “occupation” refers to Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. A kibbutz in the center of Israel is “occupied Palestine” according to most. “It makes no sense to a Palestinian to think about a Palestinian state alongside Israel,” Martin Kramer from the Shalem Center in Jerusalem said to me a few days ago. “From the Palestinian perspective, Israel will always exist inside Palestine.”

I find his answer to why America hasn’t “fixed the problem” yet as painfully true.  Americans inherently try to solve problems with the best intentions. The problem is that these intentions have a tendency to be our Achilles heal because our pure optimism in this particular situation (the Palestinian/Israeli conflict) makes us blind to a problem that is rooted in the Palestinian and (ultimately) the Muslim psyche.

[via Commentary Magazine]

It was hard for me to imagine what the IDF meant when they said that Gaza civilians were allowing tunnels into their homes for Hamas.

Now I understand precisely:

Here’s a mashup of donors of Proposition 8 (banning gay marriage in California) and a Google Earth map of their addresses.

Let’s get to work!

Trick or treat you bastards:

Click the picture to take you to the live Google Map of all Prop 8 donors.

THIS is exactly why Israel has banned journalists from the Gaza war zone. Thank you, TimesOnline for ruining a great first-person war dispatch and turning it into douche-baggery:

In truth, the dogs, and the near-kidnapping of Roi, represent the failure of the Israeli military operation in Gaza. After 14 days, the biggest military machine in the Middle East has achieved little. Despite more than 1,000 Israeli air sorties, this weekend Hamas continued to launch rockets and even increased their number.

About 800 Palestinians have been killed, many of them civilians, and more than 3,000 injured, but the main fighting force of Hamas was unhurt and lay in wait for the Israelis in Gaza City and the refugee camps in the north and south of the Gaza Strip.

Read the complete article here.

My Dilemma:

I love Israel and I love Democracy.  So what should we do with this story?

Arab parties disqualified from Israeli elections

I’m hoping this was just an emotionally charged irrational vote by Israel’s Central Elections Committee which will be overturned before the February 2009 general elections.

And here’s a number to chew on:  20% of Israeli’s are Arab.

UPDATED:

To my great relief and admiration of Israel, the ban has been reversed by the High Court of Justice.

Israel, I’m so sorry…  please don’t judge all of America on this douche.

Joe the Plumber is in Israel as an AP report.  God help us all.

[video]

Who’s recruiting over at the AP and, more importantly, if I say non-sense on camera during a Presidential election would it get me a free trip to Israel too?

Maybe.  And why not?

The Right is screaming bloody murder and insists U.S. talks would tie Israeli hands from “finishing the job” of wiping Hamas off the face of the earth.

I mean, it’s not like Obama’s claiming he’ll want an idiotic unconditional cease fire like the lame and useless United Nations.  Obama has always said he would be willing to open communication channels with Hamas as long as they recognize Israel and stop being terrorist assholes.

What good would silence do for either Israel or Palestine?  It’s clear the United States will need to get their hands (at least a little) dirty in this mess.

Discussion is a necessity but it doesn’t mean Obama will give up the farm for it.

Even though many of the U.S. cities highlighted in this video are MUCH further away than 30 miles from the Mexican border, I think it’s an important and powerful message anyway: