Bibi VI: The Bibing

With all votes in Israel finally tallied, the coalition led by Benjamin Netanyahu’s conservative Likud party has won a parliamentary majority, winning 64 seats out of 120, presumably ending a period that saw Israel hold five generally inconclusive elections.

Benjamin Netanyahu appears to be on course for a bigger victory in Israel’s fifth election in less than four years than initial exit polls suggested, all three of the country’s main television channels projected Wednesday morning.

His Likud party and its natural allies are currently projected to win 65 seats in the 120-seat Knesset, with 86% of the votes counted as of Wednesday afternoon Israel time.

A coalition of Netanyahu’s Likud, the Jewish nationalist Religious Zionism/Jewish Power bloc, Shas and United Torah Judaism would, on paper, be the most right-wing government in Israel’s history.

This, the 37th, makes the sixth government Netanyahu has led (following the 27th, 32nd, 33rd, 34th, 35th), eclipsed only by Israeli founding father David Ben-Gurion’s nine, and Netanyahu is the first to serve three non-consecutive stints in power.

By the time most movies get to a sixth installment, most are going direct to video, but Netanyahu’s pro-security policies have increasingly dominated Israel. Public support for the ever-ephemeral “two state solution” favored by the leftwing opposition has fallen to record lows.

Whoever is running Biden’s foreign policy apparatus seems to be less institutionally hostile to Netanyahu than the Obama Administration was, and Biden met with him earlier this year.

Bibi’s like the Terminator: no matter what the international left throws at him, or how many times he’s been written off for dead, he just keeps coming back.

It occurs to me that the Terminator franchise has also had six films. Let’s hope that Bibi VI is better received than Dark Fate…