The biggest impediment to annexation by Israel is a threat that the country will lose the support of the Democratic Party and American Jews, J Street says. The Israel lobby group called on Joe Biden to oppose annexation more emphatically than he already has.

Israel’s year-long political stalemate appears to be over. Netanyahu was saved by coronavirus and racism. The virus made him popular. Racism stymied Benny Gantz’s efforts to form a government with Palestinian support.

“There is no life, no existence for the Israel left and even center without the partnership with the Israeli Arabs” — a J Street expert interprets the rise of the Palestinian Joint List as the only real resistance to Netanyahu’s racebaiting.

In a humorous video intended to dispel the rumors about intense tensions within the “cockpit” of four leaders of the Blue and White party – Benjamin Gantz, Yair Lapid, Moshe “Bogie” Yaalon, and Gabi Ashkenazi – Lapid is heard telling Ashkenazi that “Bogie was quite a murderer in the army, in his military career.”

Condemnation for the recently-published UN list of companies doing business in illegal Israeli settlements has been across the Zionist spectrum in Israel, and it’s pretty much the same in the US Congress.

The last decade in Israeli politics was all Netanyahu, all the time. The Israeli left twisted itself into a pretzel trying to get rid of Netanyahu and forgot about trying to end apartheid. Now it looks like the great hate monger is gone and the issues that matter may matter again.

The nature of Zionist politics is always to lurch right not left. As Israel moves closer to elections Ehud Barak’s party has pushed talking points on “deterrence” in Gaza which has made his leftwing Meretz partners uneasy.

Israel’s new Education Minister Rafi Peretz caused international uproar recently by supporting gay conversion therapy and suggesting that intermarriage is like a “2nd Holocaust”. Though the uproar over intermarriage was mostly outside Israel, for good reason – similar views about intermarriage have been expressed historically by the Israeli left.

Israeli opposition party co-leader Yair Lapid tweeted after a shower, “Israel has to be a state of all its citizens.” Under attack, he reversed himself a half hour later. And Israel’s Foreign Minister Israel Katz has upbraided him, calling the tweet a “seriously outrageous anti-Semitic remark … the slogan of the enemy”.

For years liberal Zionists have been saying that the fundamental problem with the Jewish democracy is the bogeyman of Netanyahu. But the April election now offers a real prospect that Netanyahu will be knocked off — and the new centrist governing coalition will be just as obdurate against a Palestinian state. That could be a crisis for liberal Zionists.