The West still has a chance

Its towering champion has emerged victorious in Israel election.

It looked precarious mere days ago.  One began to wonder why he had orchestrated such an environment of risk for himself.

Here's why:

Although Netanyahu’s Likud Party only won about half the number of seats needed to secure a majority in Israel’s parliament, it did so much better than anyone expected (including Bibi) that he seems to have triumphed in the goal he had set for himself last December when he broke up the government he had formed in 2013 and called new elections.

He did that because he wanted to strengthen his own hand and rid himself of two hostile coalition partners at the same time. This was a risky strategy, and it looked for quite a while like a disastrous one.

Throughout the final weeks, polling suggested Likud had fallen behind the center-left opposition, the Zionist Unon.

If Likud had come in second Tuesday night, the ZU might have been given the first crack at forming a new government — and though it would have had profound difficulties assembling that new government, it’s possible the ZU might have succeeded.

But had it failed, Bibi would then have been left with the horrid task of slapping together some kind of nightmarish contraption coalition to secure the 61 seats necessary for a majority. He would have been weak and his government would have been on the verge of collapse from the moment it was assembled.

Something else — something entirely unexpected — happened. Bibi’s Likud was expected to secure 20 to 22 seats in the Knesset Tuesday night. That’s what all the polls showed. Instead, it appears Likud won 29, maybe 30 seats.

Not only was that shockingly good for Likud, it was a far stronger showing than in the last election, because in 2013, the party had merged with another called Yisrael Beytenu. 

So Israel will continue speaking to the world with a unified voice.

Is there any chance that post-America, a much larger nation in terms of both population and land mass, can similarly regain its moral bearings and move past the hand-wringing over Jeb's big-money donors and the percentage of Freedom-Haters who are not bothered by Hillary's email scandal?  Can it snap out of its perpetual adolescence and realize that it faces actual crises and challenges and put aside the silly faux issues and join with its natural friend to dispel the darkness and secure real peace and freedom for this age?