From my new column in Taki’s Magazine:

A victory for Netanyahu’s Democrat-aligned opponents would be good for American Republicans, since it might slightly dampen the GOP’s crush on Israel, and encourage Republicans to seek something in return for their support.

But, it looks now like Netanyahu has done well at the polls and is likely to assemble the coalition needed to give him a fourth term in the top job.

By the way, I don’t follow Israeli politics all that much and don’t strong opinions about it, but I do think that Netanyahu is close to the being the most formidable politician of his era, and closest to the template of who you’d expect to be successful in politics. I mean, imagine yourself some old party hack in the late 1970s and you’re supposed to be out recruiting future candidates. Would the young Bibi be your number one draft choice? Impressive war record as a commando, hyper-articulate speech, masculine, handsome, strapping size. He’d grade out pretty well at the combine for future candidates. (One concern might be that his charisma strikes me as stemming more from intensity than from warmth.)

My guess would be that Israel gets more of its top men to go into politics than most other countries. And its universal draft and frequent combat gives other people the opportunity to assess potential political leaders in action.

It’s kind of like how most of the Presidents of U.S. elected after the Civil War were men who had proved themselves to their contemporaries during the war. Democrats write most of the history books, so we’re supposed to assume the Republican Presidents from Grant through McKinley were non-entities. Maybe they were, but how’d the country do during this period?