Israeli Vote a Setback for Obama and Anti-Israel Left

Check out the Washington Post's report, "In Israeli Vote Results, A Setback for Obama":

President Obama's ambition to move quickly on Israeli-Palestinian peace suffered a significant setback yesterday with the rightward shift apparent in nearly complete Israeli election results, analysts said.

While the centrist Kadima party appeared to eke out a victory, the right-wing Likud party more than doubled its seats and an ultra-nationalist party made big gains, increasing the prospect that a government uninterested in peace talks will emerge from the post-election efforts to form a governing coalition. Even if Tzipi Livni, the head of Kadima who has vowed to negotiate peace with the Palestinians, manages to cobble together a coalition after weeks of negotiations, many experts predict she will be hamstrung by her coalition partners ....

Administration officials said yesterday they would not comment pending official returns, but many key players have long and difficult memories of dealing with the Binyamin Netanyahu, the Likud leader, when he was prime minister during the Clinton administration. It is no secret that U.S. officials would prefer to deal with Livni, who as foreign minister spearheaded unsuccessful talks with the Palestinians in the waning days of the Bush administration.

The prospect of a Likud-dominated government has sent Siun at Firedoglake into an anti-Israel fit, complete with wild generalizations and insinuations of American atrocities in Iraq:

While the final results are uncertain, they are all too clear – no matter which candidate wins in the end, the leadership will be one of the hawks. Livni, who not so long ago was trumpeted as the new “progressive” option, has since done everything she could to prove herself as bloodthirsty as her brethren. Netanyahu’s thuggish but oh so popular posturing set the bar the others decimated Gaza to meet. Neither direction offers hope of genuine and just peace ....

As we’ve watched with horror the Iraeli attack on Gaza and the resulting devastation of lives and homes, we may have forgotten how closely that devastation mirrors the results of our war on and occupation of Iraq. Gaza, already debilitated by the Israeli blockade, faced three intensive weeks of brutality while we have maintained our destruction of Iraqis and their society, already debilitated by our sanctions, over years. Yet the results are horribly similar.

It'll be very interesting to see U.S.-Israeli relations evolve with Netanyahu in power (if it comes to that), pressing the U.S. from the right, while the hardline pro-terror factions in the U.S. hammer the Obama administration from the extreme left.