The Tragedy of Israeli Labor

“I’m trying to be optimistic,” an Israeli friend said to me after last spring’s elections, “but my son goes into the Army next year and I shiver when I think of Netanyahu making life and death decisions for this country.”

It’s hard to blame her. The ideology of Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party is a species of fundamentalist nationalism; though secular, it claims “eternal rights” to “historical” borders, and aims to...