I stayed up later than I should have last night watching news clips about Israel/Iran. It's fascinating what one can learn upon escaping the US corporate media bubble. I heard a fairly insightful take on Benjamin Netanyahu. Bibi is not a long term strategist. He thinks very short term, he's just (A) been in power and in the public eye for decades and (B) gets a continual tongue bath from most US media. Bibi's MO is [impulsively do thing] -> [deal with the ramifications of his previous action by doing another impulsive thing.] The consequences for this pattern (besides regional instability, bloodshed an chaos) is that to stay in power he has had to increasingly align himself with formerly fringe far right elements of the Israeli political landscape. Bibi's prime directive is to stay in power so he can stay out of jail (reminiscent of a certain other political figure, but I digress...) I have read for years that to really get a proper sense of the true positions of Netanyahu and the Likud party in general, find their Hebrew language statements and run them through Google translate. The results paint a very different picture than what he says in English.