I have long hated Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. I hated him back when I was more right-wing and I obviously didn’t like him better when I became more left-wing. Over the years, I’ve said positive things about both Ariel Sharon and Shimon Peres, and I can respect both a right-wing Machiavel like Avigdor Lieberman and a potentially transformational left-wing leader like Ayman Odeh. But I cannot recall ever saying anything positive about Bibi, whose relentless divisiveness and highly-personalized political style made him a harbinger of the populist-nationalist tendency that has wreaked havoc across the West.
Yet now, for the first time, a little part of me wants him to win — to reward him for Israel’s
