“With this latest incident, the reputation for arrogance and duplicity that Netanyahu has long enjoyed among American elites is seeping out to the public at large,” writes Peter Beinart. “It’s not just Fox’s Shepard Smith who last week objected to Netanyahu treating Americans like ‘we’re just a bunch of complete morons.’ HBO’s Bill Maher, who, while liberal on most issues, has won conservative acclaim in recent months for his critiques of Islam, said after news of Netanyahu’s speech to Congress, ‘We’re getting very close on the Iran issue to allowing Israel to write American policy.'”

When Netanyahu’s running scared, he doesn’t run smart. Even Israel Hayom’s lead columnist calls his planned trip to address Congress ‘grievous,’ motivated not by concern for Israel, but for electoral gain.

Over the years, the Likud Party has preferred to grant vast funds to settlements, instead of caring for the weak and poor sectors, which got it to power in the first place.

Communists, Palestinian nationalists and religious Muslims band together for the first time, in hopes of rallying Israel’s largest minority and unseating Netanyahu.

The top two parties are neck-and-neck and the number of political king-makers is growing. With a number of potential wild-cards ahead, it’s anyone’s election.

Instead of discussing increasing violence against civilians, border skirmishes and the assassination of an Iranian general, Israeli politicians are busy putting out tasteless and tactless campaign videos attacking each other with name-calling.

They fled when the flyers fell from the sky, Israeli military orders dropped like confetti on the masses. Evacuate, they said, or else. Seek shelter now. One week of sorties, and Ibrahim made the call: We leave now — my wife and I, our seven children, our children’s children. But the Abu Shuqah family never found shelter. The closest they came was a cardboard factory — somewhere between Bureij and Nusseirat, two refugee camps along Gaza’s coastal flats. “We stayed in the storeroom about two weeks,” Ibrahim recalled. “There were mattresses, water, gas, and electricity there. Things were good.” Things were “good” — until the shelling began.

A series of meetings in Beirut have brought Hamas and Hezbollah closer, after their divided stances on the Syrian issue and in light of a possible conflict between Hezbollah and Israel.

UNRWA, the UN relief agency charged with providing aid to Palestinian refugees, announced Tuesday that it is suspending its financial aid program to the thousands of Gazans whose homes were destroyed during Operation Protective Edge last summer. The program was intended to assist them in repairing houses, as well as renting apartments for those who have remained homeless since the assault.