“Demographic and cultural changes have transformed the Jewish electorate in Israel into a polity incapable of producing a left or even center-left government,” writes Ian Lustick.  “The current election campaign shows that the painful implications of this state of affairs have not yet been absorbed by the remains of what used to be called ‘beautiful Israel.’ To do so would mean recognizing that any serious strategy for bringing Jewish moderates back into power will require an alliance with non-Jews,  campaigns to achieve extremely high turnout rates by non-Jews, and even  extension of political rights to Arabs in East Jerusalem (perhaps to Arabs in the rest of the West Bank).”

“Sheldon Adelson is in many ways the thread, the monetary backer, who weaves together the entire drama of bad-acting and partisan connivance behind the Netanyahu speech stunt,” writes Josh Marshall.

“Republicans, conservatives and some others have seized on a correction the New York Times made on Jan. 30 to suggest that “Speechgate” is overblown,” writes Ron Kampeas. “A quick review of the facts, however, shows that if anything is overblown, it’s the attention given this correction, which is relatively minor and by no means negates the chronology that has the Israeli ambassador, Ron Dermer, coordinating with Boehner for weeks before the Jan. 21 invitation was issued, while keeping the White House in the dark.”

President Obama suggested on Monday that if he met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Washington next month, it could become a political issue in Israel. There’s evidence to back that up.

Here is a list of the Democrats who are planning to skip the speech and those who are planning to go.

The gloves came off in Israel on Monday as a fierce newspaper war exploded into the country’s harsh election campaign. The two most widely circulated papers, Yediot Aharonot and Israel Hayom, have been in a dogfight since Israel Hayom, a free paper backed by the American billionaire Sheldon Adelson, began publishing in 2007. Derided as a cheerleading mouthpiece for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the free paper has cut deeply into the formerly dominant readership and advertising revenue of Yediot Aharonot, which is critical of Mr. Netanyahu. Now the prime minister himself has more than joined the fray.

One in five voters has no opinion or has never heard of the Zionist Camp leader, and only 19% see Isaac Herzog as the man to tackle the issue they most care about: the economy.

“All in all, the picture for now is not rosy for the anything-but-Bibi camp,” writes Shmuel Rosner. “So here we are again, thinking not “is it Netanyahu?” but rather ‘what kind of Netanyahu?’ – namely, what coalition Netanyahu is about to form.”

Abdullah Abu Rahmah has a sentencing hearing in military court after being convicted of standing in front of an IDF bulldozer. The nonviolent protest organizer from Bil’in who already served more than a year in prison has been declared a ‘human rights defender’ by the European Union.

In a dramatic decision, Israel’s High Court of Justice (former President A. Grunis, President M. Naor, and Justice I. Amit) ruled last night that the state must carry out demolition orders issued for nine illegal structures built on privately-owned Palestinian land in the West Bank settlement of Ofra.

The first witness for the Palestinian Authority, in the opening of its defense against the first-ever terrorism trial against it, took the stand Monday on an icy day in downtown Manhattan. Maj.-Gen. Majid Faraj, head of the PA’s General Intelligence Service, which was characterized for the jury as “the Palestinian CIA,” described his principal job during the second intifada as promoting stability and combating violence and terrorism.

“Despite international complaints about inadequate donor funding, Fatah and Hamas have been dragging their feet on the most important prerequisite for rebuilding Gaza: establishing PA governmental control on the ground,” writes Neri Zilber.