On November 1st of last year, Israelis went to the polls again, this time to elect the

120 parliamentarians who would serve in the 25th Knesset.

After just over a year leading the Knesset opposition, Benjamin Netanyahu's

Likud Party was given a leading share of the vote, and Netanyahu put together a right-wing

coalition that enjoys a clear majority in the Knesset, and this government was formed on December

29th of last year. As 2022 turned into 2023, Israeli opponents of the new government have been organizing

protests and demonstrations, manifest there, and in the newspapers and magazines and television

programs of the center and the left, is the fevered and frustrated political rhetoric

that is normal for politicians who've just lost an election

and who want to get back in the game. Now, domestic politics in Israel, as all of our listeners

probably know, is not exactly a picture of self-possessed equanimity. This is all background

for our conversation today, but it's not the subject of our conversation

today.

The subject for us today is the reaction to Israel's election and its new government on the part

of American Jews.

Many of them, for reasons we'll presently explore, have gone hysterical.

Welcome to the Tikva podcast.

I'm your host, Jonathan Silver. My guest today is a veteran

of the White House and the State Department, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations,

the chairman of the Vandenberg Coalition, and our chairman here at Tikva, Elliot Abrams.

For the February edition of commentary, Elliot has written an essay called

Jewish hysterics and Israel's new government. Guided by that essay, Elliot and I tried to analyze and

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