It's Israeli election time so I guess I should post my traditional "I prefer the center-right to the right" post and then pretend to add substantive comments to make it worth your while.This is the closest MR comes to comment bait (with the exception of hotties posts, obviously). But can't we all agree that Shas is kind of crazy and that their insanity might even have a broad electoral undertone? Or not? Fair enough - they're not up my secular alley anyway.

But even the rightist secular parties are walking into the election with some egg on their face. Remember the time when Arieh Eldad wanted Barak charged with treason for letting aid trucks into Gaza. Opps!

The polls show that it'll be a narrow Likud win. Factional considerations mean that Netanyahu will get picked to head the new government even if it's close. Plus the only reason to vote for a centrist party is so they'll get along with the State Department - and Kadima not so much. So we're set for a replay of the 1990s with Netanyahu in Israel, a Clinton State Department. Except this time there's a nuclear Iran to Israel's east and missile-armed Iranian proxies to the north and south.

MR's fearless prediction: the first big blowup won't be over settlements. It'll be over Syria:

If Benjamin Netanyahu is tapped to form Israel's next governing coalition, he will not appoint Yisrael Beiteinu chief Avigdor Lieberman as his defense minister, the Likud chairman told Channel 1 on Monday, just hours before Israelis go to the polls. "If I am elected, I will approach all the Zionist parties to join a coalition headed by the Likud," Netanyahu said. "We will take all these parties - Kadima, Labor, Yisrael Beiteinu." Netanyahu added that he is not ready to commit to holding negotiations with the Syrians. "The Olmert government's understandings with the Syrians do not obligate me," he said. "Rather, Israel's security [obligates me]."

For their part, the Syrians are holding out for Obama's original offer of talks without preconditions. Talks will eventually happen because Obama's vaunted experts think that Syria can be peeled away from Iran's orbit. That's not true - the dynamics of Arab nationalism, regional hegemonic power politics, and Assad's own unequivocal declarations guarantee as much. But wouldn't it be great if that wasn't true?

References and previously after the jump...