" JERUSALEM – Benjamin Netanyahu appeared to be headed toward a historic fifth term as Israel's prime minister on Wednesday, with close-to-complete unofficial election results giving his right-wing Likud and other nationalist and religious parties a solid majority in parliament.

The outcome affirmed Israel's continued tilt to the right and further dimmed hopes of a negotiated solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Re-election will also give Netanyahu an important boost as he braces for the likelihood of criminal charges in a series of corruption scandals.

With 97.4% of the vote counted, Likud and its traditional political allies were in command of a 65-55 majority in parliament. A couple of small parties were still teetering along the electoral threshold and fighting for their survival, so the final makeup of the next parliament has yet to be decided. In any case, the country now faces what could be weeks of political negotiations over the composition of a ruling coalition.

But under nearly every scenario, Netanyahu was the big winner.

The long-time Israeli leader had fought a tight, ugly race against centrist ex-military chief Benny Gantz, whose nascent Blue and White party emerged as a viable alternative to Netanyahu's decade in power. The near-final results showed it deadlocked with Likud at 35 seats. But most of its support seems to have come at the expense of the venerable Labor and leftist Meretz parties, who both earned historic lows in Tuesday's election.

Together with his current Jewish ultra-Orthodox and nationalist partners, Netanyahu should have no trouble building a coalition government that has a majority in the 120-seat parliament.

With a victory, Netanyahu would capture a fourth consecutive term and fifth overall, which this summer will make him Israel's longest-ever serving leader, surpassing founding father David Ben-Gurion.

"It's a night of tremendous victory," Netanyahu told supporters early Wednesday. "I was very moved that the nation of Israel once again entrusted me for the fifth time, and with an even greater trust."

He said he had already begun talking to fellow right-wing and religious parties about forming a new coalition.

"I want to make it clear, it will be a right-wing government, but I intend to be the prime minister of all Israeli citizens, right or left, Jews and non-Jews alike," he said.

Netanyahu's message of unity was a sharp contrast from his campaign theme in which he accused Gantz of conspiring with Arab parties to topple him. Arab leaders accused Netanyahu of demonizing the country's Arab community, which is about 20 percent of the population.

His attacks on the Arab sector fueled calls for a boycott and appeared to result in relatively low turnout by Arab voters.

Though the Palestinian issue was rarely mentioned in the raucous campaign, Netanyahu had in the final stretch pledged for the first time to annex parts of the occupied West Bank in a desperate bid to rally his right-wing base. Netanyahu has welched on election eve promises before, but should he follow through on this one, it would mark a dramatic development and potentially wipe out the already diminishing hope for Palestinian statehood.

The 69-year-old prime minister has been the dominant force in Israeli politics for the past two decades and its face to the world. His campaign has focused heavily on his friendship with President Donald Trump and his success in cultivating new allies, such as China, India and Brazil.

But his corruption scandals created some voter fatigue. Along with two other former military chiefs on his ticket, Gantz was able to challenge Netanyahu on security issues, normally the prime minister's strong suit, while also taking aim at the prime minister's alleged ethical lapses.

Israel's attorney general has recommended charging Netanyahu with bribery, breach of trust and fraud in three cases. He will only decide on indicting him after a legally mandated hearing. Legal experts expect at least some charges to be filed, which could set the stage for a short term for Netanyahu and another round of elections soon. "

" WASHINGTON -- The Trump administration's "maximum pressure campaign" against Iran assumes that economic sanctions are weakening the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps -- and that more sanctions will make the IRGC weaker still. The problem is that U.S. and European intelligence analysts don't think this forecast is accurate.

"Re-imposition of sanctions in 2018 has played into the hands of the IRGC," warns one recent Western intelligence assessment. Rather than turning Iranians against the corrupt IRGC leadership, in other words, the U.S. economic squeeze is instead giving Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani and his allies greater control over the Iranian economy.

The Iran sanctions paradox deepened this week with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's announcement that the U.S. will designate the IRGC as a foreign terrorist organization. But as Pompeo warned Monday, the IRGC's leaders are masters of "nationwide con artistry and corruption ... which they perpetrate against the regime's own people."

History has shown that these operatives find illegal ways to escape pressure, and that the economic vise instead tightens for the Iranian people.

Like so many Trump administration foreign-policy gambits, the Iran squeeze looks like a tactical campaign that's in search of a strategy. Does the administration want negotiations? If so, why has it effectively banned the U.S. from contact with Tehran's power brokers? "We'll preclude ourselves from talking to the people who matter," warns Karim Sadjadpour, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Does the administration instead seek a change of Iranian policy and less power for the hard-liners? If so, the U.S. should be working to deepen fissures within the Iranian elite, rather than pushing different factions toward the IRGC. "The goal should be to widen political divisions," argues Sadjadpour. "When you're trying to foment political change, you need pressure from below and divisions above."

Sanctions have their uses, to be sure. The ban on oil and financial transactions that President Trump re-imposed after withdrawing from the 2015 Iran nuclear deal has hit Iran hard. Oil exports have been cut in half, from 2.5 million barrels a day in April 2018 to about 1.25 million barrels in February 2019, according to Reuters. The International Monetary Fund predicted Tuesday that Iran's economy will shrink 6% this year, after a 3.9% decline last year. Inflation is currently running at 47.5%.

The resulting cash squeeze means there's less money for Iran to distribute to its proxies in Lebanon, Syria and Yemen.

Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah in Lebanon, said last month that the militia would need to do more internal fundraising. An Israeli official told me recently that as part of its belt-tightening, Hezbollah has cut some salaries by 40 percent. In Syria, too, the Iranians are reducing their support for Shiite militias, the Israeli official said.

The pressure is mounting, but to what end? As with other Trump administration foreign policies, it's hard to discern the strategic goal. Trump has privately told foreign leaders that he wants to pressure Tehran back to the bargaining table and win a better, broader nuclear deal than the one negotiated by his predecessor, Barack Obama. But John Bolton, Trump's national security adviser, has signaled instead that he wants to create conditions for regime change, rather than just renewed negotiation.

Imagine the White House confusion if Iran's Ayatollah Ali Khamenei sent Trump a letter proposing a new round of nuclear and regional negotiations -- with Soleimani, the leader of the IRGC's Quds Force, as his chief negotiator. Trump could claim a win, but such talks would violate the just-imposed terrorist designation.

The biggest danger of the escalating Iran campaign is that it risks unraveling the hard-won U.S. success in Iraq over the past five years. About 5,000 U.S. soldiers are now in Iraq, training the Iraqi military and checking the power of Iranian-backed Shiite militias. They could become targets, if Iran follows through on its tit-for-tat designation this week of Centcom forces as "terrorists."

But even if Iran refrains from shooting at U.S. troops, Tehran-backed politicians may pass legislation in the Iraqi parliament that would forbid continued U.S. military training of Iraqi forces. That would be a real loss. Iran would pull Iraq deeper into its sphere of influence -- offsetting any U.S. gains in Lebanon, Syria or Yemen.

Sanctions are like catnip for U.S. policymakers. If you want to see how badly they can misfire, recall the U.S.-led campaign of sanctions against the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein in the 1990s. That squeeze had the perverse effect of empowering Saddam's clique of smugglers and torturers. We're in danger of repeating that sorry chapter with Iran. "

" Story of the Year "

DANIEL HENNINGER MARCH 06, 2019

" The great political challenge of our time is sorting out what matters from what’s just chatter. The din of distracting statistical noise is overwhelming. A Democratic governor named Inslee announces he’s going to run for the U.S. presidency on one issue—climate change. Days later, the real president delivers a speech of immeasurable length to a conference of conservatives about pretty much everything rattling around in his head. The new week dawns with a Democratic House committee chairman named Nadler demanding that 81 of the president’s “associates” provide him with a document dump.

Serious people would like to believe something real in politics is going on. The good news is . . . something is.

This past weekend, The Wall Street Journal published a series of stories titled “Inside the Hottest Job Market in Half a Century.” As far as I’m concerned, this jobs record is the story of the year. The Journal’s articles transformed a year of economic data into the new daily reality of getting paid to work in America.

“All sorts of people who have previously had trouble landing a job are now finding work,” the Journal reported. “Racial minorities, those with less education and people working in the lowest-paying jobs are getting bigger pay raises and, in many cases, experiencing the lowest unemployment rate ever recorded for their groups. They are joining manufacturing workers, women in their prime working years, Americans with disabilities and those with criminal records, among others, in finding improved job prospects after years of disappointment.”

Example: A 23-year-old woman, Cassandra Eaton, a high-school graduate and single mother who was working for about $8 an hour at a day-care center in Biloxi, Miss., is doing now what previously would have been unimaginable. She’s an apprentice welder making $20 an hour at a shipyard in Pascagoula.

The unemployment rate for high-school dropouts, a status many depressing books and studies show puts one close to the bottom of the barrel for getting ahead in America, is 5%. Their median wages the past year rose 6%.

An ex-con named James O. Wilson, who got a job in 2017 with FedEx in Indianapolis, is today making more than $16 an hour, has a house and a wife, and says, “I want FedEx to say, ‘Do you have any more people like him?’ ”

Let’s cut to the chase. From left to right, socialist or conservative, most of a nation’s political debates are ultimately about one thing: making life better for people. Whatever else that may mean, it first requires giving people something to do with their daily lives—work, a job. Which is to say, aspiration and opportunity.

If what has happened inside the U.S. labor market the past two years doesn’t qualify as the point of all this effort, those of us in and around politics might as well pack it in.

A great value of the Journal’s articles on the historic top-to-bottom jobs market is that for most people this establishes a baseline of observable, undeniable reality.

“Most people,” however, does not include large swaths of the professional political class. Because the jobs story overlaps almost precisely with the policies of a U.S. presidency occupied by you-know-who, the reality outside their windows must be denied.

Start with the Democrats, whose response to the new jobs market borders on the comical: Create a new top personal tax rate of 70%, a higher corporate tax rate, a circa-1933 jobs program doing things for the environment and free health care. If none of that works, impeach the president.

It’s no surprise that Mike Bloomberg, a Democratic capitalist, chose not to compete with the crew running for the party’s presidential nomination, while former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, one of the great job creators of his generation, shuns the Democrats to run as an independent.

More interesting is the internal debate among conservatives and Republicans.

In recent years, a group know as Reformicons has argued that the Reagan-era policy mix of tax cuts, deregulation and economic growth is no longer relevant to the needs and anxieties of the U.S. middle class. Instead, their policy alternatives include targeted government interventions, such as wage subsidies, to supplement middle-class incomes. These ideas are often associated with Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and former Ohio Gov. John Kasich.

One notices that most of the Reformicon arguments emerged from 2014 to 2016—before the Reagan-era, supply-side policies of the Trump presidency were passed into law or implemented. In 2019, the idea that tax reductions, public-sector deregulation and growth are no longer relevant to the needs of the middle class is provably and demonstrably false.

It requires a remarkable degree of obtuseness to stare at the policy success of the past two years and pretend it hasn’t happened. Democrats are doing exactly that. Conservatives should pocket the Trump presidency’s Reaganesque policies for massively matching job producers with job seekers. There is plenty left for them to do without trying to reinvent the wheel."