Analysis: There is one positive

How close is Iran to developing nuclear weapons?

According to Amos Yadlin, Iran has crossed another threshold on the road to nuclear capability, after the recent International Atomic Energy Agency report that Iran has accumulated a much larger stockpile of low-enriched uranium than previously documented.

This means that although Iran is still some distance from building a nuclear weapon, it now has the tools to do it.

The bad news is thus that Iran could soon have a nuclear weapon — a transformational event that could dramatically change the region and precipitate a conflict.

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Analysis: Save us from this bull in a china shop

The concerns about Avigdor Lieberman becoming Israel’s next Foreign Minister remind me of a Jewish telegram: “Start worrying. Details to follow.”

Indeed, in an era when Israel’s image is not so shiny, the idea of someone who seems like a bully, who lives in a settlement and who uses strong language to express his radical views is not ideal.

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Analysis: Is the nuclear threat imminent?

The apparently contradictory statements from US Admiral Mike Mullen — who said Iran was not yet close to a nuclear bomb — and from US Defence Secretary Robert Gates — who seemed to imply quite the opposite — created both concern and confusion in the United States.

The Obama administration is fully aware that a nuclear-armed Iran is against its interests. However, although the statements appear inconsistent, upon closer inspection we can see that they are both accurate.

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Analysis: Lieberman may not be celebrating long

Avigdor Lieberman may have a very short period in which to savour his election success. The new kingmaker of Israeli politics has been the target of an ongoing police investigation for almost nine years, and senior officials within the Justice Ministry are now insisting that a formal charge sheet is now imminent.

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Analysis: Israel must change its electoral system

There is only one certainty that has emerged from last week’s elections in Israel. We badly need serious electoral reform to allow a system which will enable the establishment of a government within days of the polls. It has to be a government which can rule the country for four years, until the next scheduled elections, and which can focus on the urgent issues of security, peace, education and welfare without spending most of its time in machinations aimed at keeping a slender majority together.

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Analysis: A glimmer of hope amid the political paralysis

Israeli elections often seem to achieve little more than to set the terms for the next one, and the election of February 2009 is no exception.

The most likely prospect is of paralysis followed by instability. Whether the eventual coalition is narrowly rightist, a grand affair of the leading parties, or an arrangement of disparate parties across the spectrum, it will be a matter of time before some hard choice has to be faced and the act of choosing will cause the coalition to split.

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Analysis: Lieberman could still lose

President Shimon Peres, during his visit to Britain three months ago, spent a good deal of his time reassuring senior British politicians and opinion-makers that a Likud government with Binyamin Netanyahu at its helm would not automatically mean the end of Israel’s involvement in the peace process.

That was before the surge of Yisrael Beitenu in the polls and Avigdor Lieberman’s emergence as the new kingmaker of Israelis politics. Now the urbane Netanyahu with his American-accented English seems almost cuddly by comparison.

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Analysis: Obama knows Likud’s power

The Obama administration wanted a decisive Kadima victory, putting Tzipi Livni at the helm of Israel’s next coalition. But just as Israelis want the next government to be a unity one, so the nascent US administration, patiently waiting for its Israeli partner, feels that such an outcome would be tolerable.

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Analysis: Arab view bleaker than ever

Whatever coalition emerges from this week’s election, the new government’s tenure promises to be a bleak period with scant progress towards a negotiated solution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, according to analysts on both sides of the divide.

The election is part of a process under way since the breakdown of the Camp David talks in 2000 in which hard-liners on both sides are fuelling each other. The intifada brought Ariel Sharon to power, while Sharon’s policies contributed to the victory of Hamas in the January 2006 Palestinian elections.

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