The main term in the Likud Party's talking points list, and in the scare propaganda of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his party’s ministers, is "Hamastan." On Dec. 20, the prime minister’s office warned that if Labor Party leader Isaac Herzog and his leadership partner, former Minister Tzipi Livni, win the elections, “they plan to withdraw and enable the creation of a second Hamastan in Judea and Samaria.” The next day, Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon knowingly said it was “clear to all of us that if Tzipi Livni and Buji Herzog had been in power, there would already have been a Hamastan in the West Bank a long time ago.”

Once, they had Iran with which to sow fear. Now, as reported on Dec. 22 by Laura Rozen, there are growing indications that the Iranian nuclear threat is about to be removed from the agenda. Not only that, it is hard to convince the Israeli voting public that if Herzog restores the Labor Party to power, he would give up what is known as Israel’s “qualitative edge,” or, to quote foreign sources, Israel’s exclusivity in the field of nuclear weapons in the Middle East. After all, the people who led the Labor Party were the ones who gave the world the policy of exclusivity.

As far as we know, the prime minister has not reneged on his support for a two-state solution, which he declared in his 2009 Bar-Ilan speech. When Netanyahu and his friends wave around the “Hamastan” threat, they mean to warn the public about a West Bank version of the Hamas takeover of the Gaza Strip following the Israel Defense Forces’ 2005 withdrawal from the region. True, the Hamas rocket attacks from Gaza are not an encouraging precedent for a withdrawal from Israeli-held areas, but even in the period before the withdrawal, hundreds of civilians and soldiers were killed in terror attacks in the Gaza Strip. Even Livni, who was a senior member of the government that insisted on a unilateral withdrawal from Gaza, admits it was a serious mistake. Today, she vehemently objects to any move that is not the result of an overall agreement with the Palestinian Authority (PA); a move that deals with all the core issues, including appropriate security arrangements.

They would be well advised to remember that without Egypt’s cooperation, even the limited achievements of Operation Protective Edge, at the cost of 73 civilian lives (72 Israelis and one Thai citizen), would have been wiped out. In November, Egypt closed the Rafah crossing and set about creating a “sterile” buffer zone, several hundred meters wide, between the Palestinian and Egyptian sections of Rafah. To destroy the tunnel enterprise, Egyptian bulldozers razed to the ground hundreds of houses on the Egyptian side of the border. Cairo insists that the presidential guard of PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas assume control of the Gaza border crossings, including the Philadelphi corridor in Rafah, under which dozens of tunnels were dug. The Egyptian administration encourages the local media to attack Hamas leaders and to threaten the organization with more drastic action.