Will Culture Minister Miri Regev exploit for campaign propaganda purposes the photos of the house struck in Mishmeret on March 25 by a Hamas rocket from Gaza? Will she, as she did on March 17 after a gun and knife attack on the West Bank left two Israelis dead, warn that this is what awaits Israel if the “leftist-Arab bloc” defeats her right-wing bloc in the April 9 elections?

In these crazy days, surely someone will claim that Hamas launched a long-range projectile at the Israeli heartland to steal Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s thunder as he attended President Donald Trump’s signing of the declaration recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights. A festive White House event like that can certainly sideline what have become routine attacks from Gaza on Israeli border communities. Photos of the injured Israeli family against the backdrop of the live broadcast from the White House signing ceremony, however, illustrate the strategic price that Israel has paid and will continue to pay for the alliance between the Israeli and American right.

US intervention in Israeli elections is not unusual, but this is the first shift in US policy on the territories that Israel has occupied since the 1967 Arab-Israeli War and on the UN resolutions condemning the occupation. In a 2011 paper by the Institute for National Security Studies, David A. Weinberg, a former staff member of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, detailed instances of US presidential meddling in Israeli politics.

For example, a former senior National Security Council official recalled that President George H. W. Bush had wanted to get rid of Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir in the early 1990s. President Bill Clinton organized a summit in Sharm al-Sheikh in 1996 for a photo-op to boost the electoral prospects of Shimon Peres against Netanyahu. In a 2018 interview with the Israeli journalist Raviv Drucker on Israel’s Channel 10, Clinton admitted that he had tried to help Peres. “I did try to be helpful to him because I thought he was more supportive of the peace process,” Clinton said. “And I tried to do it in a way that was consistent with what I believed to be in Israel’s interest.”