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It's not technically culture war, but Hamas has just attacked Israel en-masse, overwhelming the Iron Dome with 5000 rockets and even sending raiding parties into Israel. It looks like Haman and/or Shabak haven't done their job at all, and Israel has been caught with its pants down.
For the culture war angle, I think the biggest question is of retribution. On one hand, Israeli public will now demand a reaction that makes the ongoing Hamas attack pale in comparison. On the other hand, what can Israel do to a very densely populated Gaza strip that won't be branded as a war crime or ethnic cleansing?
Ever since I started learning anything about the long-term relationship between Israel and Palestine, I've been unable to understand how there can be a stable equilibrium without something pretty close to ethnic cleansing. It seems to me that Bibi and others that are branded as "hard right" have come to a similar conclusion, even if they don't say as much out loud, and have pursued it by means of slow-moving settlements that inevitably provoke violence, allowing them to bolster security, pushing that cycle indefinitely to solidify Zionist state control of the region. While I won't go as far as saying that this morning's developments make Bibi happy, I think he will immediately see them as strategically useful and proceed accordingly.
I think this will be bad for Bibi. It's one thing to have occasional rockets slip through the Iron Dome and kill a civilian or two per year. It's another thing to have this happen on his watch. The legitimacy of Likud is that their hardline approach delivers results with respect to the security of Israel. When the dust settles opinion might turn on him; I think this might happen regardless of whether there will be a general political shift.
I think the decision to slowroll settler expansion in the West Bank in exchange for petty violence from Palestinians was a very deliberate one, but this level of violence will probably force some kind of shift in Israeli strategy, one way or the other.
Shouldn't this have been the case with Republicans circa 9/11? Instead, the guy that was in charge when 9/11 happened saw a massive increase in approval and the intelligence agencies got a massive increase in power.
I don't think the compact was the same. Psychologically-speaking, the United States had lived through decades of peace. An attack by an outside enemy on the homeland was practically unthinkable. It was not the covenant of the government of the day to prevent something that was unimagineable and unpredictable (at least to the average citizen). This was why in part the American bloodlust after 9/11 was so extreme.
By contrast Israel has been under a siege mentality their entire existence, and after 1973 the threat shifted from outside state actors and their conventional armies to terrorism. The threat of the Second Intifada in particular was that violent death could visit any Israeli at any time. The border wall, the Iron Dome, the hostage trades; the government of Israel (under various parties) has undertaken immense cost and effort to save the lives of handfuls of citizens. I'm not sure there's been another government so willing to spend money to save the life of the individual at the margin (at least at the hands of their enemies).
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Yeah, I think the response is going to determine how this works out for Bibi. If in short order is displaying the heads of Hamas on pikes outside the walls of Jerusalem (or whatever the modern equivalent is) this will help him.
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Bush had only been in power a bit over half an year, so Repscould plausibly (implicitly at first) claim that the fault was with Clinton admin.
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