PREACHING TO HIS NEOCON BASE:

[M]ost of the vitriol leading up to Israel's March 17 elections has been about Netanyahu's handling (or mishandling) of the economy and the growing gap between the wealthy and the poor in Israel, and not on the congressional showdown.

Haaretz, Israel's left-leaning newspaper of record, gave the speech top billing Monday morning, but, in its Hebrew version, it peppered its website with many more stories about economics. The paper reported that at Sheba Medical Center, one of Israel's leading medical establishments, overcrowding is so great that the hospital has asked ambulances to bring no more patients. Haaretz attached a photograph of a patient being treated in the hallway. Haaretz also reported on a small revival of the tent city that had sprouted in Tel Aviv two summers ago to protest the high cost of housing. The paper covered a court ruling that said teachers cannot stage a semi-strike over changes in their working conditions, and discussed what has emerged as the top symbolic issue of rich versus poor in the Israeli press: the investigation of alleged financial mismanagement and excessive expenditures in the prime minister's residences.

On YNet, Israel's most-read Internet news site, the Sheba hospital story led the news; YNet included a photo of bedlam in the hospital and another of ambulances lined up, presumably with nowhere to drop off their patients. Interestingly, on YNet this morning, the only discussion of Netanyahu's imminent speech was a tiny entry at the bottom of the page.

Israel's first debate leading up the elections was held last week. Netanyahu and the joint candidates for the leading left-wing party, Isaac Herzog and Tzipi Livni, declined to participate, assuming that they only had something to lose. In the conversation between the numerous other candidates, the prime minister's speech to Congress was hardly mentioned. Most of the tumultuous evening ("debate" is a generous description of what actually unfolded) was devoted to the cost of housing, the high percentage of Israelis who are sinking further into debt and the burden that Israel's largely unemployed ultra-Orthodox population places on the rest of the population.

To the extent that foreign policy figured into the debate, the issue was whether the mere notion of a Palestinian state is now irrelevant. Naftali Bennett of the Jewish Home Party claimed that "two states for two peoples" is not an option, while others insisted that solution still makes sense, except there is no partner with whom to negotiate.

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