Israeli President Shimon Peres invited Benjamin Netanyahu to form the next government.
After hearing from Peres Friday, Netanyahu, who leads the Likud Party, immediately invited Tzipi Livni, the leader of the Kadima Party, and Ehud Barak, the leader of the Labor Party, to form a national unity government.
Such a government would help Netanyahu hew to a centrist foreign policy and sustain peace negotiations with the Palestinians and the Syrians.
Barak and Livni have said they favor going into the opposition.
Look for lots of blogs at MSM and the usual suspect sites to offer opinion and conjecture about whether this is going to happen in the next six weeks and what, if it does happen, it means for the U.S. and, more anxiously, Iran, Gaza and the West Bank – the settlement movement in particular.
Don’t forget this U.N. report about Iran and uranium:
Iran has built up a stockpile of enough enriched uranium for one nuclear bomb, United Nations officials acknowledged on Thursday.
In a development that comes as the Obama administration is drawing up its policy on negotiations with Tehran over its nuclear programme, UN officials said Iran had produced more nuclear material than previously thought.
They said Iran had accumulated more than one tonne of low enriched uranium hexafluoride at a facility in Natanz.
If such a quantity were further enriched it could produce more than 20kg of fissile material – enough for a bomb.
We won’t get fooled again?
Cross-posted from Writes Like She Talks.