The last three articles that I have written have been about Israeli elections, and I have grown weary of that topic. Fortunately, living in Israel, there are always positive things to write about, and I am going to write about one of them now. We just enjoyed a very successful Shabbat Chayei Sara here in Kiryat Arba/Chevron, with almost 30,000 guests celebrating Abraham’s purchase of Me’arat HaMachpela, and there is no better time for this article than now. (Last year, the whole celebration was cancelled due to Covid-19.)

One final comment: The first 1,100 words of this 1,800-word article are really just a preface to the last 700.

As I write these words, Naftali Bennett is sitting with Yair Lapid and closing all the details to create a government consisting of all the left-wing parties in Israel, plus Bennett’s Yemina, plus Gideon Saar’s New Hope, plus the Arab Ra’am party of Mansour Abbas. And they’re all in a giddy mood. They’re “bringing new hope to the nation.” They’re “creating unity and ridding the nation of hatred.” They’re “restoring mature, statesmanlike leadership.” They’re “saving the nation from the calamitous specter of fifth elections.” Orwell would be thrilled.

The last 13 months, encompassing Corona and a third and fourth Israeli election, have been just plain creepy. Even the weather has been weird, with the coldest post-Pesach week I can remember in 35 years.

Well, thanks to the efforts of our excellent prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, we seem to have tackled Corona. Through his efforts at badgering the CEO of Pfizer, who received phone calls from Netanyahu 30 times, most Israelis have been vaccinated already, and our numbers have fallen from 70,000 actively sick Corona patients on February 10, to 3,300 as of yesterday (April 12). Most of the actively ill are people who refused the vaccination.

Israelis will go to the polls again on March 23. This is the fourth election in about two years, and we are getting really tired of this.

As in every election since 1967, the main issue people are voting on is “What should Israel do with Judea and Samaria (the West Bank)? The politicians don’t like to admit that. They don’t want to push themselves into a corner. They prefer to leave themselves open to receiving as many votes from as many constituencies as possible. But it’s a fact. All the elections are about that.

In the little time that has passed since the announcement of a peace accord between Israel and the United Arab Emirates (and Bahrain), we have been hearing a lot of similar stories. The predominantly Moslem European country of Kosova is going to establish relations with Israel and put its Israeli embassy in Jerusalem. Serbia, which already had relations with Israel, will likely be moving its embassy to Jerusalem, and there is a chance that the Czech Republic and perhaps even Austria will be moving their embassies to Jerusalem as well.

I hope this finds you all well in these uncertain times. Someone from Baltimore asked me, about five weeks ago, to explain about President Trump’s “Deal of the Century.” Below is what I knew then, with a few words at the end about what we know now. I tried to provide my answer without badmouthing anybody. The truth is that Trump and Kushner and Friedman and Netanyahu all seem like fine people, although I’ve never had a Shabbos meal with any of them, that being my main way of meeting new people. They’re all welcome to join us for Shabbos and receive my Chevron tour (after Corona is over).

In the meantime, the Deal seems to have fallen out of the news in Israel, replaced almost entirely by a preoccupation with Israel’s returning Corona virus. Still, it could come back at any time, in the format I describe below, for better or worse, with Trump or with another president. After you read what I wrote, perhaps you will be able to formulate an opinion about whether or not you want it to return.