Netanyahu’s Likud party improved from its 2013 seats of 18 to 30 in the just concluded elections. [The opposition center-left Zionist Union – previously Labor and Kadima – increased its combined 17 in 2013 to 24 in 2015; while the Arab’s Joint List increased from 11 to 13. The Orthodox and Centrist parties lost seats]. In 2013 Netanyahu’s coalition had 68 seats and now his coalition looks like it will total 67 seats. That is why the headlines say decisive victory by Netanyahu. He was losing his coalition partners from 2013 and that’s why his coalition shortened his current term by 3 years and called early elections.

Netanyahu was losing in the polls, not because of foreign policy (Iran) or the Palestinian issue, but because of growing inequality and economic mismanagement. What did do – in the last minute he mentioned that Arabs were heading to the polls in large numbers (a racist clarion call) and that there will be no Palestinian state under his watch. In other words scare mongering to get right wing voters disillusioned with his domestic policies. He caused a raucous in Israel too by colluding with Republicans in the US Congress with the active role of the Israeli Ambassador Ron Dormer, US-born and educated and a previous Republican campaigner to address the Congress without the proper protocol of being invited by the US President, and worse attack a sitting US President’s foreign policy – the treaty proposals for keeping Iran non-nuclear.

But then Obama restated US policy on the Israel-Palestinian issue – two States with 1967 borders as the base and land swaps. While this is US policy it voted against this in the UN all these years in favor of a negotiated settlement.

The White House put out the statement that Netanyahu is “no longer committed to a two-state solution,” which “means that the United States is in a position to re-evaluate our thinking.” Josh Earnest, the White House Spokesman, continued  that Mr. Netanyahu’s statements “do have consequences for actions that we take at the United Nations and other places.”

Netanyahu then reversed course in interviews with American TV stations, including MSNBC. The New York Time is reporting this – “I haven’t changed my policy,” Mr. Netanyahu said in an interview with MSNBC, his first since his resounding victory on Tuesday, which handed him a fourth term. “What has changed is the reality.” “I want a sustainable, peaceful two-state solution, but for that, circumstances have to change,” he said. “I was talking about what is achievable and what is not achievable. To make it achievable, then you have to have real negotiations with people who are committed to peace.”

But Mr. Netanyahu did not say he was ready to return to negotiations or to present any new ideas for achieving peace, and the White House all but ignored his latest comments.

The New York Times continued with this from the Palestinians - Earlier on Thursday, President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority seized on Mr. Netanyahu’s original repudiation of a two-state solution to say he would continue his unilateral strategy of seeking full United Nations recognition and using the International Criminal Court to press war-crimes charges against Israelis. “If these things are true, it means that the Israeli government has no serious intentions to reach a peace agreement that will create two states based on the 1967 borders,” Mr. Abbas said at a meeting of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s executive committee in the West Bank city of Ramallah. “We therefore will not retreat from our position to apply international law, and so it is our right to go anywhere in the world to realize our rights according to international law.”