An AP story by Daniel Estrin appeared in the Sunday Boston Globe, recounting the “despair” and “rage” on the Israeli left after Netanyahu’s election victory:

TEL AVIV — Israeli liberals woke up after last week’s national elections with a demoralizing feeling: Most of the country, in a deep and possibly irreversible way, does not think like they do.

There had been a sense of urgency among moderate Israelis, and even an ounce of hope, that widespread frustration with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s six straight years in office would lead voters to pull Israel away from what they perceive as its rightward march toward international isolation, economic inequality, and a dead end for peace with the Palestinians.

But as the results trickled in Wednesday, they showed Likud with a shocking lead […]

Estrin is an American journalist who contributes to NPR and the BBC, and his description of “moderate Israelis” sounds like a replay of the American left’s wailing and gnashing of teeth after Bush’s re-election in 2004.  Remember how leftists were so disgusted that American voters did not “think like they do” that they threatened to leave the ignoramuses behind and move to Canada?

Estrin rivals Michael Moore and Sean Penn in his hatred of democratic elections: “Optimism among liberals has been replaced with despair – and an infuriating belief that the masses may never understand that logic shows the current path is suicidal.”

The condescension is breathtaking: “The masses may never understand” the “logic” of their superiors.

Note to Estrin: it might not be wise to bring up the topic of suicide when Palestinian “mothers of martyrs” celebrate their children’s deaths as suicide bombers and are honored by the Palestinian “government.”  Especially when the following vile statement is reported in the story:

“Drink cyanide, bloody Neanderthals. You won,” award-winning Israeli author and actress Alona Kimhi wrote on her Facebook page, before erasing it as her comments became the talk of the town. ‘‘Only death will save you from yourselves.”

So people who want to protect themselves from suicide bombers are “suicidal.”  And should commit suicide.  Is this the “logic” of the “moderates” Estrin was referring to?

And what normal person would describe this hate speech as “the talk of the town”?

Like all leftists, Estrin sees history in terms of class divisions:

Israel’s founding fathers were Jews of Eastern European descent and the ideological predecessors of the Labor party, the main faction in the rebranded Zionist Union. The left led the country for its first three decades until Likud -- heavily backed by working-class Jews of Middle Eastern descent -- gained power in 1977.

The intelligentsia – those capable of understanding things like an ideology – is pitted against the “working class.”  (Think blue-state liberals vs. those cretins in flyover country.)  And Estrin even throws in the race card by distinguishing white “Eastern Europeans” from the dark-skinned untermenschen of “Middle Eastern descent.”

Estrin’s solution to the “dead end for peace with the Palestinians”: “Parties on the left would allow the creation of a Palestinian state, seeking to trade land for peace.”  Of course, because that worked so well when Israel disengaged from the Gaza Strip in 2005.