Abir Sultan, Pool via AP Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attends the weekly cabinet meeting at his office in Jerusalem, Sunday, December 11, 2016. Update: Late Wednesday night, the Amona settlers rejected the compromise offered by the Israeli government, and prepared to resist evacuation. The decision is likely to lead to a major confrontation between settlers and police at the mountaintop outpost and to a crisis in Israel's government coalition—or to a diplomatic crisis, depending on how Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu responds. D ecember 25 is usually an ordinary day in Israel. This year, though, it has been marked prominently on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's calendar. It signifies a deadline he has sought to delay and a reckoning on his West Bank policy that he wants to postpone—if possible, forever. Netanyahu's policy is to protect and expand settlements. He thereby shows that he regards Israeli rule as permanent. All the while, he aims to maintain the...

AP Photo/John Minchillo A line of early voters wait in queue at the Franklin County Board of Elections, Monday, November 7, 2016, in Columbus, Ohio. Heavy turnout has caused long lines as voters take advantage of their last opportunity to vote before election day. I n a sane year, the very definition of chutzpa would be for an Israeli to give Americans advice about how to create a better democracy. Israel rules over the West Bank, where Israeli settlers can vote and the Palestinian majority it can't. It still has Ottoman-era laws that put religious authorities in charge of marriage and divorce. I wouldn't normally dare to hold it up as a model to Americans. But this is 2016, the year of hallucinatory politics in America, when demons have risen from suppressed memory into conscious life, when picture ID requirements have been conjured up to replace literacy tests and polling places serving minorities evaporated in places with a history of voting suppression in the past. Reading reports...