I realize that about five people in the world will care about this, but what the hell.

The Jerusalem Post has an odd "exclusive" today claiming that, in exchange for an Israeli pledge to release hundreds of millions of dollars in frozen tax revenue, the Palestinian Authority agreed not to take action against Israel at the International Criminal Court when they become members next month. I say odd because the story doesn't appear to cite a single source.

It reads like spin from the prime minister's office. Benjamin Netanyahu has been mocked for his post-election about-faces—releasing the tax revenue, rejecting his previous rejection of the two-state solution. He wants to look like he's extracted concessions from the PA, when the reality is that Israel unfroze the funds because it's worried about destabilizing the West Bank.

The Palestinians, indeed, deny that there was a deal cooked up. Come April 1, they will become ICC members, and the court will start investigating two issues: last year's Gaza war, and Israeli settlement construction in the West Bank. But the PA itself won't have to ask the court to do so, which has been the plan all along. Saeb Erekat gave a briefing earlier this month on the PA's plans, and his comments on the ICC are worth quoting in full:

It's a lot of legalese, and it is slightly confused, because after all this is Saeb. (Article 44.2 deals with the ethical standards for ICC staff.) But he's referring to a provision in the Rome Statute that allows the ICC's chief prosecutor to launch her own investigations, without referral by a state party: "The Prosecutor may initiate investigations proprio motu on the basis of information on crimes within the jurisdiction of the Court."

What the PA is saying, in other words, is that they don't have to formally submit a complaint to the ICC. They've given the court jurisdiction, and there are enough human rights groups and activists submitting evidence that Fatou Bensouda, the prosecutor, will probably launch her own investigation. That's why the Palestinian response to the Jerusalem Post story, reported in Ha'aretz, was worded as such: "we expect the ICC to open an investigation into Israeli settlements, as well as the recent war in Gaza."

The aftermath of every Israeli election brings a flood of commentary about whether the country "moved right" or "moved left." Tuesday's vote was no exception. The strangest of these is a Ha'aretz column by Noah Efron which argues that, despite the re-election of a race-baiting Revisionist prime minister, Israel is actually moving to the left.

A word of advice: don't read any of them.

The problem with discussing "left" and "right" in Israel in 2015 is that these words no longer have a coherent definition. They used to refer to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: is a party pro-Oslo or anti-Oslo? For the two-state solution, or against? That distinction is increasingly meaningless. A slim majority of Israelis support the two-state solution, and a much larger majority doesn't think it is achievable.

Increasingly, then, parties are choosing not to engage with the Palestinian conflict, or foreign affairs more generally. Where would you put Moshe Kahlon's Kulanu party on this left-right spectrum? It's impossible to say, because they don't really have a foreign policy platform. The same goes for Yair Lapid (who doesn't really have a concrete position on anything). The ultra-Orthodox parties are traditionally lumped in with the "right" in these analyses, but nobody votes for Shas or UTJ because of their position on the Oslo Accords.

Avigdor Lieberman's Yisrael Beiteinu party is a telling example here. They are, unsurprisingly, lumped in with the right. But Lieberman has actually been a strong critic of Netanyahu's diplomatic inaction, and his party has a "peace plan"—albeit one that calls for ethnically cleansing Israel's Palestinian minority. They do not belong in the same category as Jewish Home, which opposes the two-state solution altogether.

Nor is there a clear split on economics. The Zionist Camp was divided within itself—the party has a genuinely liberal wing, but its candidate for finance minister, Manuel Trajtenberg, is a neoliberal. They're at least better than Likud, which doesn't even have an economic platform. The closest one comes to a left-right divide is on "identity" issues—the role of religion in state, for example—but even this is imperfect.

There is a second problem, which is the fact that many of these analyses use the tally of Knesset seats to determine the electorate's preferences. 3 percent of Israelis voted for Yachad, an extremist party that counts a Kahanist among its members. The party won zero seats, because it fell under the threshold, but you cannot simply discount the fact that 125,000 Israelis voted for it.

With each election, Israel's political system becomes increasingly personalized: voters don't choose parties so much as they choose party leaders. If you stand outside a polling station and ask people who they voted for, they rarely say Likud, or Yesh Atid, or Jewish Home; they'll say Netanyahu, or Lapid, or Bennett. Many vote on the basis of identity ("Bibi is strong"; "Kahlon will fix the economy"; "Bennett is a real Jew") rather than the party's position on any particular issue.

If there is one clear trend, it is this: In the 2009 election, 16 percent of the Jewish electorate voted for parties with an ambivalent position on the Palestinians and the peace process. Tuesday's election, with the rise of parties like Kulanu and Yesh Atid, increased that figure to 32 percent. Forget "moving left" or "moving right"—the one thing we can definitively say, looking at the polls, is that Israelis are moving toward apathy on the Palestinian issue.

Coincidental or not, it was striking to read these comments from Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, on the same day Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivered his speech to Congress. He's talking about Iran's role in fighting the Islamic State in Tikrit:

Let us put aside the surrealism of Dempsey's final sentence—his concern that, after a decade of sectarian bloodshed in Iraq, the use of Iranian-backed Shia militias to topple Sunni jihadists in a Sunni city might "result in sectarianism." An unlikely outcome, that.

The bigger point is that America's top military officer is talking positively, and openly, about Iran's role in the Middle East, something that would have been unthinkable a few years ago. David Petraeus once described Qassem Suleimani, the head of the Quds Force, as "truly evil." Today that evil general is in Tikrit, overseeing the campaign, and Dempsey is publicly endorsing his efforts.

Much of Netanyahu's speech was boilerplate: after two decades of talking about Iran's nuclear program, his views on the subject are well understood. We know that he fears an agreement will leave Tehran years or months away from developing a nuclear weapon, should the leadership decide to do so.

But a few lines jumped out at me:

Exaggeration, yes. But the point is this: Netanyahu often presents himself as the champion of Israel and the Jewish people; it is somewhat less common to hear him advocate on behalf of Yemen's Sunni tribesmen.

For decades, Israel situated itself comfortably in the so-called "axis of moderation." It signed peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan—cold peaces, to be sure, but they led to close security and intelligence cooperation. It maintained quiet (but hardly secret) ties with the Gulf countries, bonding over their mutual fear of political Islam and the "axis of resistance" anchored in Tehran. These relationships put Israel firmly on the right side of Washington's Middle East policy.

Today, of course, that axis is crumbling, and Iran has emerged to fill the vacuum. Critics often blame Obama for "pivoting" to Iran, thereby empowering them. (Many of these same critics supported the Iraq war, which created the vacuum in the first place, and should not be taken too seriously.)

The axis of moderation increasingly looks like an axis of incompetence. The GCC's efforts to impose a "political solution" in Yemen have gone up in smoke. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates have poured tens of billions of dollars into propping up a new military dictator in Egypt. Qatar is funding an Islamist militia in Libya, while its neighbors prop up a nationalist rival. Their Syria policy has been an unqualified disaster.

Iran is also a malign actor, backing a murderous dictator in Syria and death squads in Iraq. You can draw a straight line from Iran's support for Bashar al-Assad to the rise of the jihadists that Iran is now fighting.

Crucially, though, it is an effective actor. For all their wealth, the Gulf states are not; it is hard to imagine Prince Bandar on the front lines like Suleimani. Egypt is largely irrelevant on the world stage, preoccupied as it is with internal struggles. (Jordan barely merits mention.)

Obama clearly has little interest in major military engagement with the Middle East. Even if he did, there's little reason to believe it would result in real stability: the US occupied Iraq for eight years, and left behind an Iranian satellite riven by sectarian infighting. With no clear way to halt Iran's growing regional influence, he is stepping back from the region.

This is Israel's real fear, beyond the possibility that Iran will use its nuclear program to shift the balance of military power. The security establishment sees any agreement as the world's first step toward normalizing relations with Iran, to the lasting detriment of the "axis of moderation." The center of gravity will shift even further away from Riyadh and Cairo—and, by extension, from Jerusalem.

Rapprochement with Iran will be a lengthy process. The United States will not simply drop its longstanding complaints, like Tehran's support for Hezbollah. A nuclear agreement would be a signal, however, that the US is willing to deal with Iran despite its aggressively anti-Israel policy and its regional ambitions. Seen from Jerusalem, perhaps that seems a first step toward a Middle East in which Israeli security is no longer the paramount issue.

Netanyahu prays at the Western Wall on Saturday, one day before his departure for Washington.

So, this is the week. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will arrive in DC this afternoon, assuming the White House doesn't scramble F-22s to intercept his plane. He'll address the annual AIPAC conference on Monday morning, and of course The Speech is on Tuesday, at 11am EST.

The political firestorm surrounding his trip has obviously received the lion's share of media attention. As he gets ready to leave, though, three substantive points, all rooted in one observation: this is not solely a personal dispute between Netanyahu and Obama; it is a fundamental policy difference between the United States and Israel.

After sunset

Last month Intelligence Minister Yuval Steinitz, a Netanyahu confidante, briefed reporters on Israel's eight main objections to the emerging deal. Seven of them were technical questions: the number of centrifuges Iran is allowed to keep, the status of sites like the Arak heavy water reactor and the fortified enrichment plant at Fordow. Iran has only made "significant progress" on one of them, agreeing to ship its raw uranium feedstock outside the country, Stenitz said.

But he also presented an eighth item—the duration of the agreement. Steinitz alluded to recent reports that a deal could "sunset" after ten or 15 years, and said Israel would not accept that condition.

This is a new objection. It's also an odd one, for several reasons. Israeli officials have said for years that they don't trust Iran to abide by the terms of any agreement, regardless of its duration. The government in Tehran could change by 2025 or 2030: If it moderates, great; if it changes in a bad way, empowering the hardliners, then a nuclear deal signed by Rouhani isn't likely to matter much anyway.

An agreement that keeps Iran away from the nuclear threshold for 10 or 15 years seems like an unalloyed good. And Israeli policymakers are happy to make absurdly short-term policy on other fronts—see the situation in Gaza, or the recent understandings with Al-Qaeda on the Syrian border. Not long ago, Netanyahu was threatening to bomb Iran's nuclear facilities, a strike that would only set back the nuclear program by a matter of months or years.

This objection seems like a desperate attempt to draw another line in the sand—an acknowledgement that a deal is possible, even imminent.

The opposition

The diplomatic crisis between Jerusalem and Washington is no doubt driven by Netanyahu and his aides. But what would be the situation with a different prime minister—say, opposition leader Isaac Herzog?Herzog's weekend op-ed in the New York Times is instructive:

"No daylight." You hear the same thing from other politicians: Dov Lipman, an American-born Knesset member from the centrist Yesh Atid party, said last week that there was "wall-to-wall agreement" on Iran, that he and other lawmakers "were involved in an effort to get two-thirds of Congress to overturn the president’s veto."

The opposition is largely getting a free pass on this issue. A Prime Minister Herzog or Livni or Lapid wouldn't be jetting to DC to make this speech. The optics would be different. But few Israeli politicians have articulated any policy differences with Netanyahu; the substance would probably be the same. Again, there is a fundamental difference of opinion with the US.

No alternative

Finally, the one item Netanyahu probably won't address in his speech: what's the alternative to this deal?

The aggressive sanctions painstakingly cobbled together by the Obama administration will not last forever. Iran is a large market and a valuable trading partner to emerging economies like China, Turkey, Brazil; even the European Union is waiting anxiously to get back into business with Tehran. If the negotiations collapse, the sanctions regime will likely follow suit—especially if these countries believe a good deal was rejected solely because of US and Israeli intransigence.

Failure would probably also prompt Iran to resume enrichment, advanced research and development, and other activities that it suspended as a confidence-building measure over the last 18 months. It could also reduce the IAEA's access to its nuclear facilities.

Iran would get economic benefits, renewed enrichment, looser oversight—and the US and Israel would be left with few options, apart from the military one.

Israel has long staked out a maximalist position on Iran, demanding that any agreement leave it with essentially zero enrichment capacity. (The "sunset" objection is in the same vein.)

A nuclear deal is the first step toward the US and other countries normalizing their relations with a country that maintains the world's most aggressively anti-Israel policy. The terms of the agreement are almost a secondary issue, and attitudes won't change much if a new prime minister moves into the official residence on Balfour Street.