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And there is more: the love-in with India; senior Chinese officials flying in; not-so-secret talks, and even coordination, with Saudi Arabia; photo ops with the sultan of Oman; regular audiences with Vladimir Putin. And all with not even a hint of the peace process or pressure over settlements. Israel, it seems, is paying no price for its treatment of the Palestinians.

In Ramallah, too, pessimism is the order of the day. There is a deep sense of abandonment. Nasser al-Qudwa, a senior Fatah official and a nephew of Yasser Arafat, dejectedly told me he feared that the populist, anti-Arab “transformation” of the West had only just begun. “There has been an unexpected rise of Christian Zionism in countries like Brazil,” he lamented. “America succeeded in persuading Saudi Arabia,” he added, “that Israel and the United States can protect them from Iran.”

Salvini met with nobody from the Palestinian Authority.

Watching Salvini’s press conference, I felt forced to admit that Bibi was right and I was wrong about the shape of the 2010s. My theory of history had failed me. Back when Bibi was elected in 2009, I believed fervently that Obama was on the right side of history—and that Netanyahu, and Israel, were destined to suffer for their failure to reach a just settlement with the Palestinians.

I was convinced that Obama and yet more Obama was the future of Western politics; that demographic and generational change would lead, inevitably, to a more liberal, less Israel-friendly approach. Bibi, it was clear to me, was endangering the future of his country by resisting.

Read: Benjamin Netanyahu’s me-or-the-abyss allure

I was frightened. Taking my lead from the late David Landau, the former editor in chief of the newspaper Haaretz, I believed that unless Israel made painful, unilateral sacrifices, all would be lost. I even felt that it was the duty of the Jewish diaspora to wake Israel up to this inevitable tomorrow. Like Peter Beinart, I advocated boycotts of settler leaders and their produce.

But Bibi took the opposite bet: that ethnic and cultural change would lead to an anti-liberal backlash making Orbán, not Obama, the model for European leaders. Rather than populism being a hiccup on the road to a grander, woke tomorrow, Bibi bet that it was the tomorrow. Deep, fierce attachment to nation and state was not going to fade away. It was going to fight back and win. And systematically, Bibi began courting the illiberals, authoritarians, and strongmen who, instead of fading, just kept on multiplying.

As Salvini sat watching a soccer game, beer in hand, perfectly at home in the Israel that the Likud Party has built, I watched from the corner of the bar, trying to work out where I’d gone wrong. It was my optimism. It had led me to imagine my desired politics as the future of actual geopolitics. What I saw was what I wanted: a growing, unbeatable Obama coalition in the U.S., producing progressive majorities that would win every election, while the European Union pursued a consolidating common foreign policy, with Human Rights Watch diplomacy and Merkelism for all.