The ongoing protests against the election process (not to mention Ahmadinejad’s victory) are rather harrowing, given the past treatment of internal dissent by the militant forces of the Islamic Republic….

well, the treatment does continue to happen, but apparently there’s less tolerance in the opposition commons for that sort of thing:

(courtesy of Gary Sick)

Also, in relation to Netanyahu’s speech, I think its time that he whips out the long-neglected Lieberman Plan: "land for land, peace for peace". This would turn over Arab majority areas in the North District to Arab independent rule in return for gaining most of Jerusalem and Judea, thus recognizing a long-standing reality on the ground that

• the majority-Muslim Arabs of the North District have stayed in the majority in that district for the longest and are unable to be unseated from that position anytime soon, hence making them a liability for a majority-Jewish state
• The best that the Israelis can accomplish with its own population and growth rate is to win the key religio-demographic battle over Jerusalem and Judea (the southern, smaller lobe of the West Bank); the other possibility being something like giving the Arabs Judea, Jerusalem and most of the Negev so as to unify Gaza with the rest of the Arab population in a majority-Arab state while getting Samaria and the north in return (since the Tel Aviv metro area directly borders Samaria), but resulting in far more of an impetus of driving out the Arab towns in the North District.
• If the Arab state is to get the North District, then the new Arab state would have to deal with Lebanon, Syria, and their own mutual border disputes, a situation that would be exacerbated extensively by the return and absorption of Palestinian refugees.