Igor Volsky sees Netanyahu’s rejection of a two-state solution as a problem for Republicans:

Now that the prime minister has turned his back on the compromise, Republicans who have championed Netanyahu’s policies may have to answer questions about the change-of-heart.

My guess is that most elected Republicans would be only too happy to answer those questions and to emphasize their agreement with Netanyahu’s current view. Volsky mentions that George W. Bush was the first president to affirm U.S. support for a Palestinian state. He doesn’t add that this was one of the things that many of the party’s ideologues and hard-liners considered to be one of his more important mistakes. This is one issue on which they feel no obligation to follow Bush’s lead, and they don’t. If there is any support for a two-state solution among leading Republicans today, it isn’t very strong. Most, if not all, Republican hawks would have no difficulty explicitly rejecting Palestinian statehood, since many of them insist that “there is no such thing as Palestinians.” Now that Netanyahu has openly repudiated the idea, it will probably make it that much easier for Republicans here to do the same. As with Netanyahu, it won’t represent that much of a change, since most of them have been paying mostly lip service to the goal of creating a Palestinian state and have been supportive of anything that prevents that goal from being achieved.

At the same time, a Netanyahu defeat won’t cause a change in the foreign policy views of Republican hawks. For one thing, they will insist that his hard-line foreign policy views weren’t what caused the defeat, and they will cite the general hawkishness of Netanyahu’s main opponents as proof. Like most electoral repudiations, this one is being driven by primarily domestic concerns, and Republican hawks will see no need to change much of anything. Republican hawks haven’t made any significant adjustments to their own party’s past electoral defeats, so why would Likud’s defeat have any effect on them? It is certainly easier for Republican hawks to argue for a “no daylight” standard in dealings with Israel when one of their political allies is in power there, but their reflexive, uncritical support for Israeli governments doesn’t depend on the party that happens to be in power at the time. And as long as Obama remains in office, they’ll continue to use him as the scapegoat for anything that they don’t like about Israeli policies.