By John Pickard
It now looks almost certain that the Israeli general election last Tuesday will produce a new right-wing coalition headed by Benjamin Netanyahu. He will become head a government which could be described as an alliance of the right, the far right and the extremely far right.
Netanyahu is already Israel’s longest-serving Prime Minister and he is also the one most deeply embroiled in corruption. His son and his wife have been implicated in corruption and Netanyahu himself is facing a trial, although it is also possible that he may move to change the law to get himself off the hook.
Netanyahu’s Likud Party is the largest in the Knesset, but the biggest winner in the election, and the likely second-biggest party in a new coalition, is Otzma Yehudit, the Religious Zionist party. Although not formally its leader, its most well-known politician is Itamar Ben Gvir (pictured above), who is an anti-Arab racist and someone who is likely to push for an even firmer anti-Arab agenda from the new government.
Ben Gvir is an admirer of Baruch Goldstein, the Israeli-American terrorist responsible for the 1994 massacre of 29 worshippers, several as young as 12 years old, at the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron. Until it became expedient to remove it, he had a picture of Goldstein in pride of place on his living room wall.
Gvir threatened Rabin, two weeks before his assassination
He is no stranger to inflammatory and inciteful language. In 1995, he threatened the then-Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin, boasting “we got to his car, and we’ll get to him too” – this after having broken into Rabin’s car and stolen an ornament. Rabin was actually assassinated two weeks later. Even in the recent past Gvir has been known to carry a handgun and threaten Arabs with it.
At the post-election celebrations at the headquarters of his Otzma Yehudit Party, there were chants from party supporters of “death to terrorists” – although the word “terrorist”, as the Times of Israel pointed out, is sometimes used “as a euphemism for Arabs”.
This lunatic now looks likely to become a minister in the coalition government, even though Netanyahu had previously said he was “unfit” for office. In spite of the fact that Gvir, again according the Times of Israel (Nov 3), was “dismissed from enlistment into the Israel Defence Forces for his ultranationalist views,” he is on record as demanding to be made minister for public security.
This would put him in charge of the police and internal security, from which position he will be able to pursue the agenda for which he has argued, including the expulsion of “disloyal” Israelis. Given the opportunity, Gvir’s “encouragement” for Palestinians to “emigrate”, could easily turn into an attempt at forcible mass expulsions.
Gvir has called for Jewish control of the area known to Jews as the Temple Mount, which is another potential source of conflict in Jerusalem. Currently, the site, known to Moslems as the Al-Aqsa Compound, has within it the Dome of the Rock, which is the oldest surviving Islamic building in the world and the second holiest shrine for Moslems. It is an important site of worship for Moslems in and around Jerusalem, but the heavy-handed intervention of Israeli soldiers there has frequently led to clashes with hundreds of worshippers.
Currently the Al-Aqsa compound is a place only of Islamic worship but having been built on the site of the ancient Jewish Herodian Temple, some Orthodox Jews have demanded the site be restored to them. Forced intrusions into the Al-Aqsa compound by militant Jewish activists have also led to clashes in the past. This is the powder-keg on which Ben Gvir now wants to throw a petrol bomb.
Jewish population gulled into voting for ‘security’
Not least, Gvir has also promised, if he is made police minister, to push for immunity from prosecution for security personnel, as well for easing of IDF live-fire directives. Although he was himself deemed unfit to serve in the IDF, he has created a name for himself as a ‘defender’ of military personnel charged with excessive violence towards Palestinians, on those rare occasions when such charges have been made. In other words, Gvir will make it open season for shooting and killing Arabs in the West Bank and in Israel.
If these right wing and ultra-right-wing parties have made some gains in the election, it has been down to the fears they have invoked in the Israeli Jewish population over so-called ‘security’. Ben Gvir played on ‘security’ concerns after the violence of last year, when there was rioting in mixed Arab-Jewish cities, as Arabs protested in solidarity with the population of Gaza. For the likes of Gvir, ‘security’ means incitement against Arabs and unfortunately, that is precisely what succeeded, at least to some extent, in the elections last week.
“It’s time” Gvir has said, “for us to go back to being the master of the house in our own state.” (Times of Israel) This is deeply ironic, given the monstrous oppression faced by millions of Palestinians on a daily basis, but it has been a policy that has unfortunately found an echo.
If there has been a delay in announcing the formation of a coalition – the third likely member being the anti-LGBT party Noam – it is due to the horse-trading that inevitably goes on. This involves lots of haggling over the ministries, which in Israel means a share-out of patronage, jobs and lots of money for cherished ‘causes.’ Netanyahu will be demanding that the government pass new laws to get him off the corruption charges he faces. His coalition parties would certainly oblige, but only at the price of getting key ministries.
Netanyahu is building a time-bomb
For Palestinians and Arabs living in Israel, the elections last week might seem like a political setback, but in reality, nothing has really changed for them. The Israeli state is rapidly going down the road of consolidating a new apartheid state, where a government ruling over 14 million people offers either limited political rights (in Israel) or no political rights at all (West Bank) to Arabs, although they make up around half of the overall population. This includes those in Gaza, forcibly shut into in the largest open prison in the world, under permanent siege, economically embargoed and bereft of any hope of anything different.
What the likes of Netanyahu are creating is not ‘security’ or a ‘safe homeland’ for Jewish people in Israel. They are creating a time-bomb, which at some point in the future will explode with great force. Seven million Arabs will not go on forever suffering economic disadvantage, brutal oppression from the IDF, physical assaults from Jewish settlers and an ongoing vacuum in their democratic and national rights.
At some point, there will be a new intifada, only one more extensive, violent and far-reaching than any of those in the past. In the absence of an intervention by the international labour movement, a spontaneous and chaotic uprising could bring in its wake great suffering and distress to the lives of all, Palestinians and Israelis alike.
It is important to add, for the benefit of members of the Labour Party in the UK, that some of the responsibility for this dire perspective lies with the right-wing leadership of the Party and their craven support for Israeli political leaders. Under Starmer and Evans, criticism of the policies of the Israeli state has been more or less outlawed, under the pretext of such criticism being deemed ‘antisemitic’. The Israeli government has been allowed far-reaching political influence in the Labour Party.
The right-wing of the Labour party has therefore facilitated the slide to apartheid. They have enabled it, by failing to offer any public criticism or even acknowledging how disastrous Israeli government policy has been, not only for the long-suffering Palestinians, but even, in the long run, for Jewish Israelis.
As long as Netanyahu has been Prime Minister, the ‘Labour Friends of Israel’ have for all intents and purposes been the ‘Labour Friends of Netanyahu’. The Labour leadership cannot complain, when the explosion does happen – as it will – that they were not ‘aware’ and that they had not seen it coming.
[Top picture from The Times of Israel]
