23 March 2021 saw Israel’s unprecedented fourth election in two years. The previous three elections resulted in stalemates as political divisions within the Zionist state prevented the formation of a lasting coalition with enough seats to form a government. It appears that this election too will fail to produce an effective government.
Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving Prime Minister who has headed the leading Likud Party through each of these elections, is embroiled in a five-year long corruption scandal and is due to face trial for charges of fraud, breach of trust, and accepting bribes. Netanyahu has struggled repeatedly to form a coalition government, which he needs in order to pass a law granting him immunity from prosecution. In his efforts to do so, he has been forced to seek out unusual allies; these new alliances reveal the true nature of the Israeli system and what is at stake for the Palestinians living under Israeli racism and occupation.
The ‘Israeli KKK’ invited to the table
In his efforts to cobble together a governing coalition, Netanyahu campaigned in the recent election alongside the notoriously far-right extremist Jewish Power party. Referred to by journalist Jonathan Cook as ‘Israel’s version of the Ku Klux Klan’, Jewish Power is the spiritual successor of Kach, – an extremist far-right party designated as a terrorist organisation by most western countries and which was banned from Israeli elections in 1988 due to its virulent racism. Most of Jewish Power’s leadership are former Kach supporters, including its leader Itamar Ben-Gvir, who has called for all Palestinian candidates to be barred from Israeli elections, claiming they are all ‘terrorist supporters’, and who venerates Baruch Goldstein, the Israeli settler who murdered 29 Palestinians in a shooting at the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron in 1994.
Netanyahu embraced Jewish Power during this election campaign, promising the new Religious Zionism coalition, of which Jewish Power is a member, an important seat on Israel’s Judicial Appointments Committee. Election posters featured Netanyahu and Ben-Gvir side-by-side, and this alliance yielded great dividends for the latter. While Jewish Power had never before managed to pass the vote threshold to hold a seat in parliament, Religious Zionism is forecast to win seven seats, a significant proportion in Israel’s fractious political system.
However, just as the KKK was only the most explicit expression of the structural racism inherent in the US’s political system, so too is Jewish Power only a by-product of the intrinsic racism of the Israeli state. Many of its most racist positions are also held by Likud, including rejection of Palestinian statehood, support for the annexation of the West Bank, and opposition to relationships between Jews and Palestinians. As Cook points out, Jewish Power’s past electoral struggles are due in part to its difficulty in distinguishing itself from other mainstream parties that share its racist views.
Netanyahu courts Palestinian voters
At the same time as courting the racist right, Netanyahu has made unprecedented overtures towards Palestinian citizens of Israel during the election campaign. He rebranded himself ‘Abu Yair’ for Israel’s Palestinian minority, mimicking the Arab custom of nicknaming parents after their eldest son. Netanyahu made more visits to Israel’s Palestinian community during the last three months than during the rest of his political career, and released videos on social media showing him visiting Bedouin villages. The most important result of these efforts has been Netanyahu’s success in splitting the Joint List, a coalition of Palestinian parties formed in 2015 which has consistently been a thorn in the side of the Israeli government as it had formed one of the largest blocs in the Parliament. The United Arab List (UAL), a conservative Islamist faction of the Joint List, split from the coalition after being enticed by the possibility of joining a Netanyahu government. UAL’s leader Mansour Abbas argued during the campaign that by doing so he could extract concessions from Netanyahu for Palestinians in Israel, signalling that in return he may support Netanyahu’s efforts to shield himself from prosecution. This is the argument of a collaborator.
But Religious Zionism has ruled out the possibility of joining a coalition with the UAL, and in any case the election results appear to have denied Netanyahu the chance to form a government even if UAL were involved. But as a result of this fracture between the Palestinian parties, the 15 seats won by the Joint List in the previous election dropped to seven, while UAL is expected to squeak over the threshold with four seats. By weakening the Joint List, Netanyahu has undermined its usefulness to a coalition of his political opponents. More importantly, this divide-and-rule approach has pushed the rights of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza further out of the Israeli political picture. Unlike their counterparts in the Israeli state or their Jewish neighbours in illegal settlements, they are not allowed to vote in Israeli elections, despite the fact that the Israeli government effectively governs all aspects of their lives. The Joint List is the only voice that has spoken out for those excluded Palestinians in the Israeli parliament; by splitting from the Joint List and signalling its willingness to ally with a Netanyahu government, the UAL has abandoned Palestinians under occupation in exchange for false promises of greater rights for Palestinians living in the Israeli state.
This is betrayal; anti-Palestinian racism is inherent to the Israeli state and will not be overturned by such an opportunistic gambit by the UAL. The UAL knows that Netanyahu’s gestures towards Palestinians in Israel are far from genuine; he built his career on the iron fist with which he has crushed any and all Palestinian resistance to Israeli oppression. This is the same Netanyahu who oversaw the massacre of over 2,000 Palestinians in Gaza during Operation Protective Edge in 2014, who has openly plotted to annex the occupied West Bank and whose government brought in the Nation State Law which effectively codified the second-class citizenship status of Palestinians living in Israel. From his warning in 2015 that ‘the Arabs are coming out to vote in droves’ to his attempts to intimidate Palestinian voters by sending armed Likud election ‘monitors’ into Palestinian communities during the 2019 election, Netanyahu’s crimes against Palestinians, both within and outside the Israel state, are too numerous to count.
The results so far indicate that, barring an unlikely coalition of Netanyahu’s opponents, the Israeli state is heading for a fifth election very soon, until which Netanyahu will remain in office. Whatever the outcome, however, the answer to Israel’s anti-Palestinian consensus will not come through electoral haggling, but through Palestinian resistance beyond the ballot box.
Wesam Cooley
