On 13 June, Israel’s Prime Minister of the last 12 years, Benjamin Netanyahu, was ousted by a coalition of political parties, united by their determination to see him go. He was Israel’s longest running leader and it was his second term in office, leading Israel’s most popular right-wing party, the secular, Revisionist Zionist, Likud party, a dominant force in Israeli politics since first attaining power in 1977. Fiona MacLean reports.
Israeli politics is made up of a plethora of right and far right religious and secular parties and changing alliances, who support Eretz Yisrael, the Land of Israel, encompassing the West Bank, the east bank of the river Jordan, parts of south Lebanon and south Syria, including the occupied Golan Heights, and the Gaza Strip. That is, an area much larger than the current state of Israel and the post-1967 Occupied Territories (OT) combined. Many of the parties’ leaders live in or have grown up in illegal Israeli settlements in the OT and maintain a colonial-settler mentality.
Netanyahu’s administration oversaw a vast expansion of settlements in the West Bank, including, in the last decade, 40 new herding outposts, where settlers take over land, guarding it against Palestinians, backed by Israeli soldiers. This, combined with huge and expensive infrastructure construction in the West Bank, leads Dror Etkes, founder of Kerem Navot,* to assert that during Trump’s US presidency there was the biggest boom in geographical expansion since the Oslo Accords: ‘The land is gone. Israel made sure that there is no Palestinian state in the West Bank.’ Peace Now estimates that a quarter of the West Bank is designated as Israeli state land and over a third of Palestinian land has been confiscated.
Netanyahu lost power following four elections over the last two years. The party with the second highest number of votes in the March 2021 election was the ‘centrist’ party, Yesh Atid, led by Yair Lapid, who made a deal with Netanyahu’s former ally Naftali Bennett, leader of right-wing Yamina. They were joined by six other parties, including two ‘left’ Zionist parties, Labour and Meretz, and, for the first time, an Islamic political party, United Arab List (also known as Ra’am).
The new government lost no time in proving itself to be as aggressive as the last when, on 15 June, it broke the 21 May ceasefire and bombed Gaza, in response to incendiary balloons which had been let off from Gaza, creating fires in fields inside Israel. The balloons were Hamas’s retaliation after it had warned it would act if the Dance of Flags March went ahead. The march marks ‘Jerusalem Day’, an Israeli national holiday celebrating the ‘reunification’ of Jerusalem achieved after the Six-Day War of 1967. Chants of ‘Death to Arabs’ and ‘This is our home. Jerusalem is ours’ were reported. 33 Palestinian protesters were injured, including by stun grenades, rubber bullets and live fire, following clashes with Israeli security forces.
So, who are the new leaders of Israel? Naftali Bennett, the new Prime Minister, is a millionaire, a former settler-leader who served as Netanyahu’s Chief-of-Staff, led the conservative religious Zionist Jewish Home and in 2020 became leader of Yamina, an alliance of secular and religious parties. He opposes a Palestinian state. Yair Lapid is a former Israeli journalist and television figure, describing himself as a ‘security hawk’. His party represents the secular middle class and wants to end military draft exemptions for the ultra-orthodox. The coalition deal is for Lapid to serve as Foreign Minister until 2023, when he will take over as Prime Minister.
The struggle over Jerusalem united the Palestinians and ignited the resistance in May. The four Palestinian families of Sheikh Jarrah, a predominantly Palestinian neighbourhood in East Jerusalem, facing eviction after Israeli courts ruled in favour of Israeli settlers, had to wait until June for the result of their appeal to the Supreme Court, postponed due to the conflict. On 8 June, the Israeli Attorney General informed the Supreme Court that he ‘would not intervene in the legal proceedings’, which Israeli human rights groups denounced as ‘a cynical attempt to evade responsibility’ and attempt to portray expulsions as a property dispute. One of the families’ defence lawyers stated, ‘we will not back down from arguing the case from the international law aspect’.
The Attorney General’s decision could affect another 28 families of Sheikh Jarrah and at least 218 households in East Jerusalem who have cases against them, putting 970 people at risk of expulsion. Emboldened by the 2018 Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People, settler organisations drove their claim that Sheikh Jarrah belongs to them. The law states, ‘Jerusalem, complete and united, is the capital of Israel’, and ‘The state views the development of Jewish settlement as a national value and will act to encourage and promote its establishment and consolidation.’
Palestinians won a victory on 6 July when the Citizenship and Entry Law into Israel, passed in 2003 and re-enacted each year since, lapsed and failed to gain enough votes to be extended. The Law prevents Palestinian spouses of Israeli citizens from moving into Israel from the West Bank or Gaza and from countries considered ‘enemy territories’. The Law, justified by Israel on security grounds, demonstrates the racist character of the Israeli state, which requires a Jewish majority to maintain itself as Jewish and necessitates ethnic cleansing to do so. Lapid supported extending the Law: ‘[There’s] no need to hide from the purpose of the [Citizenship] Law, it’s one of the tools meant to secure a Jewish majority in Israel. Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish people, and our goal is that it will have a Jewish majority.’ Under Israel’s 1951 Law of Return, Jews everywhere are eligible for Israeli citizenship, yet with Palestinians constituting 20% of Israel’s population, Zionists fear being forced to surrender their privilege and expansionist endeavour.
Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! No 283, August/September 2021
*Kerem Navot is an Israeli organisation that monitors and researches Israeli land policy in the West Bank.
