The Israeli election: an own goal?
By Brian Durrans
Israeli elections are usually a distraction from Palestinian self-determination. However, to the alarm of Israel’s mainstream and liberal apologists, the hard-right government emerging from the November 2022 election puts Palestine centre-stage. One veteran critic predicts that by their own bigotry the openly racist, Jewish-supremacist minority parties, which for the moment can make or break the government, will “usher in the end of Israeli apartheid.” (1) This may be over-optimistic, but there is certainly a new opportunity for building solidarity with Palestine. A summary of the Palestinian strategy for self-determination might therefore be helpful before looking more closely at the evolving situation and prospects for a political breakthrough.
BDS AND SELF-DETERMINATION
The clearest expression of this strategy is set out in the 2005 “Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) Call” for global support for Freedom from occupation, Equality for Palestinian citizens of Israel, and Justice for Palestinian refugees by honouring their Right of Return. These demands unify Palestinians wherever located: in Israel proper, the occupied territories (West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem) and the refugee camps and wider diaspora. They are also open to support by anyone anywhere and by any means necessary. Since Israel’s settler-colonial apartheid system exists to deny the demands of the BDS Call, achieving them means dismantling the system itself. Only then will Palestinians be free to exercise political self-determination. (2)
Until then, argument is likely to continue on whether Palestinians should eventually exercise that right in a separate state, or accommodate it to the equivalent right to self-determination of the beneficiaries of their former oppression in a shared state. That, however, is for Palestinians themselves to decide, and their decision will probably be shaped by their experience of how, and with whose help, the system was opposed in the meantime. Uniting on what needs doing now – and here the Palestinian-led BDS movement is the essential guide – is therefore the most effective way for advocates of one state or two (or any or none) to press their case.
FAR RIGHT IN POWER
Let me return to the November election which put former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu back in power. Out of 120 seats in the Knesset (parliament), his Likud party has 32 seats and the pre-election PM Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid party 24. This leaves the two biggest parties seven seats short of an absolute majority and therefore dependent on at least half of the 14 seats now held by three smaller far-right parties that contested the election under the label of one of them, the Religious Zionism (RZ) party, whose leaders include openly racist supporters of anti-Palestinian terrorism. The other two parties in that electoral pact are Otzma Yehudit and Noam. Pushed out to the margins are parties appealing mainly to Israel’s Palestinian minority (20% of the population) with 10 seats between them. Israel’s once ruling Labor party, which in its day built illegal settlements on occupied Palestinian land faster than any other government, is now reduced to a mere 4 seats. But what does all this mean for Palestinians?
The Jewish-supremacist parties and their support base do double service for Israeli apartheid - while also putting it at risk.
RESISTANCE
First, outside the government and the Knesset, the three RZ parties are active among settlers and zealots who terrorise Palestinians. They do this with scant (if any) restraint by the police or military, or with their covert encouragement. This provokes resistance which the settlers assist the police and army in suppressing. Such attacks have increased since the election but were also underway for months before in several parts of the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
Resistance to these provocations has been especially strong in places directly affected, such as Hebron and Nablus in the occupied West Bank but also in the Sheikh Jarrah community of occupied East Jerusalem where Palestinians are campaigning against evictions which are illegal under international law. All these responses build on the unprecedented non- or cross-factional militancy of May 2021, when widespread strikes, demonstrations and armed clashes across the Occupied Territories were taken up within the 1948-borders of Israel itself. Another sign that the lessons of May 2021 are being learned is the recent emergence of the well-disciplined, unified (non- or cross-factional) armed Palestinian militia, “The Lion’s Den”. The Palestinian BDS leadership recognise that although armed resistance alone cannot match the military capacity of the Israeli state, attacking armed occupiers is not only legitimate under international law but can also be effective in particular situations and empower other forms of struggle.
MAKING THE BAD LOOK LESS BAD
The second, and equally important, service of the outlier Jewish supremacists to the apartheid system is to make those running it and especially their liberal apologists look better than they deserve. Leading figures from the RZ electoral pact parties were swiftly installed in important ministries. The Otzma Yehudit leader, Itamer Ben-Gvir, for example, has expanded his role as National Security Minister by adding powers over the police; while the new Finance Minister, RZ leader Bezalel Smotrich, looks likely to take over civil administration of the Occupied West Bank from the Defence Ministry, a development some describe as de facto annexation. (3)
In a recent interview with a reporter from UK TV Channel 4, Zvika Fogel, former head of the Southern Command of the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) and recently-elected Otzma Yehudit MK, “expressed his desire to scrap the concept of proportionality […], saying that ‘if it is one Israeli mother crying, or a thousand Palestinian mothers crying, then a thousand Palestinian mothers will cry.’” (4) What, then, is Israel’s “concept of proportionality” that scrapping it is so controversial? To judge from the last 14 years of conflict-related deaths in Israel and the Occupied Territories, including Gaza, East Jerusalem and the Golan, it can only be that the death of one Israeli is “proportional” to the deaths of at least twenty Palestinians. (5) Figures for 2022 were incomplete at the time of writing, but the “proportionality” figure may need upward amendment given the predicted record death toll for West Bank Palestinians in 2022. (6)
THINGS OF CONCERN
An article in Ha’aretz reported the reaction of some pro-Israeli US Jews to news following the Israeli election. There were three main concerns. Top of the list was that was that Israel’s so-called Law of Return, which since 1950 has given Jews - defined as having at least one Jewish grandparent, and their spouses, wherever they are living - the right to relocate to Israel and acquire Israeli citizenship, may be amended “so that the grandchildren of Jews would no longer qualify”. And that converts (and the descendants of converts) to denominations of Judaism disapproved of by Israel’s new zealots (but popular in the US) might be denied these same entitlements they have previously enjoyed. Of some, but little less, concern to those interviewed were moves to erode the rights of Palestinian citizens of Israel, of LGBTQ people and of women. And finally, plans to annexe the West Bank that would negate the “two-state solution”. (7)
In the Ha’aretz piece registering the alarm of some pro-Israeli U.S. Jews towards the rightward shift in Israeli politics there is not a single word about the 74-year-old denial of the right of return for Palestinian refugees or their descendants; nor the current second-class status of Palestinian citizens of Israel. The revelation by whistleblowers in 2014 (published in the Guardian) that Israeli military intelligence division’s Unit 8200 blackmailed LGBTQ Palestinian civilians in the Occupied West Bank, or the well-documented systematic discrimination against Palestinian women citizens of Israel. (8) The article was also silent on how illegal Jewish-only settlements and roads, and restrictions on, and fragmentation of, Palestinian homelands so that they resemble an island archipelago, make a “two-state solution” hard if not yet completely impossible to imagine. If those interviewed really thought formal annexation of the West Bank was likely - and, if it was, how the great accumulation of evidence for apartheid across the whole of Israel/Palestine (“From the River to the Sea”) could then no longer be denied - they might have put it at the top of their list instead of at the bottom. If the new Israeli government keeps on track, it seems that Israel’s fan-club, especially in the US, may be in for a rude awakening.
THE ROAD IS CLEAR
Leveraging its balance of parliamentary seats in the ruling bloc, RZ may help make the existing apartheid system even more oppressive to Palestinians yet even harder to justify to world opinion. All this leaves Israeli apartheid vulnerable as an obstacle to ruling the country by “normal” means, albeit normal for an abnormal system.
A government of this character can offer Palestinians everywhere little more than further repression and intransigence. There is no second Oslo, no repeat illusion, on the horizon. Nor can Israel offer its supporters or its critics across the world anything more than distraction from the simple and increasingly acknowledged reality that it operates a system of apartheid. The repression and the distraction will probably be ferocious. But for Palestinians and the solidarity movement – including sympathetic nation-states, governments and at least parts of international institutions - the November election has helped clarify the road ahead.
THE INTERNATIONAL DIMENSION
Just as the wider problems of the Middle East, including those of Israel/Palestine, originate in past imperial manoeuvres, so imperialism and geopolitics still impinge on how Israeli apartheid can be overthrown, how quickly, and to whose benefit. Reckless adventurism in foreign relations is sometimes an option for Israel but doesn’t always turn out well (e.g. Suez in 1956, Lebanon in 2006). Whoever is in the Israeli government, the US is never far away, so foreign policy is likely to be driven by shared objectives. If the crime of apartheid can be considered an “internal” policy, when it runs into trouble, it can quickly impact foreign policy as well. Suppose the pro-Israel lobby in the US loses the sympathy of younger and middle-aged voters likely to be disillusioned by a right-wing Israeli government scoring low against their own progressive social and cultural values. In those circumstances, current lies about BDS being the tool of jihadists or anti-semites may no longer work.
For the time being, “normalisation” of Israel’s relations with some neighbouring states – and limited attacks on its enemies, above all, Iran and Syria – are likely to continue under its new government. This is a complex and fluid situation but if Israel talks, as it always does, of facing “existential threats”, most of the world takes the view that this can’t protect its system of apartheid which, under international law, counts as a crime against humanity. Israel is the only middle eastern state with nuclear weapons but refuses to negotiate for regional disarmament, and on 28th October 2022, the United Nations General Assembly voted 152/5 that Israel should give them up. (9)
Israel and the US view Iran and Syria as targets for political, economic and strategic reasons, but as both “targets” are aligning more closely with Russia and China, the US, despite its often bellicose comments, may yet restrain Israel from the folly of a full-scale attack, unless (since grave misjudgements are also possible in the current political climate) it regards such an attack to be in its best interests. Lebanon, in the meantime, has agreed a mutually beneficial maritime demarcation with Israel to facilitate an illegal Israeli-controlled submarine natural gas pipeline originating in Palestinian occupied territory at the expense of future Palestinian options.
SOLIDARITY
There is little the solidarity movement can do about such aspects of Israel’s foreign policy beyond campaigning against UK-based Israeli arms manufacturers and dealers, those complicit with them, and the UK-Israel two-way arms trade. At home and abroad Israeli apartheid – and the Palestinian people – face uncertain times, though there is also room for hope, perhaps more so than for decades, because of the outcome of the November election. BDS, however, provides the tools necessary to help bury Israeli apartheid as was successfully done with its South African version in the early 1990s.
In that struggle, the United Nations played an important role, and it remains an important factor in monitoring and condemning Israel’s many breaches of international humanitarian and human rights laws. But it was then, and is even more so now, both a battleground for influence as well as an instrument for making the changes most of its members ask of it.
(2) Omar Barghouti, BDS: Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions – The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights (2011). BDS stands for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions, the main tools for states, organisations and citizens anywhere to pressure Israel to comply with international law.
(5) https://www.ochaopt.org/data/casualties
(6) https://www.voanews.com/a/un-2022-likely-deadliest-for-palestinians-in-west-bank-/6811454.html
(7) https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/2022-11-30/ty-article/.premium/israels-far-right-coalition-presents-unprecedented-challenge-to-u-s-jews/00000184-c7e1-d823-a9f4-d7e1c7e50000
(9) https://multipolarista.com/2022/10/31/un-vote-israel-nuclear-weapons/. The five voting against: Israel, USA, Canada, Micronesia and Palau.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Photo by Jack Sanders
A government of this character can offer Palestinians everywhere little more than further repression and intransigence.
Umm Kamel al-Kurd who was evicted from her home in the solidarity tent in Sheikh Jarrah. Photo by Bekmaw
