Netanyahu’s right-wing Israeli government is beyond extreme

Nationalist, exclusionist, and far, far-right: The most extreme Israeli government in the nation’s history has been formed.

The policies of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s newly sworn-in coalition government drew 80,000 protesters over the weekend in Tel Aviv. The protesters focused more on the government’s proposal to reform the judicial system, which could undermine democracy and the separation of powers. But the effect of the policy on the 1.6 million Palestinians in Israel and 5.2 million Palestinians who live in the occupied territories will be catastrophic, building on the policy year that Israeli human rights organizations say many crimes against humanity.

The human rights defenders and experts in Israeli politics I spoke to confirmed that this administration is no exception to the previous one – indeed, this is Netanyahu’s sixth time leading the country. However, it was the culmination of Israel’s long-running politics, and decades of policies that amounted to the de facto annexation of the occupied West Bank, and a policy of Jewish supremacy. But what is different now, is how these ideas are expressed in the guidelines of the new government coalition and important ministers on the basis of how the country works.

When the US national security adviser, Jake Sullivan met with Israeli and Palestinian leaders this week, there were serious questions about how the Biden administration will cooperate with the Israeli government that has cut the liberal veneer and thrown away any pretense of negotiations towards the Palestinian state. (Secretary of State Antony Blinken will also travel to the Middle East.)

The new Israeli government is a turn from last year’s brief centrist government, now seeking to implement policies that are anti-Palestinian and anti-liberal. But it is certainly not the first Israeli government to do so.

“The key is not to pretend, as many seem to have done, it will somehow be a sudden departure from Israel’s quote-unquote ‘democracy,'” said Hagai El-Ad, executive director of the Israeli watchdog B’Tselem. “What worries me is that even this level of clarity will not be enough to trigger an adequate international response.”

The new Israeli government has been as extreme as anticipated

Israel’s fragmented multi-party parliamentary system has led to collapsing governing coalitions and electoral turmoil, with five national elections since 2019. The “Change” government in 2021 brings together parties that opposed last year to oust Netanyahu. But the two collapsed last summer, and in the next election, Netanyahu built a coalition of ultra-Orthodox and religious Zionist parties that returned to power, leading an even more extreme government.

It is easy to foresee how the coalition will act: Ministers of the new government have made a longstanding attack on the LGBTQ community, religious freedom, Israeli and Palestinian civil society, and those who can even be called Jews. Above all, there will be drastic implications for Palestinians living in the occupied West Bank and for civil liberties for Israeli citizens, largely because Netanyahu’s internal coalition negotiations have brought settlers to key ministerial positions.

“They don’t have a lot of cracks in the coalition that can lead to some of the things they want to do, and they have Netanyahu in the barrel,” said Jeremy Ben Ami, a pro-Israeli president and pro. -peace advocacy group J Street. “He passed a lot of laws before he was sworn in as a government. He reorganized the way occupation was done.

The days of the sworn government, there are already signs of how these individuals will rule.

Justice Minister Yariv Levin has introduced legislation that would undermine judicial review and Israel’s Supreme Court’s power to strike down laws. Another proposal would reform and politicize the state’s long-standing process for selecting judges.

Amir Cohen/AFP via Getty Images

Gil Cohen-Magen/AFP via Getty Images

Or look at the first move by national security minister Itamar Ben Gvir, of the Jewish Power Party. A provocateur whose political ideas were inspired by the late radical iconoclast Rabbi Meir Kahane, Ben Gvir has played a special role in overseeing the police in Israel and the occupied West Bank. He has, in a dangerous escalatory movement, opened the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. And in early January he, on legal grounds, directed the police to destroy the Palestinian flag in public places.

There is also Minister of Finance Bezalel Smotrich. Head of the Religious Zionist party, he is a settler whose anti-gay rhetoric is legion. They have seized customs revenues belonging to the Palestinian Authority, an entity they call a “terror-abetting body” they think should fall. He also holds a newly created authority that provides oversight of the occupation of the West Bank through a role created for him in the Ministry of Defense.

These swift moves, especially Levin’s judicial reform proposal, speak volumes for the political infrastructure on the right that has been built over the last decade, largely funded by Republicans in the US. The Kohelet Policy Forum, a nationalist, libertarian Israeli think tank backed by right-wing American billionaires, reportedly drafted the legislation. As Ben Ami told me, “It is not understood that this is driven ideologically and professionally by a machine that has its roots in the United States.”

Another clue to how Netanyahu and his partners will govern appears in the coalition agreement that defines the guidelines of the new government. Although it is illegal, it clearly expresses its ideology: “Jews have exclusive and inalienable rights in all areas of the Land of Israel. The government will promote and develop settlements in all areas of the Land of Israel – in the Galilee, Negev, Golan and Judea and Samaria,” said the latter in the occupied West Bank.

This is more than the previous agreement. The government has made “the long-term intention of the coalition parties to strengthen Jewish supremacy and the oppression of Palestinians throughout the State of Israel and the occupied West Bank through a two-tier government system at all levels,” the Israeli human rights organization. It is written in the report.

The government’s new approach to the occupied West Bank is an illegal annexation of Palestinian land, according to a coalition of Israel’s leading human rights groups. The government plans to legalize illegal outposts built on private Palestinian land. The result, writes the coalition: “Palestinians are deprived of their rights and protection” and “are more vulnerable to violence and increase the suffering they have already suffered.”

“These changes” – to the judicial system, and giving ministers like Smotrich new powers over the occupation – “threaten civil rights and individual rights in Israel, but especially they will be a big and big problem to the national minority, the Palestinians in Israel” which make up about 20 percent of the country, said Aida Touma-Suleiman, a Knesset member from the Hadash party. “We will be the first and the most damaged by these changes.”

“This government has all the components of a fascist group,” added Touma-Suleiman.

The Biden administration has so far been cautious. “We will measure government by the policies it implements rather than the personalities of individuals,” Secretary of State Blinken said last month at the annual conference of the advocacy group J Street.

But so does the US appears to be hopeful of working with Netanyahu and his ministers. “The prime minister, as he told us all, has his hands very firmly on the wheel,” US Ambassador to Israel Tom Nides toward Israeli TV recently. “He assured us that we will work with the US government. Obviously, we have the same values. He understands the position of the United States, which is: we want to maintain the vision of a two-state solution.

But the idea of ​​shared values ​​and a two-state solution is not really working with this new government. No negotiations have taken place between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization, and the prospect of a sovereign and viable Palestinian state is more remote than ever. Not only because of this new Israeli government, but a lot because of many of the previous ones.

How the new government is building on the old — and what, if anything, the U.S. can do about it

It must be emphasized that Israel has been violating Palestinian human rights with impunity for decades, and this new government only illustrates its most brutal intentions more clearly.

“The hypocrisy of denying that Palestinians have lived for many years in an extreme, organized, criminal Israeli state of violence, underwritten by the US,” El-Ad of the human rights group B’Tselem told me. “And the lack of responsibility and agreement of the international community is largely responsible for driving this.”

Last year was the deadliest year for Palestinians living in the occupied West Bank since the UN began recording deaths in 2005, and it was also the year with the highest number of Palestinians held in administrative detention. The attacks on Palestinians throughout the center-right government of Yair Lapid and Naftali Bennett cannot be understated. Beloved Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, a US citizen, was reportedly shot by Israeli authorities while reporting in the West Bank. Israeli authorities raided the offices of six Palestinian NGOs, demonstrating the restrictions on freedom of expression in the country.

The US also has a role to play here, as it continues to provide billions of dollars in military aid to Israel – and fails to criticize Netanyahu’s new political ally.

Israel Government Press Office handout / Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

“There’s no way Netanyahu, as desperate as he is, would have built a coalition like this if the US had not for years and years shied away from responsibility for what happened here,” said Mairav ​​Zonszein, an analyst who covers Israel. and Palestine for the International Crisis Group. “He wouldn’t feel like he could do it. It would be very strange.

Meanwhile, the US government is carrying out some of the Middle East policies of former President Donald Trump, such as building a new embassy in Jerusalem on land owned by the Palestinians and working to re-establish normalization deals with Arab countries like Saudi Arabia.

The Biden administration will only be able to continue its wait-and-see approach for so long. When military materiel or US dollars are used to advance policies so far only explained by Israel’s new minister, what will the State Department do?

In a recent commentary, Carnegie Endowment researchers Matthew Duss and Zaha Hassan suggest consequences for the Israeli government’s choices. This may include withholding US aid to Israel and refraining from acting on Israel’s behalf in international forums like the UN and the International Criminal Court.

The Biden administration is “obviously aware of the problem,” said J Street’s Ben Ami. “But will they back it up in any way?”

Touma-Suleiman, a Palestinian member of the Knesset, is not optimistic. “I have to tell the truth. I don’t have a lot of hope,” he told me. The Biden administration “might be criticizing, it might be sending a message, but I don’t see them doing more than that.”