As Israel’s economy stalled and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu became convinced of the need to temporarily suspend his judicial reform bill, a last chord it was necessary to keep his governing coalition together.
Itamar Ben Gvira serial racist who heads the Jewish Power party and holds the post of Minister of Homeland Security, received a promise from Netanyahu that the state would proceed with the creation of a national guard under the authority of Ben Gvir – dubbed by some commentators the his “private militia”.
Israel’s two crises
This agreement demonstrates the intimate connection between the two crises which grip at the same time Israel: Domestic polarization over judicial reforms and government-fueled escalation of extremism against Palestinians.
This connection is evident, but rarely acknowledged in Israeli political circles. US President Joe Biden has scathingly commented on the justice system overhaul, but has maintained his studied silence on Israel’s criminal violations of Palestinian rights – indicating that even Washington is failing to connect the dots.
The US administration’s summoning of Israeli and Palestinian officials, along with their Jordanian and Egyptian counterparts, to Sharm El Sheikh in March and Aqaba in February shows that Washington is intent on continuing its woefully inadequate relationship management model with Israel and its consequences for the Palestinians.
While it is not every day that Western journalists use words like “pogroms” to describe attacks against Palestinians, as we have seen after the recent events in Huwwarait happens every day that Palestinians are subjected to violence and have their basic human rights trampled upon by Israeli soldiers, police, settler militias – or some combination thereof.
When Netanyahu compared the actions of settlers in Huwwara to those of pro-democracy protesters across the country, many were outraged. But the strong connection between Israeli policies and violence towards Palestinians and the contestation of Israeli democracy is incontrovertible, if uncomfortable.
Israeli society is experiencing what the Franco-Martinican anti-colonial writer and politician Aime Cesaire has called the “boomerang effect of colonization“. The work of Cesaire and others has examined how the policies used by colonial states on the colonized could then be brought back to the imperial metropolis and employed against citizens.
Protests and occupation
In the context of Israeli colonialism, the geographical distinction between colony and metropolis is very narrow – but now we are witnessing the phenomenon where some of the authoritative tools forged by the Israeli state to control the Palestinians are turned against elements of the Israeli Jewish population. Some sectors of this population fear the limitation of their freedoms.
The Israeli right’s push for judicial reforms has been strongly motivated by the goal of consolidate employment, permanently disenfranchise Palestinians and cement Jewish supremacy. While the courts have not prevented the gradual achievement of these goals – the massive array of settlements is an example of the colossal failure of the Israeli judicial system to uphold Palestinian rights – they have nevertheless served to hinder and delay, and probably will prevent, the realization of full annexation and mass expulsion.
This helps explain why the remaining opponents of Netanyahu’s temporary compromise, both in parliament and on the streets, belong to the far-right religious settler camp.
The greatest affront to democratic governance between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea is not the role of the Israeli parliament in selecting judges or overruling their decisions, but rather a permanent occupation that denies democratic rights to Palestinians beyond the 1967 linesalong with structural discrimination that gives second-class status to Palestinians within those same lines.
This persistent situation has led the main global human rights organizations, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, to rightly designate this reality as meeting the legal definition of apartheid. Similar conclusions have previously been drawn by Israeli human rights groups, Palestinian civil society activists, academics and politicians.
The Biden administration has expressed concern about both the escalation of violence in Israel/Palestine and proposed judicial reforms. The US recipe appears to be the same for tackling both problems: a return to the status quo ante. In other words, a return to security and democracy for Israeli Jews, while neither is accessible to Palestinians.
There is a well-tested Israeli phenomenon which isyell at “crisis” every time a US official disagrees with an Israeli policy. This phenomenon is now booming, including reactions from the Israeli leadership, after Biden said Netanyahu is not currently invited to the White House and that Israel cannot “continue on this path” with regards to judicial reforms (apparently , more than half a century of occupation can continue instead).
But words have not translated into actions; there is no crisis. Indeed, a more lucid analysis tells a different story: Washington’s enormous influence over Israel remains intact, and the balance still leans decidedly in favor of the carrot rather than the stick.
The silencing of Palestinian voices
As recently as February, the United States again guaranteed that it would veto a resolution Israel disliked at the United Nations Security Council. The Biden administration continues to push and persuade third countries to normalize and improve relations with Israel and is promoting Israel’s acceptance into the US Visa Waiver Program. From the podium of spokesmen, all sorts of linguistic acrobatics are used to avoid pronouncing or confirming the existence of an occupation.
To be clear, on the domestic front Netanyahu has – for now – backed down, not in response to US pressure, but rather in the face of unprecedented domestic opposition. This opposition is centered around the threat of economic losses e on conscientious objection to military service. Such instruments, long championed by the anti-occupation and anti-apartheid movement, have been attacked throughout Zionist politics as illegitimate or worse.
If negotiations on a compromise on judicial reform fail and Netanyahu revives the shelved legislation, the United States should not be expected to be the savior.
For a long time, Israel’s centrist and progressive political establishment has made great efforts to silence Palestinian voices, criminalizing the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement and making spurious accusations of anti-Semitism in response to legitimate criticism of Israel. That success is now part of their problem: the international impunity built up by Israel over decades of violating Palestinian rights now benefits the hardline architects of judicial review.
The latest illustration of the US approach on the Palestinian front is the joint communiqué of the March 19 meeting in Sharm El Sheikh, in Egypt. The release largely repeated the statement made in February after a similar meeting in Aqaba, Jordan, with the same group of participants – now ostensibly referred to as the Quintet.
Filled with high-sounding aspirations about confidence and peace-building, the Sharm El Sheikh communiqué is as stillborn as its Aqaba equivalent.
The most devastating inadequacy of this approach is that the US emphasis on de-escalation results in practice in the tranquility of only Israeli Jews, while for the Palestinians the occupation, insecurity and daily humiliation continue.
The US insistence that both sides avoid “unilateral measures” might seem reasonable, but this attitude ends up equating Israel’s violations of international law (settlement construction, home demolitions, confiscation of lands, disproportionate use of force and collective punishments for the civilian population in Gaza and elsewhere) and Palestinian efforts to enforce that same right in international fora such as the United Nations and the International Criminal Court.
The geopolitical stake
In pushing for enhanced military cooperation between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, ignoring the underlying injustice of the indefinite occupation, the United States takes the position that the occupier and the occupied should work together to stabilize the occupation. This helps explain why the ruling Palestinian party, Fatah loses popularity and legitimacy – and why the United States (and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas himself) refuse to support the Palestinian elections, which have not been held for 17 years.
In short, the persistent policy of the United States and the West of ensuring theIsraeli impunity – ensuring that Israel’s actions are without cost and consequence – serves as a crutch for Israel’s growing extremism. The Israeli public empowered politicians like Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, and Netanyahu included them in his governing coalition, knowing full well that no significant sanctions would follow for Israel.
Two years ago, we were two of the co-authors of a report entitled “Breaking the Israel-Palestine Status Quo: A Rights-Based Approach”, which sounded the alarm about the dangers of current developments and how US policy was exacerbating this situation.
But for the United States and the West as a whole, the geopolitical stakes are even higher today. The chasm between Western rhetoric about Ukraine and covering up Israel’s illegal actions carries real costs for the United States and Europe on the international scene. This fact is often cited by the countries of the global South as the most striking example in the reject moral claims about a Western-led “rules-based” order.
Huwwara is the present, but it also opens a window into the past and a glimpse into a potential future. A second Nakba it is something that right-wing Israeli politicians are openly threatening with increasing frequency, and for which settler militias are testing the waters under Israeli military cover.
The insipid politics of the Zionist center and centre-left cannot reverse these trends. For outside powers, the choice is between complicity in apartheid and holding Israel accountable. And while Palestinians have always paid the price for Israeli impunity, many Israelis are now finding that it comes at a cost to themselves as well.
Cover photo EPA/ALAA BADARNEH
This article was published in Middle East Eye on March 30, 2023