Less than a month has passed since Israel’s “government of change” was sworn in, and to bridge the gaps in the country’s most heterogeneous coalition ever, it has declared itself “anti-ideological.” Controversial issues between Right and Left are off the table, such as West Bank settlements, religion and state, and the composition of the Supreme Court. However, ideology is the bread and butter of Israel, and ideological issues cannot be kept from the morning news. The first of these was the fate of Eviatar, an illegal settler outpost erected on the lands of the Palestinian village of Beita; initially, when the new government took over, Eviatar was slated for evacuation and demolition.

At the same time, the Citizenship and Entry Law came up for its annual approval. This is a temporary order from 2003, the height of the second intifada. Eviatar and the Citizenship Law are both purely “ideological” issues. A right-wing party led by Naftali Bennett supports the establishment of new settlements and does not call them “illegal” even if built without permits. On the left side of the same coalition, Meretz denounces settlements, and it has been petitioning the courts against the Citizenship Law since 2006.

The commitment not to engage in ideology for unity’s sake has brought the coalition’s left side, Meretz for instance, to rotten compromises, dictated by the right-wing composition of the government and the Knesset. Although in the new coalition there exists a kind of balance between Right, Center, Left and the Islamic movement, the weight of the Right is decisive. Labor, Meretz and the Islamic Movement must make allowances for their right-wing partners, who have the right-wing Knesset opposition, led by Netanyahu, breathing down their ideological necks. This—even though that opposition refuses to recognize the government’s legitimacy, calls Bennett a traitor, and describes the coalition as a danger to Israel’s security.

Meretz, Labor and the Islamic Movement were forced to swallow the compromise reached by Bennett with the settlers in Eviatar, according to which the settlers will be voluntarily and temporarily evacuated from the outpost, their houses left intact, and the army will occupy the place until the status of the lands is clarified. What began in Netanyahu’s time as a demolition by agreement, became under Interior Minister Ayelet Shaked a new “legal-to-be” settlement for the first time in 20 years. This is an impressive achievement for the settlers and a scorching loss for the Left.

We did not manage to recover from the blow of Eviatar before the Citizenship and Entry Law fell on us. Under pretext of security, this law keeps citizenship from West Bank or Gazan Palestinians who marry Palestinian citizens of Israel. It discriminates against (Arab) Israeli citizens on ethnic grounds, with the justification that spouses from the territories might be terrorists. As noted, the law originated during the second intifada, when there were 45 cases in which residents of the Occupied Territories holding Israeli identity cards took part in hostilities. For 17 years, this discriminatory law was renewed without debate, although in recent years violence by Palestinians holding Israeli IDs has dwindled to zero. The number of families whose lives are hamstrung by the Citizenship Law today stands at 13,000.

Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid has openly declared that the problem is not security but demography. Lapid, architect of the new government, has thus confirmed the claim of the law’s initiators, who declared that marriage serves the Palestinians as a means of “exercising the right of return.” Supreme Court Justice Mishael Cheshin, who wrote the majority opinion in the decision not to repeal the Citizenship Law, ruled that “Palestinian residents of the area are enemy nationals who constitute a risk group for the citizens of Israel, and therefore the state may enact a law prohibiting their entry into the country.” In so doing, Cheshin camouflaged this discriminatory law under the guise of a security need—instead of its real motive, demography.

Not only is Cheshin’s claim not backed by facts, but it doesn’t make sense. The Palestinian Authority (PA) maintains intimate relations with the State of Israel, primarily by the close security coordination between the parties, confounding the notion that it is an “enemy state.” Accordingly, its citizens cannot be considered enemy nationals. Moreover, the PA itself is an Israeli invention. Newborn Palestinians in PA territory are listed in the Israeli Population Registry and given an ID number, which appears in a green ID card issued by the PA. The card is identical to the blue Israeli identity card, but its color determines the civil status of those who carry it, or rather, their lack of status.

Furthermore, 150,000 “enemy nationals” enter Israel daily to work; the accepted currency in the PA is the Israeli shekel; Israel and the PA have a uniform customs arrangement; Israel controls all entries and exits into and out of the West Bank and Gaza; and Israel can shut off the electric power at will. In other words, Palestinian residents of the West Bank and Gaza are Israelis for all intents and purposes, except that they lack civil rights. In the West Bank, they are subject to the Israeli Civil Administration, subordinate to the military commander, the supreme sovereign who determines everything; the Palestinian depends completely on his will.

In fact, Palestinians have no need to exercise the right of return through the back door. Those who are enabling that back-door return are precisely the half million Israeli settlers. By preventing a Palestinian state, they have, in effect, transformed the entire territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean into a single political unit. The Citizenship Law was meant to reinforce the illusion of a Green Line separating the West Bank and Gaza from Israel. If this imaginary line ever existed, however, it has long been erased, despite the porous Separation Barrier.

While the Knesset clashes over the Citizenship and Entry Law, which affects 13,000 Palestinian families who pose no security or demographic threat, the “government of change” avoids discussing the fate of 5 million Palestinians of the territories whom it controls in all matters, from freedom of movement to family reunification. The use of legislation to keep Palestinian citizens of Israel from marrying and starting a family only reveals the contradiction in a state that defines itself as Jewish and democratic. The Citizenship and Entry Law violates the most basic human rights. It is no coincidence that it has not become a standing law, because it harms Israel’s image as a democracy. More importantly, this discriminatory legislation cannot stop the processes taking place before our eyes, which are creating a single political, economic, demographic and geographical reality between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River.

In recent weeks, Palestinians have been demonstrating against the PA for cancelling the parliamentary elections, and for the beating to death of social activist Nizar Banat by Palestinian security forces. These demonstrations should help the Israeli public, and the international public too, to understand the “enemy entity.” The PA is oppressing the people it is supposed to represent, a people that strives like all others for democracy, social justice and basic rights.

The participation of Meretz, the Labor Party and the Islamic Movement in the Bennett-Lapid government gives a boost to the Israeli Right, which is trying to halt political, demographic and geographical processes created by its own actions. The Right regards the Palestinian question as “shrapnel in Israel’s ass” (Bennett), a problem with no solution. It legislates racist laws to delay the end, while simultaneously settling on every hill and under every fig tree, abusing Palestinian farmers and shepherds, plundering their lands while the army stands idly by. As we get closer to the reality of one state, Israel will continue legislating racist laws, on the way to becoming a state that is indeed Jewish but certainly not democratic. This is now happening with the help of the Zionist Left, which by linking its fate to the right-wing parties is losing its right to exist.

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It seems every option has been tried and the results are still the same – Bibi, like Putin and Assad, is still here and we can’t get rid of him. We must qualify that comparison: Putin has absolute control of the media and liquidates the opposition, and Assad liquidates the Syrian people with bombs and starvation.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, on the other hand, has to contend with a hostile press, but he still succeeds in charming his voters. The forces needed to defeat him simply do not exist in Israeli society. He enjoys the loyalty of the repressed, true, but the reason for his success is mostly the lack of an alternative. Bibi versus “Boujie” (Isaac Herzog) is really not a fair fight – that was clear enough even before they stepped into the ring.

When Netanyahu dissolved the Knesset, he aimed to neutralize two competitors within his coalition: Naftali Bennett (leader of the right-wing “Jewish Home” party) and Yair Lapid (leader of the centrist party, “There is a Future”). The operation was successful beyond all expectations, but the patient is still in ER. From the start, Bibi wanted a government whose members would not challenge his leadership – a kind of return to the unity government of 2009, which ran its full term with the Labor Party in partnership. But when you call for elections, you know only how things will begin – not how they’ll end. What began as an attempt to put Bennett and Lapid in their place led to the election’s big surprise – the partnership between Tzipi Livni and Herzog, who created a serious contender for government with their joint list, the “Zionist Camp.”

Bibi and the Likud

Netanyahu discovered another little thing: the Likud party members, whom he loathes so much that he avoids appearing in the party committees so as not to have anything to do with them, loathe him just as much. This is a deep-rooted, mutual aversion. Netanyahu’s true friends are the tycoons, while the powerful workers’ committees and the party functionaries are his foes. It was not by chance that he “let slip” the comparison between them and Hamas terrorists.

For a moment it seemed that an opportunity for change had come: the prospect of increased voter turnout among the Arabs; the squabbles in the outgoing government coalition, from Lieberman to Lapid; some generous assistance from the anti-Netanyahu Hebrew daily Yediot Aharonot and the v15 movement, and – voila! – we can stop Bibi!

But when the threat became tangible and the opinion polls showed him sliding, Bibi called “Oy! Gewalt! The Leftists are coming!” to remind the Likud tribe of their traditional hatred for the Labor Party and their primordial fear of the Arabs. At the last moment he surged ahead. For the first time in his political career, Bibi finds himself in a position he has always tried to avoid like the plague: pure Right.

Political suicide

Events have their own dynamic. The more the Zionist Camp advanced in the polls, the more the polarization increased and the bigger the gamble. This time Netanyahu left no room for uncertainty. His declaration that there would never be a Palestinian state, and the call on Likud voters to rush to the ballot because the Arabs were “voting in droves,” were suicide from a policy point of view, but bought him political breathing space. As a result of Bibi’s left-bashing, his Likud base shouted against the idea of a unity government with the Zionist Camp, leaving him no choice but to go for a pure rightist government. Without a moderate partner, Bibi will have no fig leaf – and he is not used to this.

The White House is once more fuming and at a loss. Obama is supposed to support Israel while its government goes back on its commitment to a Palestinian state, and its prime minister relates to Israel’s Arab citizens as a fifth column whose participation in the elections is viewed as a threat. It reminds Obama of the dark days in the southern US when African Americans were unable to vote. In fact, the government has openly declared that it is leading the country into the unknown, and it is willing to run up against the entire world as it does so.

But these positions were not suddenly exposed in the last stages of the election race. They were not acts of despair from a man fearful of losing his seat. The “nation-state law” which blatantly discriminates against Arab citizens was the reason the government was dissolved, and the position of the prime minister – who denies the PA as a partner for peace – has long been known. It was Bibi who consistently told the public that if the occupied territories were to be “given” to the Palestinians, they would rapidly fall into the hands of Hamas and ISIS.

The feeble mumblings of the Zionist Camp on this issue demonstrated that there are no fundamental differences of opinion between the two sides. Herzog holds to the position of endless negotiation under US auspices without reaching an agreement, while Netanyahu views this as a dangerous tactic which leads to “creeping concessions”, as he called the Oslo Accords. In this sense the elections were like a referendum on the future of the territories. The people have spoken, and there’s no point going to Bibi to complain.

But we can and must complain to the Zionist Camp, Meretz, and the Joint (Arab) List, who did not address the fundamental issues and made do with the slogan “Anyone but Bibi” – which succeeded only in bringing Bibi back. If Herzog promises to solve the housing problem as his main objective, while ignoring the Occupation, why should we blame Netanyahu?

The ball’s in the Palestinian court

Israel has no alternative to the Right – so the ball is in the Palestinian’s court. If the Palestinians thought Herzog and the Zionist Left would save them from themselves and from the need to make decisions, the elections bring them up against tough choices.

It’s true that the PLO Central Committee (yes, the PLO is still alive, though not exactly kicking) has decided to suspend security cooperation with Israel, but the threat has already been proven ineffective, because this cooperation serves Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) and Fatah as a means of securing donor money and as protection against a Hamas takeover; everyone knows it will continue as long as the PA exists. The PA’s appeal to the International Court at The Hague may be a threat to Israel, but it does nothing to bring the Occupation to an end or dismantle the settlements.

The incoming government intends to step up construction in Area C and permit the Palestinians to manage their own affairs in the lands that remain in their hands. The PA lives off the funds from donor states and the taxes transferred by Israel, and it is clear to all that its leaders are not about to give up their privileges. Meanwhile, the Gaza Strip continues to bleed: some 100,000 new refugees passed a cold winter in the flattened neighborhoods, and there can be no doubt that the situation will soon explode once more. But the only thing the new government will be willing to do is to ease the siege a little.

In light of this, the PA can accuse Israel of being colonialist and racist, but this explanation for the election results is somewhat simplistic. It’s true that Israelis have learned to live with the Occupation as “shrapnel in the butt,” as Bennett put it two years ago – something that bothers us sometimes, but doesn’t prevent us leading a normal life. But the Palestinians must shoulder part of the blame for the election results, because they too have resigned themselves to their situation.

The more than twenty years in which funds have flowed to the PA and the NGOs close to it have bought Israel some quiet, while the extremism of Hamas has driven Israeli voters rightwards. Thus, between resigning themselves to the Occupation on the one hand and the empty threat of destroying Israel on the other, the Palestinians will allow Bibi to sail to victory in the future too.

Let there be no mistake: the International Court and Obama will not come to the Palestinians’ aid. Obama is willing to form an alliance with Iran at the expense of the Syrian people, who are undergoing terrors far greater than those of the Palestinians, so he will certainly resign himself to the occupation too. US-Israel relations are above any personal animosity between an Israeli prime minister and a US president. The Left in Israel has shown it is powerless, and the Israeli nation does not think of the future – it lives in the present.

Therefore a response to Bibi and the Israeli Right is up to the Palestinians. Now they must stop their de facto, tacit acceptance of the Occupation. If they manage to do this, they will force the Left and the Arab population of Israel to change their agenda and create a democratic, Jewish-Arab camp which prioritizes ending the Occupation and achieving peace. Only in this way will they succeed in challenging the Right, turning its current victory into a Pyrrhic one.

– Translated by Yonatan Preminger

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Herzog and Livni join forces

We’re headed for elections again. Less than two years have passed since the meteoric ascent of the “brothers” Yair Lapid and Naftali Bennett, who forced Binyamin Netanyahu into a coalition without the ultra-orthodox parties, and already Netanyahu is dismantling the government to seek a fourth term. His dream is to go back to the “ideal” composition of the previous government, which brought together the ultra-orthodox, Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu, and Ehud Barak’s Labor party. But it is not at all clear that Netanyahu will manage to make this dream come true. He now faces a broad alliance of his past victims, including the ultra-orthodox, Lieberman, Lapid, Tzipi Livni, Moshe Kahlon, and Labor head Isaac Herzog – all past ministers in his governments.

What brings Lieberman together with Herzog, or Kahlon together with Lapid? Only hostility for Netanyahu and the desire to bring him down. Other than that, they represent a mishmash of opinions, portending anything but a stable coalition. Therefore, these elections again herald a shaky coalition, with or without Netanyahu.

The Right has made up its Mind, while the Left Stutters

The impossibility of a stable coalition comes from current political forces’ inability to decide on two central questions: the fate of the occupied territories and the place of Arab citizens in this country. These two questions are inseparable, as the fate of the occupied Palestinians projects directly on the fate of the Palestinian citizens of Israel.

In these two questions, the Israeli Right under Netanyahu has made a clear decision: The Oslo Accords are dead, the idea of a Palestinian state is discarded, and the alternative is now Palestinian autonomy, entrenching the status quo. As for the Palestinian citizens of Israel,  the Nation-State Bill put forward by the Right asserts that Israel is first and foremost Jewish, its democracy subordinate to the state’s Jewishness. Therefore, the civil standing of the Arab citizens is subordinate to the state’s Jewish character.

These two questions are no doubt always at Israel’s doorstep. You cannot postpone them indefinitely in favor of a social agenda, or to combat socioeconomic gaps, or to protest the price of cheese and housing. The European parliaments are now reminding us that the world is sick of Occupation and war. The total destruction of the four towers in Gaza, decisive in ending the past summer’s war, have been termed a war crime by Amnesty International.

The recent events in Jerusalem mark the end of an era as well. The racism reflected in Amir Benayoun’s lyrics has spread everywhere. Ministers and MKs’ racist statements against Arabs also spur on the rise of extremist Islam, and mutual hatred makes life here intolerable for all those who wish to live in a normal country and to educate their children on the values of democracy and equality.

The Right, headed by Netanyahu and Bennett, has forced through a clear agenda, an agenda that challenges the Zionist Left. The Right says No to a Palestinian state, proposing that Israel be a racist state rather than a democratic one. And what does the “anything but Bibi” camp say? Nothing, essentially. In the face of the Nation-State Bill it proposes that we make do with Israel’s venerable Declaration of Independence. As to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Labor head Isaac Herzog proposes “getting Abbas into Gaza” for regional peace. These answers are not substantially different from what the Right has to offer.

The Left’s conciliatory and cowardly stance towards the Right has led to its diminishment and retreat. The Zionist Left is afraid to confront the Right, preferring to reach an understanding with the settlers at the expense of an understanding with the Arab citizens. The Zionist Left, including Meretz, is a Jewish separatist Left. Its isolationism bolsters the Right’s position that there is no partner for peace, and that the root of the conflict lies in the Arab refusal to recognize the Jewish state.

The Israeli Left, which aspires to a democratic, liberal, and egalitarian state, has no future if it does not join forces with those elements among Israel’s Palestinian citizens who also espouse values of democracy and tolerance, opposing isolation and religious extremism. The religious extremism is not Jewish-Israeli society’s problem alone. It has long been a boomerang, projecting into Arabic society and consuming all that is good in it. The Arab equivalent of the Jewish-Israeli Shas party is the Islamic party, and the Arabic twin of Zionist Messianism is the Islamic Massianism of ISIS and of the northern branch of the Islamic Movement. The extremists on both sides are thriving at the expense of the divided Jewish and Arab moderates.

Israel Has to Decide: Jewish or Democratic

The Zionist Left’s decision to unite in an anti-Netanyahu bloc runs parallel to the aspiration among the Arab parties to unite and run a joint Arab ticket. However, make no mistake, even if the Islamic Movement runs with Balad while Hadash runs alone, this does not make Hadash a joint Jewish-Arab ticket. Hadash relies on Arab votes to pass the electoral threshold. It practices a nationalistic rhetoric in order to compete with the other Arab parties: in fact it speaks with two tongues, two messages, one in Arabic and the other in Hebrew

The differences between Hadash and the Islamic Movement reflect ideological and political divisions within the Arab world, between political Islam and Communists, whereby the Communists do not hesitate to support dictatorial regimes so long as they are secular. So for instance, in Palestine the Communists support Abbas; in Egypt they support General Sisi; and in Syria they support Assad, while the forces of political Islam work to topple him.

Hadash’s electoral considerations in refusing to merge with Balad are not too different from those of Meretz in refusing to merge with Labor. The fact that Jews and Arabs run separately six decades after the foundation of the state is a badge of shame for both the Zionist parties and the Arab parties. Both prefer narrow electoral interests over addressing the crucial questions facing Jews and Arabs alike.

The coalition which Herzog proposes with Livni, Lapid, Lieberman, Kahlon, and the Haredi Orthodox, does not portend real change – not economically, and certainly not diplomatically. The failures of Barak, Sharon, Olmert, and Livni to reach a peace agreement only strengthened the Right, which claims they were “willing to make all the concessions and still the Palestinians rejected them.” The truth is, these leaders negotiated with the Palestinians for one purpose only: to avoid deciding the questions left open in the Oslo Accords, which were supposed to be discussed in the permanent agreements – the status of Jerusalem, the future of the settlements, and the problem of the Palestinian refugees. They all worked as one to postpone the inevitable, creating more mistrust, leading to wars, and strengthening the Right wing, which bases its popularity on hatred of Arabs.

Those who now rush to vote for the Jewish “anything but Bibi” bloc or the “Arab parties” bloc have some serious soul-searching to do. The real question is not what will happen if Netanyahu assumes the role of Prime Minister yet again. The urgent question is what disaster we will inherit from an alternative coalition devoid of any program, lacking the courage to tell Israeli society what needs to be said: if we want peace and democracy, we have to evacuate the settlements and recognize East Jerusalem as the capital of the Palestinian state. If we want to fight racism, we first have to recognize the fact that Israel’s governments so far have deepened the discrimination and alienation of the Palestinians living in Israel.

Israel has to decide whether it is Jewish or democratic. The Israeli Right has solved this deep-seated contradiction, by simply declaring that the State’s Jewish character wins out against its democratic character. Compared to the Right, the Left stutters and tries without avail to square the circle.

The political platform we need is based on two clear principles: the end of the Occupation and an egalitarian state. The only way to handle Netanyahu and the Right is to form a broad Jewish-Arab front, based on these two principles. Running separately just strengthens the Right and widens the gap between Jews and Arabs.

Against the backdrop of rising racism and the diplomatic dead end, it is becoming clearer that the inevitable can no longer be postponed. Voices in Israeli society are growing stronger in calling for the creation of a joint Jewish-Arab front, an alternative to the Zionist and Arab parties alike. This is the order of the day, and every democrat and peace-lover, Jewish or Arab, must work to create a joint political framework for the benefit of Jews and Arabs alike.

– Translated from the Hebrew by Michael Sappir

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