Diligently, always managing to take advantage of the tendency towards extreme fragmentation of the Israeli political landscape, Benjamin Netanyahu has applied, since 1996, a security policy that denies the rights of the Palestinians, which has made him prime minister six times. The illiberal distortion of Israeli democracy that we are witnessing in real time, with the disastrous justice reform that the new far-right coalition gathered around the Prime Minister wants to adopt, is the logical outcome of this policy. With the coming to power of a government that has never been so right-wing, it is objectively found that the methodical denial of their democratic rights suffered by the Palestinians ended up inducing, for the Jewish majority, the decay of theirs . A context in which political violence and intolerance are reaching a new threshold in Israel.
Its founding fathers defined Israel as Jewish and democratic. Wars, hatreds, internal conflicts, political manipulations have never ceased to test this definition. It was explicitly broken with the law passed in 2018, proclaiming Israel as “the national home of the Jewish people” to the detriment of its democratic pretensions and the Israeli-Arab minority (20% of the population). A new step is being taken in the enterprise of deconstructing the rule of law with this project by which the Knesset, among other attacks on the fundamental principle of the independence of justice, will be able to invalidate by a simple majority of votes any decision of the Supreme Court (and allowing, as if by chance, Netanyahu to escape the prosecution for corruption of which he is the object)… We are here in the midst of Trumpist delirium, according to which the influence of the courts , nests of leftists, must be fought.
Also, the intentions of the new Netanyahu government bear comparison with the Iranian theocracy that he abhors so much. The tens of thousands of demonstrators who have taken to the streets of Tel Aviv every Saturday for two months do not say anything else, forming a popular opposition movement – an Israeli intifada – such as the country has rarely experienced.
There is no conjunction between this movement and what is happening in the occupied West Bank, plagued by yet another outbreak of violence. These are events and tragedies that, strangely, unfold in parallel. The wall that separates Israelis and Palestinians is not just concrete. The project of this government is nevertheless the same, on both sides, namely to impose both on the Palestinians and on the Israelis authoritarian and ultra-religious designs.
In 2020, at the head of a previous and short-lived government of national unity and supported by Donald Trump, Netanyahu had pledged to annex the Jordan Valley – a third of the West Bank -, but had finally abstained. There was in fact no security reason to do so, the Israeli army already having control of the terrain well in hand. The objective was purely political: to bury the idea of a Palestinian state.
It is more than possible that the new government will proceed, being animated by supremacists like Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, who want to end the Palestinian Authority (PA) outright. Nine new Jewish settlements were recently legalized, against a backdrop of harsh repressive operations by the Tsahal (the Israel Defense Forces) and particularly deadly violence. Worrying is the punitive expedition carried out by hundreds of Jewish settlers on Sunday evening in the town of Howwarah, burning cars, businesses and houses. It was carried out in retaliation after the death of two of their own, killed earlier in the day, themselves killed in response to a military raid which left eleven dead and a hundred wounded in Nablus, a few days earlier. A telling situation because carried out under the passive nose of the army and with the excited approval of certain members of the government.
What is happening is also the result of the Oslo peace agreement, signed with great fanfare in 1993, but which we can clearly see today was actually preparing for the annexation of the West Bank. Thirty years later, caught between the Netanyahu government and a discredited PA, the Palestinian people have become, on a geopolitical scale, a negligible pawn whose cause no longer moves, not even the dictatorships of the Arab world. It was necessary to hear the American Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, at the end of January in Jerusalem, underline very hypocritically the importance of “preserving the possibility of achieving a two-state solution”, when no one believes in it anymore, not even the Palestinians. He should also have been heard to criticize implicitly judicial reform and repression in the West Bank, while the United States, which provides Israel with US$4 billion in mostly military aid, has no Israeli policy other than that of letting do Bibi.