The spectacle of Israel’s fifth election in less than five years would be pitiful were it not for the actors involved and the aftermath of Bibi Netanyahu’s return to the helm.
The threat of the arrival of the ultra-nationalist Itamar Ben-Gvir to head any ministry is an affront to democracy and Israeli human rights claims. This sinister character is the head of the far-right Jewish Power Party (Otzma Yehudit), which has become the second largest party supporting Netanyahu and the third largest in the country. He became known for his ideology deeply hostile to the Arabs, whom he even recently threatened, a weapon in his hand.
The fact that Washington has contented itself with expressing its concerns at the rise of violence in Palestine without denouncing the individual demonstrates the total and almost villainous subservience of all American administrations to the wishes of Israel for 70 years and more, as long as the links with the Arab countries do not suffer from it, or no longer. It must be said that the latter, having recovered almost all of the territories occupied by Israel a long time ago, with the exception of the Golan Heights for Syria and the Shebaa Farms claimed by the three parties, lost interest in the fate of the Palestinians.
The newspaper The world evokes “a new face of the Jewish state [qui] takes shape… [qui] should impose on its Western allies a re-examination of their relations with Israel”, no more and no less. Thomas Friedman, of New York Timesis pithy: “The government that emerges would resemble the re-election of Trump with Guiliani as Minister of Justice, Flynn as Minister of Defense and the leader of the Proud Boys as head of National Security”.
What is terrifying is the most frenzied rise of the extreme right in Israel’s political landscape. The re-examination evoked The world underlines the obscene silence of the US administration in the face of the uninterrupted colonization in the West Bank and “the daily disregard for the most basic rights of the Palestinians” and sounds the death knell for the two-state solution.
This rise of the right has been accompanied by a climate of unparalleled and continuous violence in the West Bank – therefore not only in Gaza – between all the components of society: attacks against Israeli Arabs, fights between them, gang wars, organized crime against Israeli Jews in mixed communities, notably in the city of Hebron, a center of continuous abuses against the Arab population. In short, a situation that will allow Ben Gvir and others of his kind to launch an open war against any Palestinian who dares to protest against the Israeli authorities.
What is happening in Israel only confirms the analysis offered last February by Amnesty International on the deep and brutal disintegration of human rights in Israel and the apartheid policy of the regime in place. Obviously, this report had provoked Pavlovian reactions both from the Israeli government side and from the Jewish diaspora in the world. It will no doubt be the same for the government of Netanyahu, legitimately elected in the eyes of the right-thinking international community. Any criticism of Israel will provoke hysterical denunciations and accusations of anti-Semitism, in line with those concerning the will of the International Criminal Court to examine whether crimes corresponding to the jurisdiction of the Court have been committed by Israel against the Palestinians in the occupied territories.
The evocation of an apartheid regime in Israel always provokes outcry. However, some recognize it. After all, former US President Jimmy Carter did publish a shocking book – Palestine: peace, not apartheid – of which many mobilized readers had denounced inaccuracies instead of welcoming the importance of the denunciation. Moreover, over the years, leading Israelis have themselves denounced a de facto situation in the occupied territories. Need we recall that President Obama, for the first time in American political history, had refused to exercise his right of veto against a resolution damaging to Israel at the United Nations Security Council. The result of that vote on December 23, 2016, two weeks before Trump’s inauguration, was Resolution 2334, which calls for a quarterly Council review of the situation in the Israeli-occupied territories as well as Gaza, which is ongoing. Nowadays. This resolution states: “Resolution 2334 (2016) requires Israel to ‘immediately and completely halt all settlement activities in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem’ and ‘fully comply with all legal obligations incumbent in this respect”.
It is a pity that these quarterly reports, damning for Israel, are rarely reported in the international press, blasé 90% of the time, in the face of a conflict almost a century old. Yet it was Netanyahu who, in 2021, uttered this pithy phrase: “Israel is not a state of all its citizens but rather the nation-state of the Jewish people and only them”. Why do we talk about apartheid?