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Can there be peace under Netanyahu’s government?
FILE PHOTO: REUTERS
Israel’s catastrophic war on terror, after the Hamas attack, has reopened a bloody chapter of the region’s conflict-ridden history. Global double standards are unravelling in front of our eyes, costing innocent lives in Gaza. The latest Netanyahu coalition government – waging this virulent response, displacing millions and killing thousands of Palestinians – is the most extremist government in Israel’s history. The unsparing attacks on Palestinian lives require a historical understanding of Israel’s gradual shift to far-right extremism, which serves as context to assess the possible consequences of the aggravating situation.
In a six-day war in 1967, after a series of manoeuvres by Egyptian President Nasser, Israel shocked the world by occupying the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem. Since the occupation, the “two-state solution” has been touted by the West like a broken record, detached from the Israeli domestic environment, and the anti-democratic foundations of Israel. Till date, Israel has not adopted a constitution or equality laws as was required by the UN Resolution 181, the partition plan that caused the first mass displacement of Palestinians.
Many political analysts still believe the only possibility of the “two-state solution” was reflected in the Oslo Accords of 1993 – the peace agreement brokered by former US President Bill Clinton, and signed by Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) leader Yasser Arafat. The accords promised to create an independent state for Palestinians in five years, which never happened. There’s a catch though: until Oslo, the international consensus supported complete Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza. Essentially, PLO’s agreement to the Oslo terms legitimised Israel’s illegal pretence of possessing “existing rights” in the occupied territories. Even after peace negotiations, as Nobel Peace Prizes were handed out, Israel’s government continued to engage in mass arrests of Palestinians without reason.
Then in 1995, Prime Minister Rabin was assassinated by an ultra-nationalist Israeli who opposed the peace initiative. Current leader Benjamin Netanyahu – the leader of the Likud Party at the time – was blamed for ignoring the incitement of extremists – a charge he has vociferously denied. Rabin’s assassination marked a turning point in maturing the ultra-nationalism reflected in the coalition today.
Previously, extremism was a persistent problem lurking in the fringes in Israel since its inception. Yet the fascist turn was anticipated by prominent intellectuals like Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt in the wake of the 1948 Deir Yassin Massacre, where they publicly criticised Herut, Likud Party’s predecessor, as “akin in its organisation, methods and political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist Parties.”
When Netanyahu first became prime minister in 1996, he demonised Rabin’s efforts to compromise with Palestine, and groomed a generation of extremist leaders, such as Avigdor Lieberman, who called for the expulsion of 1.3 million “Arabs of Israel” in 2004. But Netanyahu has been a hawkish politician driven by self-interest over anything else. While appeasing his anti-Palestine national religious voters, Netanyahu also attempted an interim revival of the Oslo Accords to proclaim a farcical commitment to the two-state solution.
The Israeli government’s predictable anti-terrorism rhetoric being used to wage war today, in which Palestinian terrorism is always the cause but never the effect of evil, has also played like a broken record over the past two decades. In 1998, Netanyahu and Arafat signed the Wye River Memorandum in Maryland, to facilitate Israeli withdrawals in the West Bank, on the condition that Palestine executes a specific “action plan” to combat terrorism. In this “struggle between good and evil, the more repression the better: any restraints will impede the struggle,” as Jewish Professor Norman Finkelstein wrote in 1998, criticising the Wye River Memorandum as “securing occupation.”
The sincerity of the 1998 Wye memorandum’s “peace” objectives remain questionable; according to The Washington Post , the Clinton administration had reportedly given Netanyahu an “ultimatum” to relaunch Oslo, though confidential letters revealed that the US committed to firmly “oppose” a unilateral declaration of Palestinian statehood. In presenting the memorandum, Netanyahu cleverly recast the public discourse, framing any withdrawal from occupied territories as concession rather than justice.
Checks and balances from Israel’s long-standing ally, the US, has faded since 1991, after the Gulf War, when the US emerged as the unchallenged external power in Middle East affairs. With that powerful shelter, Netanyahu gradually became a paragon of the far-right, posturing himself as the only messianic expert capable of facing the enemies: Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas. His authoritarian tendencies go hand-in-hand with his oppressive policies towards Palestinians. After his resounding victory in 2015 elections, Netanyahu anchored the controversial Nation-State bill establishing “Jewish settlement as national value,” dooming Palestinians’ hopes for freedom. He emboldened official policies to annex the West Bank, subjecting Palestinians to apartheid, while domestically silencing Israeli dissenters and taking control of the media.
Prior to elections in 2022, facing indictments on corruption charges, after 18 months of exile, Netanyahu cultivated relationships with fascist-religious parties. Netanyahu’s appointment of extremist leader Itamar Ben Gvir – who was among a group of extremists indicted for celebrating the stabbing of a Palestinian baby by a settler extremist – as minister of national security drew widespread domestic criticism. Netanyahu’s own repressive tendencies pale in comparison to his appointees, such as the currently appointed Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who is widely recognised as a “bona-fide Jewish fascist.”
Months prior to the Hamas attack, Netanyahu’s latest government led a judicial coup amid public outrage, snubbing the Supreme Court’s power to intervene in governance. And only four days before the Hamas attack, Israeli newspaper Haaretz published an editorial on how Israel’s neo-fascism threatens Israelis and Palestinians alike.
The prospects of peaceful resolution are far unless Israel is left without fallback options. Normalisation of Israel’s government with Arab states, which the US recently brokered, is a tried-tested method that has extensively failed before to improve the conditions for Palestinians. For a realistic peace agreement, Israel’s current far-right government has to be forced to make a compromise by its long-standing allies, most importantly, the US.
Previous US administrations though were able to pressure Israel. Following the 1956 Suez Crisis, President Eisenhower threatened economic sanctions to force Israel to withdraw from Gaza and Sinai. In 1977, President Carter threatened to terminate US military assistance to Israel if the nation did not evacuate Lebanon and secured an agreement between long-time enemies Egypt and Israel. And the last time in 1991, the US Secretary of State James Baker rebuked Israel’s far-right government’s hard-line approach that eschewed dialogue with Palestine.
Today the scope for accountability is moot. President Biden, who claims the US is a democracy champion, is supporting an outright authoritarian regime in Israel. The US vetoed the adoption of a humanitarian pause, essentially allowing bloodshed to continue. In 1986, Biden said in Congress, “if it were not for Israel, the US would have to invent an Israel to protect its interests in the Middle East.” The US’ position as a global superpower currently dwindles with the rise of China, and as such, its own agenda in protecting Israel as an ally – even at the cost of providing military funds to a fascist government embracing militant Zionism – matter more to its national interest, than being on the right side of history.