JAMES M. DORSEY
Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu’s far-right, Jewish nationalist, ultra-conservative coalition government threatens to put the Jewish state on a collision course with Diaspora Jewry and could weaken or undermine a pillar of Israeli national security: unquestioned US support.
The looming crisis with two of Israel’s crucial constituencies, the United States and Diaspora Jewry, stems from Mr. Netanyahu’s embrace of the far-right and willingness to sidestep the rise of anti-Semitism among Christian nationalists and Evangelicals, two groups that constitute the mainstay of US grassroots support for Israel.
The Israel that was
Details, leaked to Israeli media, of the coalition agreement between Mr. Netanyahu’s Likud party and five ultra-nationalist and ultra-conservative religious parties provide a roadmap to multiple potential crises Israel and the new government could encounter. The agreement entails policies that would legitmise racism, impinge on the secular nature of the state, curtail democratic checks and balances, and pursue annexation of occupied territory and Judaisation of Palestinian-populated areas of Israel proper.
Under the agreement, the parties intend to pass legislation that will end a ban on individuals who incite racism from serving in the Knesset, the Israeli parliament. They also plan to extend exemptions for the teaching of core subjects like English and mathematics in ultra-conservative religious schools, increase the funding of ultra-conservative religious schools, legalise public funding of gender-segregated events, and grant parliament the right to override Supreme Court decisions.
The coalition partners also agreed to introduce the death penalty for perpetrators of political violence and legalise wildcat settlements hitherto described by Israeli governments as illegal. The accord further involves a vague consensus to move towards annexation of parts of the West Bank occupied by Israel during the 1967 Middle East war and draft plans to Judaise the Galilee and Negev, areas within Israel’s pre-1967 borders that are home to significant Palestinian communities.
Critics will take heart from potential timebombs that could blow the coalition apart at any point after it takes office even though it is a far more cohesive alliance than the unwieldy partnership of its predecessor that was led by Yair Lapid and Naftali Bennett.
The timebombs include legal obstacles to passing a law that would fortify exempting religious seminary students from military service, definitions of the authority over the police of the incoming national security minister and of another hardliner’s powers in managing the occupation’s civil administration of the West Bank, the level of increased funding for religious seminaries, and Mr. Netanyahu’s hesitancy to move ahead with understandings that would curtail the rights of non-Orthodox Jews because of the virulent response from American Jews and potential opposition to the measures by Russian Jewish segment of his electoral base.
With the announcement of his government, Mr. Netanyahu rejected suggestions by prominent Israelis and American Jews, including Dan Kurtzer, a former US ambassador to Israel and Egypt, to form a coalition of centre-left parties. The alliance would cancel the prime minister’s trial on corruption charges to keep the far right out of power.
Some Israeli analysts argue that was never an option because Mr. Netanyahu is a changed man. “The 73-year-old Likud leader is no longer the ‘responsible adult’ in the room that he was perhaps a decade ago when he rejected calls from within his own party to weaken Israel’s judiciary. He has adopted a conspiratorial worldview, leads a party that has shifted dramatically to the right, and is completely beholden to Israel’s ultra-Orthodox politicians, who have grand plans to turn Israel into a more fundamentalist and less democratic society,” said Haaretz columnist Amir Tibon.
Seven years ago, Mr. Netanyahu was outraged when police discovered a video of an Orthodox wedding on which attendees celebrated by stabbing a picture of a Palestinian baby was murdered in a firebombing by an ultra-nationalist.
At the time, Mr. Netanyahu condemned the revelers as “the real face of a group that poses danger to Israeli society and security.” Today, Mr. Netanyahu has nominated one of the wedding’s attendees, Jewish Power leader Itamar Ben-Gvir, as national security minister, in his newly announced government.
Mr. Netanyahu is betting that his pledge not to govern based on Jewish religious law and tighten Israeli cooperation with the United States against China will appease the Biden administration and his Jewish critics. That is likely a slippery slope at best.
Moreover, compounding potential upsets in Israel’s foreign relations is a potential crisis in dealings with Egypt and Jordan, the two Arab states that initially concluded peace treaties with the Jewish state, if members of the new government act on their promises.
Mr. Ben-Gvir, the incoming national security minister, promised that one of his first acts would be to visit Jerusalem’s Temple Mount or Haram ash-Sharif and authorize Jewish prayer on the site. Such moves would infuriate Jordan, the custodian of the Muslim holy sites. At the same time, Avi Maoz, the minister in charge of shaping Jewish identity, has described Egypt as an “enemy state.”
“Over the years, the power of the Palestinians to motivate Arab public opinion has greatly eroded. The only place that perhaps can still produce protest is the Temple Mount …. It is also Jordan’s weak spot, and when ties between Netanyahu and the (Jordanian) king are far from friendly, the king will have to rely on other Arab leaders and the United States to calm the Israeli government,” said a Jordanian-Palestinian newspaper editor.
To position itself as the Arab country with the most influence in Israel and a potential facilitator between the Netanyahu government, Palestinians, and other Arab countries, the United Arab Emirates, the Arab state that spearheaded the recognition in 2020 by Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan, took a different tack. It became, together with Bahrain, the first nation to legitimise Mr. Ben-Gvir by inviting him, even before the formation of the Netanyahu government, to attend a national day celebration at its embassy in Tel Aviv. Days later, UAE ambassador Mohamed Al Khaja visited Religious Zionism leader Bezalel Smotrich, another far-right Netanyahu coalition partner, in his office in Jerusalem.
The outreach signalled that it would be business as usual after the UAE had initially unsuccessfully sought to convince Mr. Netanyahu not to include Mr. Ben-Gvir in his Cabinet.
Changing tacks, the UAE has opted to bet on sustaining its past accomplishment of stopping Mr. Netanyahu from implementing some of his most provocative policies. In 2020, the UAE successfully made its recognition of Israel conditional on Mr. Netanyahu dropping plans to annex parts of the West Bank.
The UAE and Bahrain’s engagement with the Israeli far-right acknowledges Israeli political trends but sits uncomfortably with the divergence in attitudes of Diaspora Jews and Israelis towards Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands and Palestinians and non-Israeli Jews’ concerns about the new Israeli government. Ties to Diaspora Jewry is a pillar of Emirati soft power.
Apartheid in the making
American Jews expressed a critical view of Israel in a poll on the eve of the November 2022 US midterm elections. Sixty-eight per cent supported placing restrictions on US aid to Israel to prevent it from being used to expand Israel’s occupation of the West Bank.
The poll contrasted starkly with a hardening of attitudes towards Palestinians and an increasing rejection of a two-state solution by Israeli Jews.
Instead, Israeli Jews, according to Yuval Noah Harari, one of Israel’s most prominent public intellectuals, embrace the notion of a three-tiered class system with Jews on top of the societal pyramid in a swath of land that stretches from the Mediterranean coast to the Jordan River.
The three tiers are “Jews, who have all the rights; some Arabs, who have some rights; and other Arabs, who have very little or no rights. And this is increasingly the situation on the ground. And this is increasingly also the aspiration or the mindset of even people in government,” Mr. Harari said.
Mr. Hariri’s assessment would legitimise assertions by Israeli and international human rights groups that Israel is embracing a system of apartheid that is borne out by the ambitions of Netanyahu’s coalition partners.
Finance Minister Smotrich’s Religious Zionist Party, for example, aims to impose Israeli sovereignty over the West Bank and for Israel to be governed by the laws of the Torah. In addition, the party of Mr. Smotrich, who will be responsible for the civil administration of the West Bank, calls for disbanding the Palestinian Authority and expelling Palestinians “disloyal to Israel” in what would amount to ethnic cleansing.
Mr. Ben-Gvir has expressed support for Rabbi Meir Kahane, an American-born, ultra-nationalist writer, and politician who founded the Jewish Defence League that called for expelling Israel’s Palestinian citizens and banning sex between Jews and non-Jews.
Mr. Kahane was sentenced to five years in prison in the United States on terrorism charges. He was assassinated in 1990 while speaking to an Orthodox audience in Brooklyn by an Egyptian-born American citizen.
Mr. Ben-Gvir, who in 2007 was convicted on charges of incitement to violence and support of a terrorist organisation, also spoke positively about Baruch Goldstein, a West Bank settler who killed 29 Palestinians and wounded 125 more when he attacked a mosque in 1994. A picture of Mr. Goldstein long adorned Mr. Ben-Gvir’s living room.
Mr. Ben Gvir has clearly defined his vision of policing. He has proposed new rules of engagement with potential perpetrators of violence. Police and security forces would be authorised to shoot on sight anyone they spot holding a rock or a Molotov cocktail if that person “hate(s) Israel,” a definition to be applied to Palestinians rather than Israeli Jews. In other words, Mr. Ben-Gvir’s reforms were likely to reinforce rather than tackle racism in police ranks and the police’s failure to address crime in Israeli Palestinian communities that is spiralling out of control.
Mr. Tibor, the journalist, noted that Mr. Ben-Gvir was pushing a law in parliament that would make him the de facto commissioner of police rather than just the politician responsible for law enforcement. “This means that a man with a rich past as a suspect and defendant will have (the) final say on criminal investigations and indictments. Israel’s attorney general issued a rare public warning against this legislation, but Netanyahu and his allies couldn’t care less,” Mr. Tibor said.
The 13th tribe
For a majority of Jews, Mr. Netanyahu’s swing to the right amounts to turning Israel into a Jewish state that emphasizes relationships with far-right groups irrespective of their attitudes towards Jews rather than with Jewish communities regardless of their political leanings.
“If Israel ceases to be an open democracy, I won’t be able to support it. If Israel becomes a fundamentalist religious state, a theocratic nationalism state, it will cut Israel off from 70 percent of world Jewry, who won’t qualify into their definition of ‘who is a Jew’… I never thought…I would reach that point where I would say that my support of Israel is conditional. I’ve always said that (my support) is unconditional, but it’s conditional,’” warned former director of the Anti-Defamation League Abe Foxman.
“I don’t need to tell you how politically, and strategically American Jewry is critical as a cement to the relationship between the two countries, and therefore it is critical that this new government not do damage to relationships; not tamper with Israel’s democracy, its institutions, its legal systems, its civil rights of Arab minorities; not tamper with the Law of Return and the status of Christians and Muslims,” Mr. Foxman added.
Mr. Foxman was voicing a more deeply rooted rot in Israel’s relationship to Diaspora Jewry, particularly Jews in the United States, who, together with Israeli Jews, account for 80 percent of Jews worldwide.
