{"id":186442,"date":"2021-06-07T12:01:54","date_gmt":"2021-06-07T11:01:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=186442"},"modified":"2024-06-12T21:24:23","modified_gmt":"2024-06-12T20:24:23","slug":"israels-new-government-will-deepen-rifts-not-heal-them","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2021\/06\/israels-new-government-will-deepen-rifts-not-heal-them\/","title":{"rendered":"Israel\u2019s New Government Will Deepen Rifts, Not Heal Them"},"content":{"rendered":"

The symbolic moment of a Palestinian party sitting in government alongside settler leaders will turn sour all too soon.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

4 Jun 2021 – <\/em>The photo was unprecedented. It showed<\/a> Mansour Abbas, leader of an Islamist party for Palestinians in Israel, signing an agreement on Wednesday [2 Jun] night to sit in a \u201cgovernment of change\u201d alongside settler leader Naftali Bennett.<\/p>\n

Caretaker Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will fervently try to find a way to break up the coalition in the next few days, before a parliamentary vote takes place. But if he fails, it will be the first time in the country\u2019s 73-year history that a party led by a Palestinian citizen has joined \u2013 or been allowed to join \u2013 an Israeli government.<\/p>\n

Aside from the symbolism of the moment, there are no other grounds for celebration. In fact, the involvement of Abbas\u2019s four-member United Arab List in shoring up a majority for a government led by Bennett and Yair Lapid is almost certain to lead to a further deterioration in majority-minority relations.<\/p>\n

There will be a reckoning for this moment, and Israel\u2019s 1.8 million Palestinian citizens<\/a>, a fifth of the population, will once again pay the heaviest price.<\/p>\n

The sole reason that this makeshift coalition exists \u2013 the only glue holding it together<\/a> \u2013 is the hostility of the various parties towards Netanyahu. In most cases, that is not a hostility towards his political positions; simply towards him personally, and towards the corrupting stranglehold he has exerted on Israel\u2019s political system for the past 12 years.<\/p>\n

The \u201cchange\u201d referred to by this proposed government coalition begins and ends with\u00a0the removal of Netanyahu.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Doubly offended<\/h3>\n

It barely needs stating again that Bennett, who will serve first<\/a> as prime minister in rotation with Lapid, is even more right\u00a0wing<\/a> than Netanyahu. In fact, three of the new coalition\u2019s main parties are at least, if not more, rabidly nationalistic than the Israel\u2019s longtime leader. In any other circumstances, they would be enthusiastically heading into government with his Likud Party.<\/p>\n

As Bennett and Mansour huddled inside a hotel near Tel Aviv<\/a> to sign the coalition agreement as the clock ticked down on Lapid\u2019s mandate to form a government, far-right demonstrators<\/a> noisily chanted outside that Bennett was joining a \u201cgovernment with terror supporters\u201d.<\/p>\n

Much of the ultra-nationalist right is so incensed by Bennett\u2019s actions that he and other members of his Yamina party have been assigned a security detail<\/a> for fear of an assassination attempt.<\/p>\n

No one has forgotten that it was Bennett\u2019s own settler camp that produced Yigal Amir<\/a>, the man who in 1995 shot dead the then-prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, in a bid to foil the Oslo peace accords with the Palestinians.\u00a0Amir killed Rabin in large part because the latter was seen to have betrayed the Jewish people by allowing \u201cArabs\u201d \u2013 Palestinian parties in the parliament \u2013 to prop up<\/a> his minority government from outside. They did so to pass legislation necessary to begin implementing the Oslo process<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The chain of events that followed the assassination are well-known. Israelis lurched further rightwards and elected Netanyahu. The Oslo track with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat was derailed. A Palestinian intifada<\/a> erupted. And \u2013 coming full circle \u2013 Netanyahu returned to power and is now Israel\u2019s longest-serving prime minister.<\/p>\n

Today\u2019s potential Yigal Amirs are doubly offended by Bennett\u2019s behaviour. They believe he has stabbed the right\u2019s natural leader, Netanyahu, in the back, while at the same time allowing Abbas \u2013 seen by the right as Hamas\u2019s man in the Knesset \u2013 to dictate policy to the Jewish owners of the land.<\/p>\n

___________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/em>Jonathan Cook is an award-winning British journalist based in Nazareth, Israel, since 2001. He is the author of: <\/em>Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish State (2006); <\/em>Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (2008); and <\/em>Disappearing Palestine: Israel\u2019s Experiments in Human Despair (2008). In 2011 he was awarded the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize<\/a> for Journalism.<\/em> The same year, Project Censored<\/a> voted one of Jonathan\u2019s reports, \u201cIsrael brings Gaza entry restrictions to West Bank\u201d, the ninth most important story censored in 2009-10.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 jonathan-cook.net<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

4 Jun 2021 – Ignore all the talk of a historic, post-Netanyahu era in which settlers and ‘Arabs’ work together in government. The new coalition will quickly turn sour \u2013 and Israel’s large Palestinian minority will, as always, pay a heavy price.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":186445,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[2221,120,1829,1030,87,267,1029,487,2395,2414,2415,2416,771,1027,2417,85,2418,109,287,1572,985,880,292,70,126,1025,886],"class_list":["post-186442","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-palestine-israel-gaza-genocide","tag-checkpoints","tag-conflict","tag-coronavirus","tag-fatah","tag-gaza","tag-geopolitics","tag-hamas","tag-human-rights","tag-international-criminal-court-icc","tag-israeli-apartheid","tag-israeli-army","tag-israeli-occupation","tag-nakba","tag-oslo-accords","tag-palestine-israel-apartheid-wall","tag-palestine-israel","tag-palestinian-rights","tag-politics","tag-power","tag-settlers","tag-social-justice","tag-state-terrorism","tag-un","tag-usa","tag-violence","tag-west-bank","tag-zionism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186442","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=186442"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186442\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":264151,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186442\/revisions\/264151"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/186445"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=186442"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=186442"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=186442"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}