This isn’t just another right-wing Israeli government, but may include extremists who want to expel all Palestinians from the occupied territories.
Israel’s election last week brought former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu into power yet again, but it’s hardly a case of the same old thing. First, it will usher in the most chauvinistic and religious government in the country’s history. Second, it occurs just as violence has been spiking in the occupied West Bank in ways not seen in decades.
Worst case scenario: a spiraling cycle of Palestinian insurgency and Israeli suppression not just in the occupied territories, but spilling into Israel itself. If that happens, Israeli annexation of the West Bank becomes not just a possibility but perhaps inevitable.
A low-level insurgency, although not quite a third intifada (uprising), has been brewing this year among Palestinians. It’s being driven by gangs of armed youths not affiliated with Fatah, Hamas or other established Palestinian movements. It’s a deadly mix, combining the spontaneous, leaderless quality of the first intifada, which began in 1987, with the armed nature of the second in 2000.
Israel’s response has been sustained, violent repression. The United Nations reported last month that 2022 has been the deadliest year for West Bank Palestinians since it started tracking in 2005. More than 30 people, including six children, have been killed by Israeli occupation forces, and 311 were injured. The Israeli government claims there have been 4,000 attacks aimed at Israelis, with two soldiers killed and 25 Jewish civilians injured.
Among the victims of the violence was the Palestinian American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh. The Israelis initially denied responsibility for the killing, which set off global outrage. They now say she was shot by accident, although Palestinians’ skepticism is amply justified.
Now into the caldron come some of the most extreme Jewish nationalists ever to hold office.
Itamar Ben-Gvir, who hopes to oversee the police and security forces, leads a party whose platform vows to annex “all parts of Eretz Israel” — meaning Greater Israel — “liberated in the Six-Day War” in 1967. It would also expel all “enemies of Israel,” a euphemism for Palestinians suffering under occupation, to neighboring Arab countries. Ben-Gvir has hung a portrait of Baruch Goldstein, the Israeli American doctor who massacred 29 Palestinians in Hebron in 1994, in his living room.
His far-right compatriot Bezalel Smotrich, who seeks a role overseeing the occupation of the West Bank, has called for the segregation of Jewish and Arab maternity wards. Significantly, he wants governance of West Bank settlement areas taken away from the Israel Defense Forces and given to government ministries, a major step toward annexation.
Smotrich and Ben-Gvir aren’t outliers — they are simply the most extreme additions to an already radicalized Israeli politics that has long given up on a two-state solution and is drifting toward permanent occupation of much or all of the West Bank.
A major explosion of violence would provide the opportunity for an extreme Israeli government to say that annexation is a painful necessity needed to protect “Jewish communities” — i.e., illegal Israeli settlements — from dire threats. Large numbers of Palestinians may again be expelled, as they were in 1947-48 and 1967. The logical consequence is the unilateral imposition of a new border, with Israel consolidating control over land it conquered in the 1967 war.
It may not happen anytime soon, but the new cabinet will certainly drive dynamics in that direction. And just as they will push Jewish power deeper into the West Bank centrifugally, Israeli extremists are likely to pull aspects of the occupation back into Israel itself in a centripetal manner.
Ben-Gvir and his colleagues view Israeli Arabs with the same degree of suspicion they apply to Palestinians living under occupation. His vow to expel everyone not loyal to the Israeli state, as he would define it, may well apply to a significant percentage of Arab citizens.
Moreover, these parties want to use the power of the Israeli government to bring the religious sensibility of the most radical settlements into the largely secular towns and cities where most Israelis live, far from the West Bank. They want Israel to become in effect a theocracy, governed by Jewish religious law, or Halakha.
The one thing that might convince Netanyahu to dump Ben Gvir and the other extremists, and replace them with people like Defense Minister Benny Gantz — a hardliner on security but not a religious extremist — would be for the state to drop his ongoing corruption trial.
Yes, that would be a perversion of justice, but as long as he faces the prospect of conviction, Netanyahu will use the anti-establishment religious radicals as a shield against prosecution. If the charges were dropped, Israel, and the world, might get a less radical Netanyahu-led cabinet.
Even in that “optimistic” scenario, nothing can cancel out the alarmingly strong performance of the religious ultra-right and diehard annexationist parties. Most worrisome, their support is strongest among Jewish youth, suggesting a generational shift in their direction.
A massive crackdown in the West Bank could transform the simmering low-level insurgency into another major Palestinian uprising. If that happens, all bets are off about what this new, more extreme and religious Israel might be willing to do.