Geopolitical Insights
Is there a prospect of peace under Netanyahu’s extremist government?
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. With the scale of Israel's war crimes engulfing the Gaza Strip and its citizens to ashes, the two-state solution is truly dead today, if it ever truly was a possibility. The concept itself has always been fundamentally 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, ethnic cleansing and mass killings of an estimated 15,000 Palestinians by Zionist militia.
For a realistic peace agreement, Israel's current far-right government has to be forced, politically, to make a compromise by its long-standing allies, most importantly, the US.
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 extravagantly handed out, Israel's government continued to engage in mass arrests of Palestinians without reason, and abused the persecuted minority in administrative detention centres, as documented by Amnesty International at the time.
Then in 1995, Prime Minister Rabin, who also signed a peace treaty with Jordan in 1994, was assassinated by an ultra-nationalist Israeli who opposed the Oslo peace initiative to share territories with Palestinians. Current leader Benjamin Netanyahu – also 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 in the Jewish society in the wake of the 1948 Deir Yassin Massacre, when members of the Irgun and Stern Gang Zionist militias attacked the village of Deir Yassin, killing at least 107 Palestinians. The likes of Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt had written a letter to The New York Times, castigating 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 twisted the public discourse, tactically framing any withdrawal from occupied territories as concession rather than what it actually was: 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 espoused all facets of authoritarianism, emboldening 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 to ride his way back to the Prime Minister's office. 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 was singled out as a "bona-fide Jewish fascist," by Uri Avnery, the leader of the Jewish peace movement organization Gush Shalom and a former member of Israeli Knesset (parliament).
Months prior to the Hamas attack, Netanyahu's latest government led a judicial coup amid public outrage, curtailing 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 of its kind, 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. During his unprecedented visit in Israel, he undiplomatically embraced Israel's narrative on the Gaza Hospital massacre on October 17, while the US Intelligence was conducting preliminary investigation. The US also vetoed the adoption of a humanitarian pause in the UN Security Council, all of which, taken together, do not show signs of reversing back to the 1990s dynamic where the US could somewhat cast an influence in Israel's hard-line policies. In a video that has now gone viral, from 1986, Biden had loudly 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 enduring comment hovers over the US' position in Israel, only in its regional and national self-interest. 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 than being on the right side of history.
Ramisa Rob is a journalist at The Daily Star.
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