Israeli politicians’ extreme demands over West Bank, Gaza
Extreme demands of “doomsday” and the use of nuclear weapons are fuelling increasing tensions that the Israeli PM can’t ignore.
ANALYSIS
One of Israel’s most senior ministers is calling for the “sterilisation” of “buffer zones” surrounding illegal settlements in the occupied Palestinian West Bank. And it’s a call Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu cannot ignore.
Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich sent a letter to the Prime Minister earlier this week, demanding Palestinian farmers be barred from accessing their fields and olive groves.
“The concept of security is shaken,” the leader of Israel’s far-right Religious Zionism party said about his own coalition government’s failure to repel a surprise October 7 attack by Hamas. Some 1400 Israelis were killed, and more than 200 were taken hostage.
“The writing is on the wall, and I am not ready to be a part of it. I will not agree to additional blood under my watch due to insistence on maintaining distorted perceptions,” Smotrich wrote.
Netanyahu is under immense pressure to comply.
The United Nation’s 1947 Partition Plan created a single Palestinian state, with the southern area of Gaza and much of the border with Egypt linked via the “international” city of Jerusalem to lands on the West Bank of Jordan. These territories have been extensively eroded by decades of conflict and illegal Israeli settlements.
Now Netanyahu’s sixth term as Prime Minister over a deeply divided Israel is built on the support of Israel’s far right. And his need to back their controversial West Bank settlements has been blamed for diverting attention from Gaza at a critical time.
He must contend with their incendiary rhetoric as he struggles to maintain international rage against Hamas and justify his overwhelming assault on the Gaza Strip. And it’s a battle he must face on the home front.
“Jews murdered in the West Bank are more important than Jews murdered in Gaza because the former are right-wing settlers and the latter are left-wing kibbutz members,” Religious Zionist Party member – and chair of the Knesset’s Constitution, Law and Justice Committee – Simcha Rothman proclaimed last week.
His words expose a bitter divide within Israeli society.
Jewish Power
Israel’s far-right political parties won six seats in Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, last year. Chief among them was ultranationalist Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power) and its leader Itamar Ben-Gvir.
At his victory speech, Ben-Gvir’s supporters reportedly began chanting “death to the terrorists” and “death to the Arabs”. In 2007, He had been convicted in 2007 for supporting the terrorist-designated Kach party.
His political partner is Smotrich, the leader of the Religious Zionism party.
“Netanyahu was already suffering from a severe legitimacy deficit due to his trial for corruption, which had limited his choice of coalition partners to ultra-orthodox and ultra-right parties,” argues Chatham House Middle East studies Professor Yossi Mekelberg.
“To ensure his political survival, he had appointed the most extreme representatives of the settlements movement to key government positions, including Minister of National Security Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich as a minister in the defences ministry in addition to his main post as finance minister,” Mekelberg adds.
“Neither have any military or other security experience and both promote an ideology that embraces confrontation with the Palestinians and the annexation of the West Bank.”
That apocalyptic ideology was being asserted well before the October 7 disaster.
Ben-Gvir lives among his supporters in the illegal West Bank settlement of Kiryat Arba.
Smotrich lives in the illegal West Bank settlement of Kedumim.
Both are determined for the region to become part of a new Jewish religious state.
Outpost of apartheid?
In August, Ben-Gvir inflamed international outrage after claiming Israeli rights were more important than those of Palestinians in the West Bank.
“My right, my wife’s, my children’s, to roam the roads of Judea and Samaria are more important than the right of movement of the Arabs,” he told national television.
He then told the Arab-Israeli journalist: “Sorry Mohammad, but this is the reality, that’s the truth. My right for life comes before their right to movement.”
The US State Department responded: “We condemn all racist rhetoric, as such messages are particularly damaging when amplified by those in leadership positions and are incongruent with advancing respect for human rights for all.”
Prime Minister Netanyahu was forced to step in to deflect the crisis.
“In order to prevent these heinous murders, Israel’s security forces have implemented special security measures in these areas,” his office said in a statement. “This is what Minister Ben Gvir meant when he said ‘the right to life precedes freedom of movement’.”
But the scene had already been set.
In February, Smotrich – the same minister now calling for the “sterilisation” of Palestinian lands – reacted enthusiastically to reports of a violent Israeli settler rampage through an Arab village.
“The Palestinian village of Huwwara should be wiped out,” he proclaimed. “The state needs to do it and not private citizens.”
Hamas has also been voicing its hate.
It has reiterated its founding goal – to destroy Israel. It insists there is “no place on our land” for such a state and vowed to attack Israel “again and again” until the United Nations 1948 Partition Plan for Palestine is overturned.
Hamas is an internationally sanctioned terrorist organisation.
Israel is a democratic member of the global community under the “rule of law”.
But emotions are running high.
‘Kiss doomsday’
On November 1, Israel’s National Heritage Minister Amihai Eliyahu declared that the rubble and ruins of Gaza looked “more beautiful than ever”. Three days later, the Jewish Power member insisted there were “no non-combatants” in the Palestinian enclave in response to allegations of collective punishment against civilians.
But that wasn’t enough.
He went on to state the use of nuclear warheads against Gaza was “one of the options”.
The senior Israeli cabinet minister was amplifying an earlier call from one of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s own Likud Party members.
“Jericho missile! Jericho missile! … A doomsday weapon! Shoot powerful missiles without limit. Not flattening a neighbourhood – crushing and flattening Gaza,” member of parliament Revatal Gotliv insisted in a series of social media posts last month.
“Only an explosion that shakes the Middle East will restore this country’s dignity, strength, and security! It’s time to kiss doomsday.”
This was too much for Netanyahu. At least publicly.
He accused his coalition partner of being “divorced from reality”. He told the Israeli public Eliyahu had been suspended from cabinet meetings. But the controversial coalition leader was later seen attending via conference call anyway.
Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, himself convicted for corruption offences while in office, says such behaviour shows Netanyahu is suffering a “nervous breakdown”.
“He has shrunk. He’s destroyed emotionally. I mean, something terrible happened to him. Bibi has been working all his life on the false pretence that he is Mr Security. He’s Mr. Bullsh*t,” he told Politico this week.
“Every minute he is prime minister he is a danger to Israel.”
‘Children of darkness’
An official Netanyahu social media account last month declared the Israel-Hamas conflict to be a “struggle between the children of light and the children of darkness, between humanity and the law of the jungle.”
It was deleted the next day.
United Nations secretary-general Antonio Guterres has since called Gaza a “graveyard for children”. He blamed Hamas for using them as human shields. He accused Israel of indiscriminate bombardment.
But Netanyahu has since returned to the ultranationalist talking point.
“This will be a victory of good over evil, of light over darkness, of life over death,” he declared in an October 29 address. “In this war, we will stand steadfast, more united than ever – certain in the justice of our cause. This is the mission of our lives. This is also the mission of my life.”
It’s a Jewish Power and Religious Zionist message that locks in a violent future for the Palestinian Gaza and West Bank.
“Their ultimate goal is to have a very different Israeli state – religious rather than secular – and it starts in the West Bank,” International Team for the Study of Security Verona analyst Omri Brinner told France24.
“Keeping the eyes of the world on Gaza allows them and their followers to advance extreme right-wing agendas in the West Bank, even violence against Palestinians there; the bigger the war in Gaza, the less oversight there is in the West Bank.”
But not all oversight has been averted.
US President Joe Biden has warned that increased Israeli settler violence in the West Bank since the outbreak of war was “pouring gasoline” on the crisis. “It has to stop. They have to be held accountable. It has to stop now,” he told a news conference attended by Australia’s Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, late last month.
And the UN Human Rights Office has also drawn attention to the attacks. “Settler violence, which was already at record levels, has also escalated dramatically, averaging seven attacks a day,” a spokeswoman stated. “In more than a third of these attacks, firearms were used.”
Jamie Seidel is a freelance writer | @JamieSeidel
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