What the Incoming Hardline Government Means for Israel, Palestine, and the United States

This podcast episode includes references to the Eurasia Group Foundation, now known as the Institute for Global Affairs.

Transcript:

MUHAMMAD SHEHADA: Now, with Netanyahu's government coming in, this is likely to be a green light for both settlers and Israeli soldiers and police officers in the West Bank to escalate things dramatically. So, I think the US in that situation can be the only player capable of pulling substantial cards to deter an escalation of human rights violations and atrocities.

ZURI LINETSKY: Welcome to None of the Above, a podcast of the Eurasia Group Foundation. My name is Zuri Linetsky. I'm filling in for Mark Hanah today.

You're about to hear part one of a two-part series on an enduring and intractable problem in international affairs: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. If you're an American listening, you know Israel always comes up during election season, and you know it's become almost axiomatic for candidates running for national public office to emphasize America's support for Israel. It's a foregone conclusion for most people in DC that Israel is one of America's most important partners. But this has been the case for decades. So, why are we talking about this now? Well, Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel's longest-serving prime minister, has until tomorrow, December 21, to form a new coalition government. This government is likely to be the most right-wing in Israeli history, and this could have far-reaching implications for America's relationship with Israel and Palestine.

Let's take a step back. You might be wondering why you're hearing about Benjamin Netanyahu again. Hasn't he already served as prime minister of Israel, and didn't Israel just have elections?

Interlude featuring archival audio

LINETSKY: Netanyahu, also nicknamed Bibi, has served as Israeli prime minister for more than 15 years. And this past election was the country's fifth in the last four years.

NERI ZILBER: It's a world record, a dubious world record.

LINETSKY: That's Neri Zilber, a journalist and analyst focused on the Middle East and host of the podcast Israel Policy Pod. He joins our conversation from Tel Aviv and got us up to speed on the current state of Israeli politics.

ZILBER: Big picture: Israel is a parliamentary democracy. The parliament here is called the Knesset. It has 120 seats. Historically, for most of Israel's history, it’s had a very raucous kind of sharp-elbowed politics, a lot of smaller parties, fragments of parties, that all run, that all usually win some number of seats. But every time after an election in Israeli history, the winner has to cobble together a governing coalition. Basically, it's a coalition of various parties that all come together to get at least a parliamentary majority, which would be 61 seats. In terms of the actual process, the results of the elections in more recent years was effectively deadlock.

LINETSKY: Neri explains that as of late in the Knesset, there have been two blocs of political parties: a pro-Netanyahu bloc, which consists of Bibi's Likud Party and various right-wing and ultra-Orthodox party. And then the anti-Bibi bloc, which includes disenchanted former members of Bibi's own Likud Party, other right wing parties, centrists, and whatever is left of left-wing parties like the Labor Party and Meretz Party, and then various Arab majority political parties. Unlike the pro-Bibi camp, this latter group has struggled to work together against Bibi and his allies.

ZILBER: But the problem was, starting in early 2019, no bloc, as it's called here, no side of the political divide actually was able to get a clear majority. So, you did have a situation after election round number four, which was in 2021, in which the anti-Netanyahu camp finally deposed the long-serving Bibi Netanyahu, and were able to cobble together a bare parliamentary majority. All those kind of disparate parts of the anti-Netanyahu camp, including for the first time ever, an Arab-Israeli Islamist party, all formed a governing coalition. And that held for about a year until this past summer. And it kind of broke apart. Various right wing members of the coalition defected to Netanyahu, and that cost the government its parliamentary majority. And then it subsequently fell. And that's what triggered this most recent election.

Going into election day on November 1, the pundits and even the public thought it would be just another deadlock—a very close election. But for various reasons which may interest you and the listeners or maybe not, Netanyahu was able to finally pull it out, staged this comeback, gained a clear parliamentary majority, and now he's in the process of finalizing his governing coalition with an eye to actually swearing in this government by the end of this year.

LINETSKY: The right dominates Israeli politics today, but it wasn't always like this.

ZILBER: The socialist ethos of Israel was a fact of life in the pre-state period before the founding of Israel in 1948. But really it was the movement that founded the state, that built up the state of Israel, and led Israel almost as a one-party system right up until the late 1970s. And in the election of 1977, that was the first time the Israeli right—led by the Likud predecessor, but for all intents and purposes, we can call it the Likud—led by Menachem Begin—he actually won the election of 1977. And since that time, really for over 40 years, the Israeli right, with a few exceptions here and there, have won the elections and led Israel. And again, there have been a few very distinct and important exceptions to that rule. But overall, for the past 40 years, it's been mostly right-wing rule here in Israel.

Now, there are various reasons for this shift. You can talk about Israeli demographics. You can talk about how the Israeli left itself has shifted. So, if in the past, say, in the first few decades of Israel's history, the left wing was, in matters of war and peace, almost as hardline as the right wing. It was mostly differences of, say, economic policy or social policy, who specific facets of Israeli society were voting for, whether it was the Eastern European Jews who voted more for the left wing socialist parties, and mostly, say, Mizrahi Jews, Jews from Middle Eastern-North African origin, who voted eventually for Menachem Begin and the Israeli right and still do have a strong identification with those political parties. But the left itself has also shifted its positions, embraced a lot more on the issue of peace with the Palestinians, territorial compromise, two-state solution.

LINETSKY: What are the implications of Bibi returning to power with his far-right coalition government? According to Neri and our second guest, Muhammad, the implications could be severe.

SHEHADA: Now, with Netanyahu's government coming in, this is likely to be a green light for both settlers and Israeli soldiers and police officers in the West Bank to escalate things dramatically. So, I think the US in that situation can be—I wouldn't say the adult in the room, but—the only player capable of pulling substantial cards to deter an escalation of human rights violations and atrocities.

LINETSKY: That's Muhammad Shehada, a Palestinian journalist and analyst from the Gaza Strip. He joins the discussion from Copenhagen.

Part of the reason the new government is concerning is because several of the people Bibi is expected to give important cabinet positions to are, well, criminals. Some have been convicted of fraud, and others have been investigated by the Israeli domestic intelligence service, the Shin Bet. And this might raise red flags to people outside of Israeli politics.

ZILBER: Well, it's disconcerting for insiders, too. For many Israelis, it's quite disconcerting. Unprecedented. Choose your adjective. The notion that a person like Itamar Ben-Gvir—who has been convicted in court for incitement to racism, who was proudly a disciple of Rabbi Meir Kahane and the Kach movement, which was outlawed as a terrorist organization here in Israel—will now be, in just a matter of days, responsible for the Israel police would have seemed like science fiction even a year ago. But that's just one example of many with the reality coming out of the November 1 election and what will likely be Netanyahu's new government.

LINETSKY: Looking at the incoming government, what are journalists on the ground seeing? How might this election affect the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? And what will this mean for America's relationship with Israel and Palestine, as well as its broader interests in the Middle East?

SHEHADA: After the Lipid-Bennett coalition government, Palestinians are no longer shocked by any government coming into office in Israel. There were a lot of hopes that Lipid, coming from the left, along with Labor and Meretz, might do something useful towards the Palestinians. But in the general picture, the grand calculus of their term in office was just a big zero, if not a negative.

If you take, for example, Benny Gantz holding the Defense Ministry for the last few years, the result of it has been that this year has been deemed by the United Nations the bloodiest in the West Bank for Palestinians since 2005. In terms of Gaza, you have Benny Gantz stating one time after the other that we will not, quote unquote, “allow real development” in the Gaza Strip until Hamas returns our boys, until permanent calm is established, until disarmament, or whatever conditionalities you would put forth. But you have clear determination to not improve the situation for Palestinians significantly or meaningfully in any way aside from a few symbolic gestures, such as allowing people from Gaza to work in Israel—around 12,000 to 20,000—and giving permits to the Gazans who live in the West Bank to have a legal status to live there—if you think about how crazy that is. But otherwise the result of the government's impact has shown that no matter whoever sits in Israel's government, it's going to be the same. The result is every day is getting worse and worse for the Palestinians.

But on the other hand, the incoming government, as Neri has described very eloquently, is that it's a government of criminals. And the other side for Palestinians—we call it the government of the Second Nakba. You have Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich who made a career out of killing Palestinians, who think they didn't finish the job in 1948. The second Nakba is coming. It will be taught a harsh lesson. These are the kind of people we're going to be dealing with.

There's always the saying that, as I said before, no matter who sits in the Israeli government, the result is the same. It's always going to be bad for Palestinians, at least for the last decade. But they and Netanyahu's government are still capable of making things much worse for the Palestinians, particularly for any Palestinian who believes in the idea of peace and the idea of nonviolence and in the idea of meaningful engagement and dialogue. For Palestinians, you cannot say the population is ideologically in favor of, let's say, armed resistance versus peaceful methods of resistance. It's not about what feels good, but for most Palestinians, it's goal-driven. It's about what can achieve the result of providing a normal and decent life. So, in that sense, support for armed versus nonviolent resistance is always fluctuating depending on the environment and circumstances around. And with Netanyahu's government, including these sort of major extremists in it, you can take it for granted that for the Palestinians, there's going to be a heavy push towards advocacy of armed resistance and violence, as well as a rise for the hardline. That is very dangerous omen. It's a government that is exceptionally catastrophic for the Palestinian Authority. It can trigger its collapse, but it's also a government that's, I can say, incredibly helpful to Hamas and to the Islamic Jihad, because it proves all their points about Israel being an extremist society which does not understand any language but the language of violence. So, that, in a sense, is disastrous for both people.

LINETSKY: Just a few brush-clearing points. The first Nakba was not the creation of the State of Israel itself in 1948, but the forced displacement of Palestinian populations from their lands in the context of the independence conflict between Israel and the seven Arab nations around it. So, the second Nakba is a second catastrophe. I just want to make sure we have that conceptually mapped out.

And I think this has been the deadliest year in the conflict since 2005. We should note 2005 is the penultimate year of the Second Intifada, which is a bloody conflict which lasted from 2000 to 2006. And this year, by some estimates, 167 Palestinians have been killed; 31 Israelis have been killed. And 129 have been wounded. And as of this past Saturday, a 16-year-old girl was killed by the IDF, not to mention Shireen Abu Akleh, among many others. My question is then, are we concerned? And I think this is a constant question.

SHEHADA: Well, if you look back at 2015, the end of it when the Kerry initiative collapsed, at the time, it led to a huge wave of despair and desperation among Palestinians. It triggered what was called back then the knife, the Intifada, where it was mostly young, unemployed, and low-income people undertaking lone wolf attacks against Israelis with primitive weaponry, knives, and whatever they can hold the position of, and that is likely to escalate again. The more desperation there is for Palestinians who have been left with nothing to wish for and nothing to hope for and nothing to lose, the easier it is for young people to reach a point of despair where they think their death might do more use to their family than their continued excruciating existence. So, in that sense, that is one dangerous indicator.

The other one is the Palestinian militant groups across Nablus and Jenin. The lion den that has garnered a significant amount of popularity among Palestinians because it emerged as a statement of rejection or refusal of the status quo that can also enjoy a significant boost to its popularity. But the most concerning issue is the Palestinian Authority. You have people in Netanyahu's government who are dedicated to seeing the Palestinian Authority dismantled, destroyed, weakened, isolated, subsided, whatever you can describe that sort of mentality. The result of it is the Palestinian Authority has been on the brink of collapse for years and years, ever since Trump took office, for many reasons. But it's just a waiting for a trigger for that collapse to happen. And if it happens, the result of it would be not just chaos, but it would be way more catastrophic than that.

The other thing is that Israeli policy in terms of sustaining this sort of unsustainable status quo while containing its spillovers and side effects, is basically premised on the assumption that Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, is going to be there forever. He's now 86/87. He's going to die sooner or later. And no one in his immediate circle is likely to command the respect or this sort of support of Palestinians, or at least tolerance of Palestinians, as Mahmoud Abbas did for most Palestinians. We've given up on trying to remove him out of office because he's too old. So, we're just waiting for it to happen any day now. But whoever is going to take office next is not going to be the same level of patience, nor the same level of credibility, nor the same level of respect. The result of Abbas dying at any minute—that is also a very catastrophic scenario. But the fact that you have a government which is dedicated to the collapse of the Palestinian Authority should be the most concerning element of it.

ZILBER: I share Muhammad's pessimism. I'm actually very concerned about this coming year here on the ground, whether inside Israel or between Israel and Palestine, West Bank, Jerusalem, Gaza as well in certain scenarios. I truly believe it will get quite rocky for a number of reasons, but the trend lines like Muhammad laid out very eloquently, are all negative, especially coming out of this past year.

Now, this new Netanyahu government won't reverse those trends. To my mind, they will only make it worse. You can just look at what Netanyahu agreed to give Bezalel Smotrich, a far-right politician who heads the religious Zionism party. He or one of his proxies will be given de facto control over the Israeli military bodies which administer the West Bank. And really, we're talking about civilian populations. Smotrich wants control over the settlers in the settlements. He wants to give them carte blanche, essentially, to build and do whatever they like in the West Bank. So, you can see a situation where Israeli settlement construction booms. And on the flip side, under Smotrich’s command, the Israeli military starts demolishing every single Palestinian structure in the areas of the West Bank that Israel still directly controls.

LINETSKY: The next issue I have—and this is a big question, and I'm curious to hear from both of you—what's the American interest now in Israel and in Palestine? The Biden administration has claimed it wants to center human rights in its policy abroad. At the same time, Tony Blinken at the J Street Conference a few weeks ago said the United States has an unwavering support for Israel. And last year, when Biden was on his Middle East tour, he didn't say the word occupation once. So, what is United States’ interest in the region, in the conflict, in Israel? And how does it fit with this language of human rights first, because it sounds like we've got, on both sides, a human rights catastrophe?

ZILBER: The Biden administration needs to take the current moment and the incoming Israeli government more seriously than it has taken it in recent weeks. Now, part of it is just we're all waiting to see what the contours of the new government are. They have to officially take power next week or the week after, and then it's kind of wait and see what they actually do. I think Secretary of State Blinken said we're going to judge them not by the personalities, but with regard to the policies. That's not an unreasonable position to take, so long as they actually do judge this new Israeli government on what it actually does. And my argument—and Muhammad probably shares this opinion—is that they're already telling us what they're planning on doing. Netanyahu already gave these various extreme figures in his government all these kinds of outsized powers to do exactly what they've promised to do. So, yes, waiting to see what happens is not unreasonable. But I'd argue Washington and many other capitals all around the world need to maybe change their prism. The old Israel, like they've known it, is likely going to be overtaken by this new government. Such is point number one. And like Muhammad said, alluded to in the op-ed by Kurtzer and Aaron David Miller, yes, certain red lines have to be made very clear to this new Netanyahu government, and a cost has to be at least put forward or floated in order to make clear, by the way, not only to the Netanyahu government that there will be repercussions for what they do, whether on the Palestinian issue or domestically inside Israel, but also to make clear to the Israeli public that there is a cost to voting for these very extreme figures.

Now, again, it's an unfortunate situation to be in, but I think that's just the reality of Israeli domestic politics. Many people who voted for extremists like Ben-Gvir or even Netanyahu again, with an alliance with these extremist figures, they weren't necessarily voting—or definitely not voting at all—say, on the issues of settlement construction or this or that policy agenda. But they said, “Okay, look, we may not like everything these individuals stand for, but we like this aspect of them.” And it was never really made clear either by the outgoing government, the anti-Netanyahu bloc, or the Israeli media, or the international community, that these figures who were in alliance with Netanyahu were really beyond the pale for very specific reasons. I don't think that was made clear in exact terms to the Israeli voting public. But that's a separate issue.

In terms of US interests vis a vis Israel and Palestine—look, they talk about shared interests and shared values and the shared interests in security and defense, primarily as it relates to the Middle East, and the burgeoning regional architecture vis a vis Iran. That's one aspect of it. Economic ties—that's another interest, and so on and so forth. But there's also the issue of shared values. And successive US administrations and successive US presidents have gotten up there and said, “Look, Israel is part of the liberal democratic order. There's a very close and special relationship between America and Israel, between the American people and the Israeli people.” And so, to my mind, while that was true or may have been true in the past, it would be very difficult for a senior Biden administration official, whether secretary of state or even a president, to get it up there and say that we, the Biden administration, share the same values as this Netanyahu government with all these figures we've alluded to previously here on the episode. I think the interest may stay the same, especially vis a vis military ties. And again, it's not for me to say what specific costs may be put out there with regard to Washington making clear to Netanyahu there will be a cost. But the issue of shared values—I don't think that can be paid lip service to anymore given the makeup of this new Israeli government.

And then just the final point. Big picture, I think we all know this—Washington these days would much rather not deal with Israel-Palestine. Between the rise of China, between the war in Ukraine, between other issues, say, happening in the Middle East, relationship with Saudi Arabia, between climate change—this has just not been a priority for this US administration.

LINETSKY: You're really good at this. You took one of my last questions about how the war in Ukraine and the competition with China affect this. Literally, I'm crossing this off right now. But instead I want to ask—go ahead.

ZILBER: Just to tie up this point, they haven't been applying any kind of pressure on Israel, especially as it relates to the Palestinian issue and the peace process, because it just hasn't been a priority. And their whole mindset, to the best of my understanding, is we want to just keep things calm. We want to keep things calm and quiet. And we don't want things to explode because otherwise we, America, will have to get involved. We don't want to get involved. And so, now I think the scenario Muhammad and I laid out, very likely we will see some kind of explosion in the coming months. I'd argue it would behoove Washington to actually get ahead of any of this type of explosion and escalation on the ground here.

LINETSKY: So, you're asking an American administration to think ahead and develop a strategy before something bad happens? Yeah, that sounds like the American government.

ZILBER: America used to be able to do this, I think. And by the way, all kidding aside, like Muhammad said, this is a domestic political issue in America—and by the way, not only in America but many other Western countries. And so, all of these leaders of these various Western countries would do well to actually try to head off any escalation or upsurge in violence.

LINETSKY: Certainly. In the question of Iran, I think there's a whole other episode to talk about Iran and regional security and the Abraham Accords and all this. But I actually want to finish with one question about domestic politics in Israel and Palestine. I myself have worked, what I consider to be extensively, on both sides of the green line dividing Israel and Palestine. And I have my own view of this this question. But what are the folks in Israel and Palestine saying or in Gaza saying?

There's a New York Times piece by Patrick Kingsley which came out yesterday, I think, and he quotes Ofer King, who says, “Amongst voters who are probably in the military, about 15% voted for the far right.” That's 50% higher than the average population for our listeners. Military age people are between 18 and 21, if they're serving their conscription years, if they're doing their obligatory military service, meaning the young people in Israel are voting in larger numbers than the general public for the right. And so, what are young people in Israel saying about the future of the conflict, looking at these voting numbers? And then for you, Muhammad, what are people in Gaza, which is under intense, constant daily depredation, saying about this conflict, given that Hamas is the government? Possibly Islamic Jihad has a lot of influence in the strip. I'd love to speak to the popular sentiment here.

SHEHADA: Yes, I think the first thing is sort of contempt towards what is viewed as the hypocrisy of the American administration and the European Union as well, in the sense that now you can see this sort of panic over the morality of: How do we deal with an Israeli government that includes convicted criminals and members who previously were part of terrorist organizations like Itamar Ben-Gvir, while pretending like the last Israeli governments were sort of okay, or morally, as Neri said, sharing mutual and shared values? So, I think ever since Netanyahu took office 2009, there's been a trend in Israeli politics that no matter whoever sits in office, the result is the same in terms of making Palestinian lives unlivable. So, where was the moral panic in the US when Ayelet Shaked was in Netanyahu's government saying Palestinian mothers are snakes, or Palestinian homes are the dens of snakes? Or when Miri Regev, minister of culture in Netanyahu's government, was saying asylum seekers from Africa are cancer in Israel? This sort of moral panic of the moment, just because an Israeli government will include people with labels on their backs, such as convicted criminals, former members of terrorist organizations, there should have been the same sort of consistency and criticism of the previous Israeli government which was almost completely absent in the last decade.

I was in the room repeatedly when people coming from abroad would lecture us that if only you would adopt nonviolence, if only would be peaceful in your protests, it’s going to be a dramatic difference in your everyday life. That was experimented with between 2018 to 2020—the Great March of Return—the result of which was that Israel shot and killed more than 200 Gazans at the perimeter fence and maimed, wounded, and injured over 30,000. So, the idea of nonviolence was almost altogether killed in the minds of Gazans that it doesn't work. It doesn't need to result because the international community was standing idle when this sort of brutality was unfolding. This progress holds a huge potential, but it requires the US in particular to keep pressure and escalate pressure on the incoming Israeli government to loosen up the restrictions on Gaza. For Hamas—and this is this might be a bit ironic or contradictory—they prefer, to some extent, Netanyahu over Bennett or Lipid because they think Netanyahu is more reluctant, less likely to engage in war, more reluctant to launch an attack on Gaza, whereas with Lipid's government, there's always been the urge to prove the left is equally capable of inflicting pain and violence on the Palestinians, because the Israeli left is trying to demonstrate that they are not weak and soft on Palestinian, quote unquote, “terrorism.” So, in that sense, Netanyahu is less likely to feel an urge to demonstrate that sort of capability to inflict pain on Palestinians, even though his government is going to do a great deal of damage in the West Bank.

LINETSKY: This conversation leaves me with an important unanswered question. Can the United States actually do anything to change the realities on the ground in Israel and Palestine? Israel is a democracy and an ally, so, the US will not and cannot affect change in Israeli domestic politics. Both Democrats and Republicans clamor to announce their unwavering support for Israel. A push to end the occupation of Palestine and apartheid-esque policies in the West Bank and Gaza is unlikely to be forthcoming. So, while the US might want to do something to prevent violence in this now 55-year-old conflict, what is that something? And has the US ever been able to do anything?

Tune in next week when we air part two of this episode with historian Rashid Khalidi, where we dive into the history of America's involvement in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

I'm Zuri Linetsky, and this has been an episode of None of the Above, a podcast of the Eurasia Group Foundation. Thank you so much to Neri Zilber and Muhammad Shehada. Thanks also go out to the None of the Above team. Thanks to our host Mark Hannah, producer Caroline Gray, and associate producer and editor Sarah Leeson. If you enjoyed what you've heard, we would appreciate you subscribing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or anywhere else you find podcasts. Rate us and review us, and if there's a topic you want us to cover, send us an email at info@noneoftheabovepodcast.org. Thanks for joining us.

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