He is on trial for bribery, fraud and breach of trust, the
evidence against him is strong, and his peril is real. The court system is one
of the few aspects of Israeli public life that have not been politicised:
former prime minister Ehud Olmert was sentenced to six years in jail (reduced
to 18 months on appeal) on exactly the same charges Netanyahu now faces.
Netanyahu
has benefitted from being a right-wing populist and ultra-nationalist at a time
when that flavour is enjoying considerable success in politics (Trump,
Bolsonaro, Orbán, Meloni, Modi, etc.). But it’s still remarkable that one man
can make his fate the core political issue for a country of 10 million
people.
Why would
he even bother, given that serving prime ministers can be indicted, put on
trial, even removed from power if found guilty by the courts? Because it’s a
kind of insurance: a convicted prime minister still can’t be removed until
every last possibility for an appeal has been exhausted, which could take many
years.
Moreover, a
prime minister, using his majority in parliament, can try to change or abolish
the laws that he has been accused of breaking. Netanyahu has not yet managed to
do that, because all Israeli governments are coalitions, and he couldn’t
persuade his political partners to go along with it. However, this time could
be different.
Political
attempts to bring down various coalitions led by his Likud Party began even
before he was formally indicted in late 2019, and he barely squeaked a victory
in each of the first three elections. After twelve consecutive years in power, he lost the fourth election in 2021 by an equally narrow margin and is
currently in opposition.
But Bibi is
trying hard to make it back into office next month – and this time he might be
able to form a coalition that would end his legal worries. The Religious
Zionist Party (RZP) is relatively new on the scene, but it is already the
country’s third biggest party.
If a band
of criminals managed to gain political power, you would expect them to
decriminalise crime. If the RZP joins a victorious Likud-led coalition, its
proposed ‘Law and Justice’ plan would take power from the courts and give it to
the politicians instead – and most particularly, it would annul the current law
against fraud and breach of trust.
The leading
figures in the RZP, Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, were once beyond the
pale in Israeli politics.
Ben-Gvir
famously admires Israeli terrorist Baruch Goldstein, who murdered 29
Palestinians and wounded 125 others in Hebron in 1994. Smotrich says “Israel
should be run according to Torah law” – a theocracy like Iran, in other words.
But Israeli politics has now moved far enough right to include even them: 62%
of Israelis now identify as right-wing.
Bibi is not
a religious fanatic himself, but Smotrich’s ‘legal reforms’ would quash
Netanyahu’s indictment, so he would have no reservations about giving the RZP
senior cabinet posts if the right-wing parties get enough seats in this
election to form a government.
Will they?
Impossible to say, really. The magic number is 61 (out of 120 seats in the
Knesset), and the right-wing, pro-Netanyahu parties consistently come up with
only 59 or 60 seats in the polls. The Jewish parties in the current coalition
get 56, and the four parties representing Israel’s Arab citizens get four seats
(or possibly none at all, if they cannot unite).
Like the
previous four elections, this one is likely to end up as a cliff-hanger. It may
not even be the last in the series, for most Israelis are just voting the same
way every time. Meanwhile, however, the real world around them is going to
hell.
The three
million Palestinian Arabs in the occupied West Bank are near the breaking
point. The Palestinian Authority, Israel’s instrument for controlling the
occupied territories, has lost all authority. The PA’s unelected leader,
86-year-old Mahmoud Abbas, is in poor health and has no deputy or designated
successor.
The cities
of Jenin and Nablus in the northern West Bank are already effectively beyond
Israeli or PA control. The young and heavily armed militants of the ‘Lion’s
Den’ militia dominate the streets except when the Israeli army goes in
shooting, and a third full-scale ‘intifada’ may be just weeks away.
Yet Israeli
voters, permanently distracted by the Netanyahu melodrama, seem largely unaware
of what is heading their way.
Gwynne Dyer is an independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.
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Whomever promises to create even more Illegal Settlements at the back of Palestinians´lives- that´s who wins elections in Israel; that´s just pure math, based on past history. The fact people are willing to elect a criminal- not novelty by their own standards. (Nor, to be honest, our own. Portugal has recent examples of Politicians getting away with murder (Mr. Cabrita) and giving dissident refugees´ private info back to the gvrts these people fled from (Mr. Medina)). As for referring to the “Lion´s Den” forces as the heavily armed aggressors who “dominate the streets except when the Israeli army goes in shooting” sounds just ambiguous enough to lead the uninformed readers to the impression that the Lion´s Den attacked 1rst. Truth is, Israeli Army regularly raided and attacked civilian folk trying to go on about their lives before this “Lion´s Den” group was formed. It´s hard to defend yourself against random Israeli army attacks as a civilian; so your narrative, to be intellectually honest, should have included that. No one asks the Ukrainians to fight against Putin´s attacks with nail clippers, do they? Palestinians must be a special breed that way, a good beast of burden as far as international compassion (and condemnation!) goes.
By guida from Lisbon on 28 Oct 2022, 05:20