Fighting for his political life after an inconclusive vote in April, the war criminal said last Tuesday Israel will "apply Israeli sovereignty to the Jordan Valley and the northern Dead Sea immediately" if he comes first in the September 17 polls.
The Jordan Valley and the northern Dead Sea make up 30 percent of the West Bank. They lie in Area C, which means they are mostly under Israeli military and civil control.
Approximately 65,000 Palestinians and 11,000 Israelis residing in illegal settlements live in that area, according to Israeli human rights group B'Tselem. The main Palestinian city is Jericho, with about 28 villages and smaller Bedouin communities.
After Netanyahu's announcement, Arab foreign ministers meeting in Cairo called his election promise a "dangerous development and a new Israeli aggression by declaring the intention to violate the international law. The Arab League regards these statements as undermining the chances of any progress in the peace process and will torpedo all its foundations."
In a series of separate statements, Qatar criticised "Israel's continued contempt of international law"; Turkey slammed the annexation pledge as "racist"; Jordan called Netanyahu's plan a "serious escalation"; and Saudi Arabia called for an emergency meeting of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC).
The United Nations, meanwhile, warned that Netanyahu's plan would have "no international legal effect". And so what? Will there be sanctions, finally? Most probably, not. The Zionist lobby would not allow any attempt to punish Israel for its crimes.
The agreements led to the establishment of an interim Palestinian government - the Palestinian Authority (PA), which was granted limited powers of governance in Areas A and B.
They were also meant to kick-start future peace talks brokered by the United States, with a two-state solution as the desired objective of negotiations.
But the outcomes of the Oslo Accords have instead left Israel in complete control of the Palestinian economy, as well as its civil and security matters in more than 60 percent of the West Bank, designated as Area C.
Despite granting the interim government control over administrative and internal security matters in parts of the West Bank, Israel maintains military control over the entire area.
Efforts to strike a comprehensive peace deal over the years have proven fruitless, leaving the Palestinians with a provisional self-governing authority that has been unable to prevent Israeli expansion.
Israel has since undertaken the further expansion of settlements in the territories it occupied in 1967, including parts of East Jerusalem - which it annexed shortly after the war it fought with Egypt, Jordan and Syria that year.
The UN and international rights groups have condemned the settlement expansion project, declaring settlements illegal under international law.
The Jordan Valley is considered the most fertile land in the West Bank and has proven lucrative for Israeli companies that have long exploited the area's land and resources.
Annexing settlements - and the surrounding Palestinian villages - could well be the end of any lingering hopes of establishing a Palestinian state alongside Israel.
To understand what a formal annexation would mean, here is a breakdown of the three areas that make up the West Bank: Areas A, B and C ?
Today, Area A constitutes 18 percent of the West Bank. The PA controls most affairs in this area, including internal security.
In Area B, which comprises about 21 percent of the West Bank, the PA controls education, health and the economy.
In both areas, Israeli authorities have full external security control.
This means that the Israeli military retains the right to enter these areas at any time, typically to raid homes or detain individuals under the pretext of security.
About 2.8 million Palestinians live crowded into Areas A and B whose major Palestinian cities and towns are Hebron, Ramallah, Bethlehem and Nablus.
Area C is the largest section of the West Bank, comprising about 60 percent of the Palestinian territory.
It is also the site of the vast majority of the more than 200 illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank, where more than 400,000 settlers live.
Although control of part of this area was meant to be transferred to the PA in 1999 as per the Oslo Accords, the handover did not materialise, leaving security, planning and construction matters in the hands of Israel.
B'Tselem, an Israeli human rights group, says Israel has restricted Palestinians from building on, or even accessing, much of the land in Area C, regularly denying requests for building permits.
Palestinians who attempt to build in the area are subject to home demolition orders, resulting in displacement and the disruption of livelihoods, the UN has said.
Israel's blocking of Palestinian development in the area is also carried out by "designating large swaths of land as state land, survey land, firing zones, nature reserves and national parks," the rights group says.
Israeli settlements are meanwhile allocated large plots of land that are connected to advanced infrastructure, such as Jewish-only bypass roads that circumvent Palestinian areas.
In addition to facing severe restrictions on planning and construction, Palestinians are also unable to access basic resources such as water.
The end result might well be the indirect expulsion of Palestinians from an area that is currently being used to serve Israeli purposes.
According to B'Tselem, the forcible transfer of Palestinians from occupied territory is considered a war crime, whether executed in a direct or indirect manner.
Will the ICC stand by and watch Israel's ethnic cleansing of Palestine without raising a finger or the Legal voice to prevent this long-lasting genocide?
Everyone talks about the fourth-largest party as the kingmaker: Former Defense Minister and bouncer Avigdor Lieberman’s party polls at 9 or 10 seats. The rightwing settler wants to cobble together a “unity government” of the two top parties and his.
What about the third largest party in the polling? That’s the Joint List of Arab parties, now polling at 10 or 11 seats. You’d think they’d be in great demand.
But no one is talking about coalition building with the Palestinian parties because they’re not Zionist Jewish; and Israeli governments are Jewish and Zionist.
So Binyamin Netanyahu can make deals with messianic extremists and other rightwing anti-Arab racists, trying to squeeze out an extra three rightwing seats. And insiders can speculate about Labor joining Netanyahu to the point that the Labor leader shaves his mustache off in an ad to make a credible denial. And Netanyahu can try to paint Lieberman as a “leftist” to rally his voters on the religious right.
But the third largest party in Israel counts for nothing.
You’d think that– if Israel is a democracy— the Palestinians would be highly-sought-after. As highly sought-after as black and brown voters have been to the Democratic Party in the U.S. since the 60’s.
Anyone with the fantasy of seeing a center-left Israeli government needs those Palestinian voters. Add up all the Zionist/Jewish seats on the center-left (31 for Blue and White, 7 for Labor/Gesher, and 7 for the new Democratic Union Party of Barak/Meretz/Shaffir (and yes, one of those parliamentarians is Palestinian)), and you only get to 45, well short of a majority.
Throw in the 10 or 11 Joint List seats and you get to spitting distance of a majority. Right where Netanyahu and the right are now.
In fact, in the 1990s Israel Labor governments under Rabin and Barak depended on the passive support of Palestinian parliamentarians, to guarantee them five votes in crunch time inside a closely-divided parliament.
Today some of the Palestinian parties are said to be willing to play such a role again. Ayman Odeh has said he could imagine joining a Blue and White coalition. And Ahmad Tibi said today that he is open to participating in a “blocking” coalition to allow Blue and White’s Benny Gantz to become PM if Gantz promises higher status to the Palestinian community.
But the Israeli centrist parties don’t want anything to do with Palestinians. Benny Gantz rejected Odeh’s “historic” overture.
“We will not invite a party that does not recognize Israel as a Jewish state,” [Blue and White leader Gabi] Ashkenazi told Army Radio.
Likud and Blue-and-White were deadlocked after the April election, but Benny Gantz never even called the Joint List “to ask for its recommendation” to the Israeli president President Reuven Rivlin about forming the next government. Palestinian parliamentarian Yousef Jabareen said that’s “because of racism in Blue and White.”
The polling shows that Palestinian voters are open to these parties participating in a government (68-12), but Jewish voters are overwhelmingly against it (60-9).
Labor leaders have been just as resistant as Blue and White to appealing to Palestinian voters because the mood of the Israeli public is so anti-Palestinian. FP: [Former] Labor leader Avi Gabbay said in an interview in 2017: “We will not sit with them, unequivocally. … I do not see anything that connects us to them [the Arab political parties] or allows us to be in the same government with them.” Former Labor leader Yitzhak Herzog said in 2016 that the center was taking away votes from the Labor Party because he claimed to hear, “in endless encounters with the Israeli public that we are always Arab lovers.”…
The Palestinian parties and mainstream Jewish parties don’t get along for the simple reason that the Jewish parties are all Zionist (with some softening on the Meretz left, which includes Muslim candidates), while Palestinians are generally anti-Zionist. And no wonder: Zionism has been a bad deal for Palestinians from its beginnings.
The Palestinian alienation from the Jewish political process has gotten worse in recent years, as Israeli politics have swung further and further right. Last year Israel passed a basic law proclaiming Israel the “nation state of the Jewish people,” that Palestinians see as a frank declaration of apartheid: Jews have the “exclusive” right to self-determination in the biblical land of Israel, and Jews have higher land rights and language rights than Palestinians.
Blue and White has been running to the right in this election, supporting illegal Israeli settlements and not coming out for a Palestinian state.
Some on the Israeli left continue to imagine a coalition of Palestinian and Jewish voters to break open the rightwing stranglehold. Earlier this year, Mikhael Manekhin and Ameer Fakhoury reissued the challenge to the Israeli left and Palestinian to work together to build a new society.
What does it mean to be a liberal or progressive in Israel today? Not only do we need to call for ending the occupation within a framework of two states, but we must also address the fundamental political inequalities of the Palestinian minority in Israel. The Jewish left and the Arab Palestinian parties in Israel must be able to seek a more common political and ideological ground; otherwise Netanyahu’s claim of Arab citizens as a political threat to the Jewish state will remain without an ideological and political alternative.
That dream remains more distant than ever. Jabareen said: “It is a fallacy that joining a Zionist party will bring real change. We are not busy tailoring our suits. We will be in the opposition.”
And Peace Now’s Yossi Alpher said today, the likely outcome of the election is a unity coalition.
The only mathematically-possible coalition at this point appears to be one that involves both [Likud and Blue and White]. Liberman’s ten mandates give him leverage in this regard.
Palestinians will be completely left out from that government, like virtually every government before that.
Former Prime Minister Ehud Barak, the general who is running on the list of the Democratic Union (formerly Meretz) and in his time in power did all he could to further a "soft" ethnic cleansing of Palestine in Camp David, said recently that Netanyahu "is no more of a magician than the magicians you bring to your son's birthday party. He does not possess superhuman skills - he is just a con artist. If I managed to defeat Netanyahu in 1999, he can be defeated today, too."
Blessed be the believers in Ehud Barak's change of heart and in Israeli Jews' respect for the Palestinians right to dignity and life.
The Lebanese response, accompanied by jubilation throughout Lebanon, shows that Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, may have overplayed his cards. However, for Netanyahu it was a worthy gamble, as the Israeli leader is desperate for any new political capital that could shield him against increasingly emboldened contenders in the country’s September 17 general elections.
A fundamental question that could influence any analysis of the decision to strike Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Gaza is whether the strategy originated from the Israeli government or the limited personal calculations of Netanyahu himself. I contend that the latter is true.
Israel has already violated the sovereignty of all of these regions, bombing some of them hundreds of times in the past, but striking all at once is unprecedented. Since neither Israel, nor its US allies offered any convincing military logic behind the campaign, there can be no other conclusion that the objectives were entirely political.
One obvious sign that the attacks were meant to benefit Netanyahu, and Netanyahu only, is the fact that the Israeli Prime Minister violated an old Israeli protocol of staying mum following this type of cross-border violence. It is also uncommon for top Israeli officials to brag about their country’s intelligence outreach and military capabilities. Israel, for example, has bombed Syria hundreds of times in recent years, yet rarely taken responsibility for any of these attacks.
Compare this with Netanyahu’s remarks following the two-day strikes of August 24-25. Only minutes after the Israeli strikes, Netanyahu hailed the army’s “major operational effort”, declaring that “Iran has no immunity anywhere.”
Regarding the attack on the southeast region of Aqraba in Syria, Netanyahu went into detail, describing the nature of the target and the identities of the enemy as well.
Two of the Hezbollah fighters killed in Syria were identified by the Israeli army, which distributed their photographs while allegedly travelling on the Iranian airline, Mahan “which Israel and the United States have identified as a major transporter of weaponry and materiel to Hezbollah and other Iranian proxies in Syria and Lebanon,” according to the Times of Israel.
Why would Israel go to this extent, which will surely help the targeted countries in uncovering some of Israel’s intelligence sources?
The Economist revealed that “some … in Israel’s security and political establishments are uncomfortable” with Netanyahu’s tireless extolling of “Israel’s intelligence-gathering and operational successes in surprising detail.”
The explanation lies in one single phrase: the September 17 elections.
In recent months, Netanyahu has finally managed to wrestle the title: the country’s longest-serving Prime Minister, a designation that the Israeli leader has earned, despite his checkered legacy dotted with abuse of power, self-serving agenda and several major corruption cases that rope in Netanyahu directly, along with his wife and closest aides.
Yet, it remains unclear whether Netanyahu can hang on for much longer. Following the April 9 elections, the embattled Israeli leader tried to form a government of like-minded right-wing politicians, but failed. It was this setback that pushed for the dissolution of the Israeli Knesset on May 29 and the call for a new election. While Israeli politics is typically turbulent, holding two general elections within such a short period of time is very rare, and, among other things, it demonstrates Netanyahu’s faltering grip on power.
Equally important is that, for the first time in years, Netanyahu and his Likud party are facing real competition. These rivals, led by Benjamin Gantz of the Blue and White (Kahol Lavan) centrist party are keen on denying Netanyahu’s every possible constituency, including his own pro-illegal settlements and pro-war supporters.
Statements made by Gantz in recent months are hardly consistent with the presumed ideological discourse of the political center, anywhere. The former Chief of General Staff of the Israeli army is a strong supporter of illegal Jewish settlements and an avid promoter of war on Gaza. Last June, Gantz went as far as accusing Netanyahu of “diminishing Israel’s deterrence” policy in Gaza, which “is being interpreted by Iran as a sign of weakness.”
In fact, the terms “weak” or “weakness” have been ascribed repeatedly to Netanyahu by his political rivals, including top officials within his own right-wing camp. The man who has staked his reputation on tough personal or unhindered violence in the name of Israeli security is now struggling to protect his image.
This analysis does not in any way discount the regional and international objectives of Netanyahu’s calculations, leading amongst them his desire to stifle any political dialogue between Tehran and Washington, an idea that began taking shape at the G7 summit in Biarritz, France. But even that is insufficient to offer a rounded understanding of Netanyahu’s motives, especially because the Israeli leader is wholly focused on his own survival, as opposed to future regional scenarios.
However, the “Mr. Security” credentials that Netanyahu aimed to achieve by bombing multiple targets in four countries might not yield the desired dividends. Israeli media is conveying a sense of panic among Israelis, especially those living in the northern parts of the country and in illegal Jewish settlements in the Occupied Golan Heights.
This is hardly the strong and mighty image that Netanyahu was hoping to convey through his military gamble. None of the thousands of Israelis who are currently being trained on surviving Lebanese retaliations are particularity reassured regarding the power of their country.
Netanyahu is, of course, not the first Israeli leader to use the military to achieve domestic political ends. Late Israeli leader, Shimon Peres, has done so in 1996 but failed miserably, but only after killing over 100 Lebanese and United Nations peacekeepers in the Southern Lebanese village of Qana.
The consequences of Netanyahu’s gamble would come at a worse price for him than simply losing the elections. Opening a multi-front war is a conflict that Israel cannot win, at least, not any more. That is why the war criminal reurned to what the majority of Israelis wants most: the ethnic cleansing of the native population in order to have, in the place of historical Palestine, the big Zionist state of Israel where the Palestinians, Muslins and Christians alike, are doomed to become cheap labour and slaves of the Jewish settlers.
PALESTINA
BRASIL
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