The result was not the worst of it. Indeed, buried in the detailed numbers of last week’s Israeli election were odd crumbs of consolation. No, what made Benjamin Netanyahu’s emphatic win so dispiriting were the depths he plumbed to secure victory. He made two moves in his desperate, and ultimately successful, effort to woo back those Israeli Rightists who had drifted from Likud into the hands of more minor nationalist parties.
Netanyahu reassured them that they could forget the lip service of the past few years, the diplomatic niceties he had served up since returning as prime minister in 2009: There would be no Palestinian state on his watch. On election day itself, he sank lower still. In a Facebook video, he posed in front of a map of the Middle East, as if in a war room, and used the idiom of military conflict to warn that “Arab voters are advancing in large numbers towards voting places” and that this was “a call-up order” for Likud supporters to head to the polling stations. It is worth pausing to digest the full meaning of that move.
The enemy against whom Netanyahu was seeking to rally his people was not Daesh (self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) or massed foreign armies, or even the Palestinians of the West Bank or Gaza. He was speaking of the 20 per cent of the Israeli electorate that is Palestinian: Arabs who were born in, live in and are citizens of Israel. A prime minister was describing the democratic participation of one-fifth of the country he governs in the language of a military assault to be beaten back.
Imagine if a US president had warned the white electorate that black voters were heading to the polls in “large numbers”. Or if a European prime minister had said: “Quick, the Jews are voting!” This is the moral gutter into which Netanyahu plunged just to get elected. It worked. Not because it won fresh recruits to the Right camp, but because it summoned disenchanted hawks back home. That is the small consolation. The numbers suggest Israel did not lurch Rightwards last Tuesday. Indeed, the nationalist and religious Right bloc merely held steady, gaining just one seat. Netanyahu’s success came by recutting that pie to give himself a bigger slice. But it is a cold comfort.
For the Likud leader was able to siphon off votes from the far Right by absorbing its message of belligerence and bigotry. Some will say that is hardly new. Only the naive could look at Netanyahu’s nine years in office (spread over three decades) and conclude he was ever serious about either equality or the pursuit of a two-state solution. But now we have his explicit word, confirming that everything his harshest critics said of him was true. The result is despair — in liberal Tel Aviv, where Bibi’s Labour challenger, Isaac Herzog, topped the poll. In foreign capitals, who will note that Netanyahu has now officially disavowed the near-universally preferred solution for the Israel-Palestine conflict; and in the Jewish diaspora, which has long clung to the hope that Israel at least wants to end the post-1967 occupation, even if it has still not managed to do it.
Mindful of the damage his win-at-all-costs moves had wrought, Netanyahu lost no time trying to unsay what he had said. In his victory speech, he promised to be prime minister of all Israelis, Jewish and non-Jewish alike. And in a US TV interview last Thursday, he insisted that he did want a “sustainable, peaceful two-state solution” after all, so long as “circumstances” change.
I know of at least one European leader who now says privately that Netanyahu’s “credibility is shot” and that “no one will want to work with him”. And in the fellowship of world leaders, that will not be a minority view. How then should those outside Israel react? Some will seize on the disavowal of two states to push instead for their favoured option: A so-called one-state solution.
It sounds both simple and enlightened, everyone living together under one roof, with one person, one vote. But as the Palestinian-Israeli writer Sayed Kashua argued powerfully last week, any conceivable path to such a destination would be “grounded in the trampling of the Palestinians”. The more obvious objection is the one summarised by the Israeli novelist and veteran anti-occupation activist Amos Oz: “After one hundred years of blood, tears and disasters, it is impossible to expect Israelis and Palestinians to jump suddenly into a double bed and begin a honeymoon.”
And yet we cannot go back to mouthing the same old platitudes about two states, not when we have heard Israel’s leader admit he has no intention of allowing any such thing. The right response is surely to match Netanyahu’s honesty with our own. In this regard, the Obama administration has already performed better than Europe. While European Union diplomats greeted Netanyahu’s victory with the same tired formulas, invoking a nonexistent peace process, Washington voiced its displeasure at Netanyahu’s “divisive rhetoric” and let it be known that it was ready to make things uncomfortable.
Until now, Washington has always acted as Israel’s diplomatic protector, blocking hostile resolutions at the United Nations and the like. Now the White House, still smarting over Netanyahu’s Republican address to a Republican Congress, wants to remind Netanyahu that such support is not unconditional. The core message, and it should not be delivered by the US alone, would be simple. It would say, of course the world has to respect the decision of the Israeli electorate. But if this is the path Israel is taking, there will be consequences. If Israel is effectively ruling out a Palestinian state — and given that it rejects a one-state solution whereby Israel absorbs millions of Palestinians and gives them the right to vote — then it has committed itself to maintaining the status quo, permanently ruling over another people and denying them basic democratic rights. And that is a position the world cannot accept. Such a stance may entail US withdrawal of diplomatic cover. It may mean tougher European sanctions of the kind proposed in last Friday’s EU report on colony activity in occupied East Jerusalem.
It could mean a growing shift towards divestment and sanctions, targeted at the occupation, without the polarising tactic of boycott that tends to alienate as many potential supporters as it recruits. Whatever form they take, there will be consequences for Netanyahu’s actions. He was ready to sink to a new low to save his skin, but it will be Israelis — and their Palestinian neighbours — who pay the price.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
