Will the real Benjamin Netanyahu now stand up and be counted? Here is the Israeli prime minister’s last chance to tell his fellow citizens — once and for all, Jews and Arabs — his honest thinking about a final Palestinian-Israeli peace settlement, something he has never revealed. The Palestinians have conceded more than half of the share of their homeland in accordance with 1948 Partition Plan of Palestine. The Jewish community was then surprisingly awarded 55 per cent of the former British colony, but controls more than 78 per cent of Palestine, excluding the Israeli-Occupied Territories beyond the 1967 armistice line where some 500 illegal Jewish colonies have been established since the 1967 armistice agreement.
The breakup of Netanyahu’s coalition government, to date tormented by ongoing bickering, and the parliamentary election scheduled sometime in March, comes in the wake of Israel’s serious economic problems and a controversial Jewish nation-state bill that critics say discriminates against Israel’s Arab citizens, who account for more than one-fifth of the country’s population.
Netanyahu, Israel’s second-longest serving Prime Minister and leader of the right-wing Likud Party, is expected, according to two television polls last Tuesday, to win the national election if it is held in the near future. If so, he will surely be serving a fourth term as prime minister. What has been rather audacious about Netanyahu’s action was his dismissal of finance minister Yair Lapid and justice minister Tzipi Livni, two prominent centrist ministers who have been whiplashing dominant right-wing cabinet members. In turn, Netanyahu claimed that Lapid and Livni have been engaged in behind-the-scenes attempts for an alternative coalition government. Livni, however, denied the accusation and claimed that Netanyahu himself has been trying to replace both of them.
An issue that has recently preoccupied the Knesset and the Israeli people has been the nation-state legislation that won cabinet approval more than a week ago, but Livni, according to Reuters, “fell out with Netanyahu over the nation-state legislation ... [and] she has looked uncomfortable in the government ever since peace negotiations with the Palestinians collapsed in April”. Reuters said that “a new mandate could give Netanyahu more leeway domestically to pursue his expansionist ... [colony] policies on occupied land Palestinians seek for a state. It will also allow the prime minster to push ahead with the Jewish nation-state bill that he says is essential to protecting Israel’s Jewish identity”.
For a clearer situation of life in occupied Jerusalem, the opening paragraph by Nathan Thrall in the London Review of Books says: “What the government of Israel calls its eternal, undivided capital is among the most precarious, divided cities in the world. When it conquered the eastern part of [occupied] Jerusalem and the West Bank — both administered by Jordan — in 1967, Israel expanded the city’s municipal boundaries threefold. As a result, approximately 37 per cent of [occupied] Jerusalem’s current residents are Palestinians. They have separate buses, schools, health facilities, commercial centres and speak a different language. In their neighbourhoods, Israeli ... [colonists] and border police are frequently pelted with stones, while Palestinians have, on several occasions recently, been beaten by Jewish nationalist youths in the western half of the city. Balloons equipped with cameras hover above [occupied] East Jerusalem, maintaining surveillance over the Palestinian population. Most Israelis have never visited and do not even know the names of the Palestinian areas their government insists on calling its own. Municipal workers come to these neighbourhoods with police escorts.”
A shocking incident last week in Jewish-dominated occupied West Jerusalem, according to the Washington Post’s William Booth, was when “Arsonists who police suspect are Jewish extremists torched a first-grade classroom and scrawled racist graffiti on the walls of one of the few Arab-Hebrew bilingual schools in Israel”. The slogans that were spray-painted on the walls outside the classrooms declared ‘Death to Arabs’ and ‘There is no coexistence with cancer’.
Paz Cohen, chairman of the occupied Jerusalem parent-teacher association, whose daughter is one of the 600 students who attend the school, is committed not only to shared languages but coexistence between Jews and Arabs. The students are taught about Christian, Jewish and Muslim cultures and religious beliefs.
“We live in a city with many different people,” Cohen told Washington Post. “It is important for my daughter to keep her Jewish identity, but also important for her to learn who else lives here.”
It is now time for Netanyahu and his key American supporter, US President Barack Obama, to absorb this line.
George S. Hishmeh is a Washington-based columnist. He can be contacted at ghishmeh@gulfnews.com
