Achi news desk-
In Israel, the far right is increasingly influential in politics, with a government that depends for its existence on a settler movement driving an increasingly extreme agenda.
Analysts note that settler and far-right voices have come to dominate the cabinet, providing legal and political cover for even greater expansion into internationally recognized Palestinian territory, and the basis for much of the ferocity of Israel’s war. on Gaza.
And yet, despite that, and regardless of the international criticism of Israel that continues to grow, the United States continues to fund it.
US lawmakers voted in the Senate on Tuesday, by an overwhelming majority, to transfer $17bn in military aid to Israel.
Celebrating the bill’s passage, House Majority Leader Chuck Schumer told the Senate: “Tonight we say to our allies: ‘We stand with you.’
“We say to our opponents: ‘Don’t mess with us.’ We are saying to the world: ‘The United States will do everything to protect democracy and our way of life.'”
Settlers and politics
But in Israel, “democracy” and the system that Schumer and other US politicians are after is about illegally settling occupied Palestinian land, replacing the native population, and creating a dual system of government, with Jews are ruled under the civil law of Israel, and Palestine is occupied. under military law.
These settlements now dot much of the occupied West Bank, either congregating in established clusters, or in outposts that even the Israeli state considers illegal, but does little to their circle.
As their numbers and political support have increased, settlers have become more confident, attacking Palestinian villages in armed and coordinated raids, occasionally with military support, and evicting Palestinian villagers.
Alongside the expansion of the settlements, there has been a wider drift to the right across Israeli society, which saw the country elect its most right-wing parliament or Knesset in its history in November 2022.
Its members include far-right provocateur Itamar Ben-Gvir – convicted of incitement in 2007 – who acts as national security minister, and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, whose claims to Palestinian territory are in the West Bank occupied in violation of international law.
“The settlers and far-right movements have been growing rapidly within Israel for years, to the point where the formation of a government is impossible without the participation of right-wing parties opposed to territorial compromise with the Palestinians,” said Omar H Rahman of the Middle East Council on Global Affairs.
Ben-Gvir and Smotrich, members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition cabinet, are speaking to a growing constituency characterized as “messianic” in its approach to Palestinians and their land, according to analysts.
Settler ideologies – which claim, among other things, religious justification for taking Palestinian land – are a growing political presence since the 1967 war, which resulted in Israel occupying the Gaza Strip, the Sinai Peninsula, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem.
“The United States has played a significant role in this right movement by ensuring Israel’s punishment for relentlessly building illegal settlements, thereby undercutting those within Israeli politics who warned of the consequences of unfettered expansion,” Rahman said. “This showed the Israeli public that there would be no punishment for supporting those in Israel who want all the land ‘between the river and the sea’.”
Israel appears to have carried out a violent campaign in the occupied West Bank alongside its war on Gaza, which followed a Hamas-led attack on Israel in which 1,139 people were killed and some 200 taken to Gaza.
In March this year, 7,350 Palestinians had been arrested by Israeli forces across the West Bank, many without charge and without any hope of due process.
In recent days, the rights group Amnesty International has strongly criticized settler attacks on Palestinians and what it calls an established system of apartheid that reigns in the West Bank which has been occupy
In the days after the discovery of the body of 14-year-old Binyamin Ahimeir, himself from an illegal settlement on the West Bank in Israel, hundreds of settlers went on a deadly rampage between April 12 and 16, torching homes, fruit trees and vehicles.
By the end of their attack, four Palestinians lay dead, killed by either settlers or Israeli military forces, Amnesty said, including Omar Hamed, a 17-year-old boy from near Ramallah.
It is estimated that 487 Palestinians have been killed in the occupied West Bank in attacks by armed settlers, who are often supported by security forces according to witnesses, or by security forces in almost nightly raids on towns and refugee camps and in other incidents.
Israel’s war on Gaza has killed at least 34,262 people. The true figure is likely to be much higher.
Netanyahu and the settlers
While Netanyahu has officially rejected settler ambitions for Gaza, he has two settlement ministers in his cabinet and the movement continues to grow.
Expectations that prime minister Netanyahu could act as a check on settler ambitions have also proved unfounded. Since at least 2015, he and his Likud party have been aligning themselves with extreme elements of the right by running campaigns noted for their dog-whistling racism, said Eyal Lurie-Paredes of the Middle East Institute.
“This is not just about the present,” added Lurie-Paredes, “It’s about the future.
“Most of the political parties, not just Likud, have never really opposed the settlements. They are a winning card. The two main sectors of the settler population – national orthodoxy and ultra-orthodox – have the highest birth rate among Israeli Jews from high birth rates. Of Jewish first graders, more than 40 percent belong to these groups.
In addition, the Israeli governments have created a better welfare state in the West Bank for Jews, offering them better infrastructure and cheaper housing – which either drives people to move there and increase their belonging to the settlement movement,” he added.
Referring to the years leading up to Israel’s founding in 1948, Tel Aviv analyst Dahlia Scheindlin said, “Settler politics has always been there.”
“However,” he noted, “he’s never really been particularly religious. Only after the 1967 war did that element enter the political mainstream. From that point, the idea that territorial expansion was part of Messianic redemption took hold as a specific theology among some religious Jews.
“In conjunction with this there was a state that was willing to facilitate settlements covertly. However, more recently, Likud’s own popular mandate has become inseparable from that of Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, and now we have a government that openly embraces settlers, the extreme right and their politics.”
The United States and the settlers
The US says it opposes the creation of settlements and has recently sanctioned organizations linked to the movement, known to be close to Ben-Gvir and said to be actively raising money for the settler movement in the United States.
The US government has also said it is considering sanctions against the Netzah Yehuda battalion, which operates within the occupied West Bank and draws its recruits from Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox Jews, over repeated allegations of wrongdoing. -handling rights.
Nevertheless, while the United States may oppose settlements on paper, the Israeli government publicly embraced the mission of settlers Ben-Gvir and Smotrich in June last year, overturning legislation that had stood for 27 years, and giving effective control to Smotrich on the expansion and acceleration. settlement building process. Netanyahu himself has repeatedly rejected the idea of a Palestinian state, and presented himself as a blow against Palestinian self-determination.
Apart from a short period under former President Donald Trump, when the United States supported the idea of settlements, Washington has considered them illegal since 1978. In 1983, the census showed that the population of West Bank settlers was 22,800. It is currently estimated at 490,493.
And now, the dominance of the ultranationalist tendency of settlers in Israeli politics threatens Gaza.
At a “Settlement Brings Security” conference in Jerusalem in January, around a third of Netanyahu’s cabinet ministers, as well as up to 15 additional Knesset members, including members of his own nationalist Likud Party, walked past a large map of Gaza with a bold star of David emblazoned above his head.
For Palestinians in Gaza, the threat of a new wave of displacement to make way for any such illegal settlement is real – promoted by figures at the top of Israeli politics.
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