Now, armed with a stable coalition, immune from any meaningful criticism, let alone tangible consequences to his action, the Israeli leader feels ready to carry out his right-wing agenda without further hesitation.
While Israeli politicians and military strategists are openly fighting over who has cost Israel its precious ‘deterrence,’ very few seem willing to consider that Israel’s best chance at survival is peacefully co-existing with Palestinians.
In truth, Israel has not changed much, either in its own self-definition or in its treatment of Palestinians. Failing to understand this is tantamount to tacit approval of Israel’s racist, violent and colonial policies in Occupied Palestine over the course of 75 years.
Israel is now facing the dilemma of either ignoring this new Palestinian factor, at its own peril, or accepting the inescapable fact that Israel can never enjoy stability while Palestinians remain occupied, confined and oppressed.
It turns out that morality cannot be divided based on geography, class, religion or race. It might be time for ordinary Israelis to accept this unavoidable truism.
So far, Bennett has proven to be another Netanyahu. Yet, if Israel’s longest-running prime minister ultimately failed to convince Israelis of the merit of his political doctrine, Bennett’s charade is likely to be exposed much sooner, and the price, this time, is sure to be even heavier.
While the Americans and the Israelis are busy engaging in the ever-familiar ritual of ‘putting lipstick on a pig’, the Palestinians remain irrelevant in all of this, as their political aspirations continue to be discounted, and their freedom delayed.
Netanyahu struggled to redeem his image. It was too late. As strange as this may sound, it was not Bennett or Lieberman who finally dethroned the ‘King of Israel’, but the Palestinians themselves.
n truth, Mansour Abbas, a Palestinian Arab politician who is willing to find common ground with extremists and proud ‘Arab killers’, only represents himself. The future shall attest to this claim.
Without a clear ideology, especially when combined with the lack of a written Constitution, Israeli politics will remain hostage to the whims of politicians and their personal interests, if not that of Netanyahu, then of someone else.