by ZAHA HASSAN & DANIEL LEVY
Authoritarian tools forged to control Palestinians are now being turned on elements of the Israeli Jewish population
As Israel’s economy was shuttered and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu became convinced of the need to temporarily suspend his judicial reform legislation this week, one final deal was necessary to hold together his governing coalition.
Itamar Ben Gvir, a serial racist who leads the Jewish Power party and serves as national security minister, was promised by Netanyahu that the state would move forward with creating a national guard under Ben Gvir’s authority – dubbed by some commentators as his “private militia”.
This deal speaks volumes to the intimate connection between the two crises simultaneously gripping Israel: the internal polarisation around judicial reforms, and the government-empowered escalation of extremism against Palestinians.
That connection is glaringly obvious, but rarely acknowledged in Israeli political circles. US President Joe Biden has commented acerbically on the judicial overhaul, while maintaining his studied silence on Israel’s criminal violations of Palestinian rights – indicating that Washington, too, is failing to connect the dots.
The US administration’s convening of Israeli and Palestinian officials, alongside their Jordanian and Egyptian counterparts, in Sharm El Sheikh this month and Aqaba in February, shows that Washington is set on continuing its woefully inadequate template for managing relations with Israel and the accompanying consequences for Palestinians.
While it is not every day that western journalists use words such as “pogrom” to describe attacks on Palestinians, as we saw after the recent events in Huwwara, it is every day that Palestinians experience violence and have their basic human rights trampled by Israeli soldiers, police, settler militias or a combination thereof.
When Netanyahu compared the actions of the settlers in Huwwara to those of pro-democracy protesters across the country, many people were outraged. But the strong link between Israeli policies and violence towards Palestinians, and the contestation around Israeli democracy, is incontrovertible – even if inconvenient.
Israeli society is experiencing what French-Martinique anti-colonial author and politician Aime Cesaire called the “boomerang effect of colonisation”. The work of Cesaire and others looked at how policies used on the colonised by colonial states could then be brought back to the imperial metropole and deployed against citizens.
Curtailing freedoms
Under Israeli settler-colonialism, the geographic distinction between colony and metropole is barely present – but we are now witnessing that phenomenon, whereby some of the authoritarian tools forged by the Israeli state to control Palestinians are being turned on elements of the Israeli Jewish population. Parts of that population fear the curtailment of their own freedoms.
Middle East Eye for more