Binyamin Netanyahu anti-'Occupation' Gadfly

The damage Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has unleashed upon Israel's political society in six months is plain — at least for half of Israel – to see. The other half is willfully blind or maintains that the ends (majoritarian democracy with theocracy as a possible endgame) justify the (economic, social, and military destabilizing) means.

One of the many unintended consequences that Netanyahu has wrought is that he has exposed the direct connection between the "occupation" and his coalition's regime change putsch. "Judicial reform" mobilizers are mostly associated with the settlement movement in one fashion or another. They want to gut the judiciary's powers to remove the last check on absolute Jewish sovereignty in Judea and Samaria. For it is the judiciary that routinely interferes with the confiscation of disputed lands and applies international legal norms in the West Bank. It does this because it is the civilized thing to do; and protects IDF personnel from being dragged before international tribunals as war criminals.

By campaigning to undermine democratic values within the Green Line, even as they are too often flouted in Judea and Samaria, Netanyahu has unwittingly brought “West Bank rules” into Israeli living rooms. Even as Israelis debate whether pure majority rule is "democracy," as the Netanyahu camp maintains, or that overarching "democratic values" define "democracy," as I and other opponents of regime change hold, millions of Palestinian Arabs enjoy no democracy whatsoever. Those in the West Bank live under the unelected Palestinian Authority's authoritarian rule and, on top of that, are subject to IDF military law.

Netanyahu's post-Jabotinsky Likud Party and the ultra-nationalist Orthodox Hardal parties led by Bezalel Smotrich, Itamar Ben Gvir, and Avi Maoz have jarringly connected the dots for many Israelis like me between the Hardal (*) stream, the "occupation," and what is happening inside the Green Line to the rule of law. Of the 64 coalition members, about half are Hardal or Haredi (including three Likud MKs). Ten live over the Green Line.

Hardal sensibilities lean toward intolerance, anti-intellectualism, and antagonism to modernity. Their hilltop clerics have koshered the murder of Arab non-combatants. Government ministers applaud vigilantism. No less than old-school haredim, Smotrich, Ben Gvir, and Maoz appear committed to incremental yet inexorable gender segregation in public spaces. Virtually all their movement's youth groups are now segregated. Zvi Thau, the Supreme Leader of Maoz's party, has made trashing gays his holy mission. 

While haredi politicians of United Torah Judaism and Shas (also coalition members) would profit from taking down the judiciary, they are primarily political free riders narrowly interested in budgets, patronage, and evading national service. 

The advance guard driving “judicial overhaul” is mostly associated with the Hardal stream and is motivated by a desire to annex Judea and Samaria regardless of the demographic and international consequences. The exception that proves the rule is Justice Minister Yariv Levin, who presents as a secular Jew and champions majoritarian democracy. Though, let's not forget that Levin himself has long pressed for annexation. 

In this way, Netanyahu's coalition has shoved the "occupation" in our faces. He has forced us to recognize the political and cultural intersectionality between events in Judea and Samaria and within the Green Line. Until recently, I myself denied that the settlement enterprise served as a hothouse for intolerance and disregard for the rule of law on both sides of the Green Line.  That position is hard to maintain, given that annexation at any price is so central to Netanyahu's regime change.

For de jure annexation of the West Bank to happen, the judiciary would need to be sidelined. Let me pause to explain why annexation makes no sense. There are 3 million Palestinians in Judea, Samaria, and Jerusalem. Another 2 million in the Gaza Strip. Add in nearly two million Palestinian Arabs who are Israeli citizens within the Green Line, and you have 7 million Arabs living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. This is equivalent to the number of Jews in the same territory.

Before my lefty friends smugly mutter, "I told you so," consider that Israel has a moral, historical, legal, and cultural claim to the West Bank. It is bolstered by the security-based practical need to retain the West Bank's high ground, which overlooks coastal Israel. Jews are not colonizers in the West Bank — what "colonizer" can dig down and discover artifacts belonging to their ancestors? Eretz Israel is not occupied, yet the Arabs who live there feel they are “under occupation.” This has become a distinction without a difference.

It took two sides to create this "occupation" conundrum. The settler movement operated by creating facts on the ground in the absence of legal authority or societal consensus. It made settlement the first imperative. No Israeli government, left or right, offered a strategic settlement plan anchored in our security needs that made space for a deal the other side could live with – if it ever wanted peace. Settling the land in the face of unremitting Arab violence became an end in itself, with generations raised in a fervent breeding ground of messianic expectations.

Palestinian Arab intransigence is the flip side of the occupation equation. Imagine if, after the 1993 Oslo Peace Accords signed by Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat, the latter had wanted peace and not the phased destruction of Israel. Imagine if, with all the EU and US money thrown at the PA, Arafat had allowed viable political institutions to be developed and inculcated Palestinian youth in coexistence. Imagine if, when Hamas began blowing up Israeli buses to protest Oslo, Arafat had attended the funerals of the Jewish victims. Imagine if he and Mahmoud Abbas had said "yes" — just once — to a Palestinian state in the offers made by Shimon Peres, Ehud Barak, Ehud Olmert, Ariel Sharon, or even Netanyahu in his earlier incarnation.

At the end of the day, we can't want a Palestinian state more than the Palestinian Arabs do — and as long as their leadership will not accept that the Jews, too, have a right to a national homeland. What matters most for the PLO, Hamas, and its international apologists is not building their polity but destroying ours. What sort of state would sprout if the "occupation" ended tomorrow? How long before Iranian Revolutionary Guards were set up overlooking Ben-Gurion Airport? Gaza is a flashing red light, foretelling what PLO/Hamas control of the West Bank would bring.

Opponents of the "occupation" have never wanted Israelis to overthink the "Day After" a Palestinian state came into being. The more delusional among them imagine the Palestinian Arabs as peaceful shepherds, disciples of Gandhi who, if left to their own devices, would build an egalitarian non-sectarian state. Or they trick themselves into thinking that Israel would pull up its drawbridge and our two peoples would go their separate ways.

It is in this context that Netanyahu comes along to make plain the toxic blowback of radical settler ideology on our domestic polity. And in doing so, he has made the "occupation" the problem not just of the left and the Palestinians but of all opponents of regime change. I blame Netanyahu for normalizing hatred of the judiciary. 

Bearing in mind that this government plans to be in power until at least October 2026, Netanyahu has already given us a sour whiff of what a Hardal-Haredi Israel led by a demagogic Likud might look like.

Netanyahu’s symbiotic union with Jewish supremacists aching to bring animal sacrifices on the Temple Mount and with retrograde non-Zionists keen to maintain their own insularity while imposing ultra-Orthodox mores on Israel's busses, trains, and mainstreet is pushing heretofore agnostic or even right-leaning Israelis into the "anti-occupation" orbit. 

Security hawks like me wonder whether the Jewish subculture nurtured in West Bank messianic circles that spawned Ben-Gvir, Smotrich, and their ilk poses more danger to Herzlian Zionism than Haredi obscurantism. UTJ and Shas leaders may be grifters and shirkers, but their ethical pliability makes them open to bargaining. In contrast, the Hardalim, including those ensconced within the Likud, are rigid ideologues with a sinister agenda: to refashion Israel’s political regime. 

Binyamin Netanyahu is principally responsible for bringing our polity to this brink. He could yet save Israel and salvage his reputation by resigning. That would make a national unity government possible. A new government could pull Israel out of its quagmire and maybe, by and by, set the stage for a reassessment of our strategy in the West Bank. 

Or, he could stay the course and persist in his unintended role as anti-'occupation gadfly. 

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(*) The stream formerly known as national religious or Mizrachi and identified with modern orthodoxy, has largely morphed into חרד״ל, an acronym for חרדי לאומי‎ Ḥaredi Le'umi.

Characterized as religiously stringent, they troll for khumrot (above and beyond what law and tradition require) while valuing insularity, like authentic haredim. What most distinguishes Hardalim is their ethno-supremacist and messianic political orientation. They are mostly post-Zionists in the sense that they take their cues not from the state or the military hierarchy but from their clerics (just like haredim).