Fortunately, in 2023 Israelis bravely rose up in the 100,000s to protest for weeks against proposals by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with his band of far-right governing cohorts to allegedly reform Israel’s judiciary, that would’ve transformed this 75-year-old democracy into an autocracy. Due to strong opposition from protesting Israelis and from some brave souls within the governing ranks, the prime minister and his right-wing coalition were forced to give up on almost all of their hopes towards becoming much more powerful via judicial reforms.
These protests included Israel’s military reservists standing down, and Israel’s largest trade union declaring a general strike which caused the cancellation of all outgoing flights, as workers at universities, hospitals, airlines and elsewhere paralyzed much of the economy. For weeks, protesters flooded the streets outside the Knesset, the prime minister’s office and the Supreme Court.
During this time, these extreme right governing ministers and power players led by Prime Minister Netanyahu took a hit in the polls as their popularity took a deep dive, putting a time limit on their already tenuous hold on power.
And in January 2024, in the midst of deep political divisions within Israel, its Supreme Court justices courageously delivered its fatal blow to one major surviving proposal. So, Israel’s democracy is still standing, even if somewhat bruised.
This failed plan to overhaul Israel’s judiciary began in November 2022, when a number of Israeli far right extremists surprisingly managed to squeak out a win, whereupon they proceeded to resurrect Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from his political deathbed by inviting him to lead them. The former prime minister had been ousted from power in 2021 while he faced multiple indictments for criminal wrongdoings.
So, in early 2023, the prime minister’s partnership with Israel’s most far-right government in history, including fringe religious nationalists, Jewish supremacists and settler activists, set out to significantly strengthen their power via implementing Israel’s judiciary reforms, in order to promote their major long-term objective of relocating all Palestinians in Israel to other countries, and/ or even to their outright elimination.
These right-wingers’ other major goal has always been to draw the U.S. into a war against Israel’s arch enemy, Iran, the sponsor of terrorist /militarist organizations like Hamas in Gaza, the Houthis in Yemen and Hezbollah in Lebanon.
But when this right-wing governing coalition failed in their plans to overhaul Israel’s judiciary and as their popularity has tanked, how could they hope to succeed in plans to oust all Palestinians from residing in the West Bank and Gaza or anywhere else within Israel and to successfully confront Iran, all of which are in direct contradiction to U.S policy and U.S. national security interests?
I’d almost feel sorry for Israel’s prime minister who’s being squeezed by working to please his right-wing governing partners in order to stay in power while giving lip service to U.S. counsel that’s counter to Israel’s current 3-months old military war tactics of the outright destruction of Gaza and the trapped Palestinians living there, in response to the October 7, 2023 brutal massacre of about 1,200 souls in Israel with 240 being taken as hostages by Hamas from Gaza. That this horror took place despite Israel having been in possession of accurate, ample, detailed, timely intelligence from allies and from within is a troublesome fact that demands accountability now, and not later, post war.
Meanwhile, the U.S. President’s Joe Biden’s administration with interested Arab officials have been hard at work to prevent both the escalation of the 2023 Israel-Hamas war outside of Israel and the relocation of Palestinians residing in Israel to other Arab countries.
The following article describes how widespread this right-wing thinking of relocating all Gazan Palestinians outside of Israel has become.
This mind set means that the U.S.A. will definitely have its hands full in working with Israel to replace Hamas in Gaza with the Palestinian Authority governing body from the West Bank or its equal; the release/ rescue of all hostages taken from Israel by Hamas; and the implementation of a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine.
As per the January 5, 2024 Washington Post report, “Israeli calls for Gaza’s ethnic cleansing are only getting louder” by Ishaan Tharoor:
Excerpts:
“Members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition have called for the dropping of a nuclear bomb on densely-populated Gaza, the total annihilation of the territory as a mark of retribution, and the immiseration of its people to the point that they have no choice but to abandon their homeland.”
“This week alone, a parliamentarian from Netanyahu’s Likud party went on television and said it was clear to most Israelis that “all the Gazans need to be destroyed.” Then, Israel’s ambassador in Britain told local radio that there was no other solution for her country than to level “every school, every mosque, every second house” in Gaza to degrade Hamas’s military infrastructure.”
“This accumulating rhetoric forms part of the 84-page application filed by the government of South Africa at the International Court of Justice, accusing Israel of actions that amount to genocide or failure to prevent genocide. Though it condemns Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack, the South African case argues “no armed attack on a State’s territory no matter how serious — even an attack involving atrocity crimes — can … provide any possible justification for, or defense to, breaches” of the Genocide Convention. Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, it explains, has already “laid waste to vast areas of Gaza, including entire neighborhoods, and has damaged or destroyed in excess of 355,000 Palestinian homes,” rendering swaths of the territory uninhabitable for a long period of time to come. Israeli authorities, claimed the South African complaint, have failed to suppress “direct and public incitement to commit genocide” from a host of Israeli politicians, journalists and public officials.”
“That includes far-right figures like finance minister Bezalel Smotrich and national security minister Itamar Ben Gvir, who do little to hide their vision of an ethnically-cleansed Gaza. “What needs to be done in the Gaza Strip is to encourage emigration,” Smotrich said in an interview Sunday with Israeli Army Radio. “If there are 100,000 or 200,000 Arabs in Gaza and not 2 million Arabs, the entire discussion on the day after will be totally different.” Ben Gvir separately called for the de facto forced migration of hundreds of thousands out of Gaza.
“U.S. and other Western officials condemned these statements as “inflammatory and irresponsible.” But such pushback is doing little to change the tone of the conflict. Netanyahu himself, according to my colleagues, tried to cajole Egypt and other Arab governments and states elsewhere into taking Gazan refugees — a non-starter for many in the Middle East, who fear further Palestinian dispossession of their lands.”
“Israeli calls for de facto ethnic cleansing and potential Israeli settlement of Gaza may not reflect the actual position of Israel’s wartime cabinet. “In private, Israeli officials say the proposals [to relocate Gazans] stem from the political imperatives of Netanyahu’s coalition and his dependence on far-right parties to maintain power,” my colleagues reported.”
“The professionals in the military and the security establishment know this is not even in the realm of possibility,” a person directly familiar with conversations inside the Israeli government told The Washington Post, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly. “They know there is no future without Gazans in Gaza and the [Palestinian Authority] as part of the government.”
“Nobody is going to take the steps that would precede new normalization agreements when Netanyahu is rebuffing Arab states demands on a two-state political process and also insisting that they should fund Gaza reconstruction with no questions asked or strings attached,” wrote Michael Koplow and David Halperin of the Israel Policy Forum.”
“Meanwhile, a group of prominent Israelis, including former lawmakers, top scientists and intellectuals, wrote a joint letter Wednesday condemning Israel’s judicial authorities for not reining in the genocidal rhetoric widely on show. “For the first time that we can remember, the explicit calls to commit atrocious crimes, as stated, against millions of civilians have turned into a legitimate and regular part of Israeli discourse,” they wrote. “Today, calls of these types are an everyday matter.”
As per his December 29, 2023 New York Times opinion piece, “What Is Happening to Our World?” Thomas L. Friedman writes of how Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu became the architect of cataclysmic intelligence failures of the century that culminated in the 2023 Israel Hamas war.
Excerpts:
“Before this war, Netanyahu actively worked to keep the Palestinians divided and weak by strengthening Hamas in Gaza with billions of dollars from Qatar, while simultaneously working to discredit and delegitimize the more moderate Palestinian Authority in Ramallah, committed to Oslo and nonviolence in the West Bank. That way Netanyahu could tell every U.S. president, in effect: I’d love to make peace with the Palestinians, but they are divided, and moreover, the best of them can’t control the West Bank and the worst of them control Gaza. So what do you want from me?”
“Netanyahu’s goal has always been to destroy the Oslo option once and for all. In that, Bibi and Hamas have always needed each other: Bibi to tell the United States and Israelis that he had no choice, and Hamas to tell Gazans and its new and naïve supporters around the world that the Palestinians’ only choice was armed struggle led by Hamas.”
“The only exit from this mutually assured destruction is to bring in some transformed version of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank — or a whole new P.L.O.-appointed government of Palestinian technocrats — in partnership with moderate Arab states like Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia.”
Gronda Morin 
Netanyahu is actively committing crimes against humanity! He needs to be shut down immediately. Between him and Putin they are liable to start another world war, and no sane person wants that!
LikeLiked by 1 person
Hi!
I’m convinced that both Putin and Netanyahu will continue with their wars in the hope that their authoritarian buddy the US MAGA republican ex-President Trump will become the next U.S. president in November 2024.
But I’m betting that Israel’s PM Netanyahu won’t last that long and Russia’s President Putin will be left with a failing country with a second-rate economy as he discovers that his buddy has lost bigtime while the U.S.A. remains a democracy.
Hugs, Gronda
LikeLike