Netanyahu’s war on Israel’s tenuous democracy
On a cool November night in the West Bank, Murad Shteiwi walked me through the streets where he had been shot.
Shteiwi is an activist leader in the town of Kufr Qaddum, a quiet village near the northern city of Nablus. Israel closed the road between Kufr Qaddum and Nablus during the second intifada in the 2000s to prevent Palestinians from getting too close to the nearby Israeli settlement Qadumim. A drive to Nablus that should take 15 minutes takes closer to 40.
On Fridays, the residents of Kufr Qaddum stage demonstrations — which they say are peaceful, though protesters have been known to throw stones — calling on Israel to open the road. Shteiwi, a kind-faced, middle-aged man with a thin mustache, says he’s been shot twice by Israeli soldiers during these protests and jailed five times.
He insists that he’s not opposed to Israel’s existence — he describes his hope for ending up with “two states, neighbors” — but will not tolerate the continued presence of Israeli settlers on what he sees as his people’s historical land.
“We are human beings. We like life,” he says in fluent English. “Life with them, the man who steals my land, is impossible.”
In democracies, these disagreements are supposed to be settled through the ballot box. But Murad Shteiwi will not get to vote in Israel’s upcoming elections on March 2. The West Bank’s Palestinian residents, who live under the grinding realities of occupation, are not Israeli citizens and don’t have a voice in the policies that profoundly shape their lives. The Israeli settlers, many of whom moved to the West Bank with the explicit ideological purpose of seizing control of Palestinian land, do.
Israel is a democratic country within its internationally recognized borders, but it maintains a military occupation of land on which millions of people live while denying those people the right to vote. Under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, this inherent instability has started to tip toward outright authoritarianism throughout the territory under Israeli control. In a 2019 poll conducted by the nonpartisan Israeli Democracy Institute, a majority of Israelis (54 percent) said their democracy was “in grave danger.” [Continue reading…]
As polls closed at 10 p.m. Monday after the third Knesset election within a year, three television exit polls predicted significant gains for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, putting it within a hair’s breadth of forming a governing coalition, with centrist rival Benny Gantz’s Blue and White party falling well below its performance in the past years’ two previous elections.
“A huge victory for Israel,” Netanyahu tweeted shortly after the polls came out.
According to the exit polls, the right-wing bloc — made up of Netanyahu’s Likud party, the religious right-wing Yamina, and the ultra-Orthodox Shas and United Torah Judaism — will get 60 seats in the 120-member parliament. The center-left bloc, minus Yisrael Beytenu, is forecast to win 52-54 seats. [Continue reading…]