Benjamin Netanyahu now enjoys the luxury of choosing between a narrow government of far-right parties, and a right-wing national unity government embracing his rival Benny Gantz. Either way, this election demonstrates that opposition to Netanyahu and the right has been well and truly crushed.
As world leaders congregated in Jerusalem to eulogise Shimon Peres as a "great peacemaker", the peace camp of which he was the figurehead went to war against its main Palestinian partner in Israel. Ayman Odeh, head of the only Jewish-Arab party in the Israeli legislature, enraged the Israeli Jewish public by refusing to attend Peres’ funeral.
Members of one of the main Palestinian parties in the Israeli parliament have accused authorities of seeking to criminalise their political activity following the arrest of more than two dozen party officials. Balad party leader Jamal Zahalka tied the arrests to the outlawing late last year of the popular northern wing of the Islamic Movement, an extra-parliamentary faction led by Sheikh Raed Salah.
Israel's parliament, the Knesset, awarded itself a draconian new power last week: A three-quarters majority of its members can now expel an elected politician if they do not like his or her views. According to Adalah, a law centre representing the fifth of Israel's population who are Palestinian citizens, the so-called expulsion law has no parallel in any democratic state.
Benjamin Netanyahu is effectively legislating the expulsion of the Balad party and throwing down a gauntlet to the courts. It won’t end there. If Balad is unseated, the participation of the other Joint List factions will be untenable. In effect, the Israeli right is seeking to ethnically cleanse the parliament.
Last November, just days after lethal attacks in Paris by ISIS, the government of Benjamin Netanyahu outlawed the northern wing of the Islamic Movement in Israel. He compared the group, which is tied to the Muslim Brothers, to ISIS in an attempt to frame the ban as part of the global war on terror. But in reality, the Israeli government's action was long in the making and driven by considerations of local power politics.
Tens of thousands of visitors have come to Sheikh Raed Salah's protest tent in the past three weeks, since Netanyahu declared his Islamic Movement an “illegal organisation”. In an interview, Salah calls the move “a declaration of war not just against our movement but against Islam and against the whole Palestinian community [in Israel]. Everyone feels targeted.”
With dismaying predictability, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu lost no time in exploiting the massacre in Paris by outlawing the Islamic Movement, a popular party among Israel’s Palestinian citizens. Netanyahu justified the decision by conflating the movement with Hamas and ISIL, even though the Islamic Movement rejects violence and operates entirely within Israeli law.
Leader of the Islamic Movement in Israel, Sheikh Raed Salah, gestures outside a Jerusalem court (AFP) - Courtesy Middle East Eye
The decision by the Israeli government to outlaw the country’s main Islamic Movement marks a dangerous turning point in Israel’s relations with its large Palestinian minority. The move effectively drives underground a religious, political and social movement representing the views of a sizeable portion of Israel’s 1.6 million Palestinian citizens.
