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It's little short of remarkable when you think about it. Last March, Bezalel Smotrich, the minister of finance in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Israeli government (as well as the head of the extremist Religious Zionist Party), said with striking bluntness, "There is no such thing as a Palestinian nation. There is no Palestinian history. There is no Palestinian language." And yes, he's long wanted to annex the whole West Bank and essentially wipe the very idea of Palestinians out of history, but that only begins to catch his nature. Here's a description from 2017 of some of his earlier stances. He had by then declared himself in favor of "segregated maternity wards separating Jewish and Arab mothers, called for government reprisal attacks on Palestinians, and once organized a homophobic 'beast parade' protest against Gay Pride."
When several Arab members of the Israel parliamentary body, the Knesset, heckled him in 2021, he said all too bluntly, "You're here by mistake. It's a mistake that [Israel's first Prime Minister David] Ben-Gurion didn't finish the job and didn't throw you out in 1948." And this February, referring to the embattled Palestinian town of Huwara in the northern part of the West Bank, he insisted that it "needs to be erased. The State of Israel needs to do that heaven forbid not private individuals."
And that's just to begin down a list of extremist rants and positions Smotrich has taken. Yet he remains a crucial figure in Netanyahu's government. If that doesn't tell you something about Israel today or why there have been seemingly never-ending protests against his regime by hundreds of thousands of Israelis (in a country of only 9.5 million people), then let TomDispatch regular Juan Cole, who runs the remarkable Informed Comment website, fill you in on the shocking rest of the story. And while you're reading it, keep in mind that President Joe Biden has all too kindly invited Netanyahu to visit him sometime this year. Is that extreme enough for you? Tom
How Israel Occupied Itself
The Way the Crisis on the West Bank Became the Crisis in Israel Itself
By Juan Cole
On July 24th, the Israeli Knesset passed a measure forbidding the country's High Court of Justice from in any way checking the power of the government, whether in making cabinet decisions or appointments, based on what's known as the "reasonability" standard. In the Israeli context, this was an extreme act, since right-wing parliamentarians were defying massive crowds that had, for months on end, demonstrated with remarkable determination against such radical legislation. And that measure was only one part of a wide-ranging redesign of the court system unveiled by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in January, which deeply alarmed his critics.
As exemplified by prominent world historian Yuval Noah Harari, such protestors warned that limiting the functions of the highest court, in a land with a parliamentary system largely lacking other checks and balances, represented a big stride toward a future autocracy. After all, dangers abound in a nation with a one-chamber legislature, lacking the equivalent of a Senate, that elects the prime minister as the instrument of its will.
The central motivation for that legislation, however, lay not in domestic politics but in the desire of extremists in the cabinet to ensure that the courts won't be able to interfere with their plans to vastly increase the number of Israeli squatter-settlements on Palestinian land on the West Bank and perhaps someday soon simply annex that occupied territory. Under such circumstances, members of the far-right Religious Zionist Party were recently excoriated by Tamir Pardo, a former head of Israeli intelligence, as Israel's "Ku Klux Klan."
Reasonability, Fraud, and Occupation
The Israeli supreme court had invoked what's called "the reasonableness doctrine," rooted in British common law, to strike down Netanyahu's January appointment of Aryeh Makhlouf Deri as Minister of Health and the Interior in his ever more extreme cabinet. Deri, a Moroccan-Israeli, leads the ultra-Orthodox Shas Party, largely comprised of Mizrahim, or Jews of Middle Eastern ancestry, like himself. Deri has often been in trouble with the law. He was, in fact, given a three-year jail sentence in 1999 for fraud and bribery. In 2022, he was facing a possible conviction for tax fraud by the High Court of Justice, which could have resulted in jail time and a seven-year ban on political activity. According to the justices of that court, Deri promised to retire from politics to avoid being sentenced, a vow on which he later reneged.
Netanyahu managed to keep Shas in his current coalition despite its loss of that important cabinet seat. Indeed, he still needs its support to stay in power. Over time, the Shas Party has swung far to the right on the Israeli political spectrum, while taking an ever-harder line in favor of expanding Jewish settlements in the Palestinian West Bank, which Israel seized in 1967. It is now inhabited by some three million stateless Palestinians whose land continues to be usurped. The Shas leadership has shifted to ever stronger support for Jewish settlements on the West Bank in large part because of the increasing proportion of Israeli squatters there who hail from the Haredim or Ultra-Orthodox religious tradition. They had already become about a third of all West Bank settlers by 2017.
In the Israeli system, the Ultra-Orthodox pay little in taxes, are subsidized to study the Bible, and are exempted from military service. Moreover, as a group, thanks to their tendency to have large families, they have grown to about 13% of the Israeli population. They place a substantial burden on the state, which, in recent years, has responded by giving them inexpensive housing on Palestinian land.
At the left-leaning +976 Magazine, journalist Ben Reiff recently pointed out that Minister of Justice Yariv Levin, a long-time factotum in Netanyahu's Likud Party and a driving force behind the recent attack on the judiciary, justified his actions primarily in terms of the Palestine issue. He singled out High Court decisions that prevented the blackballing of individuals who supported the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) on Israel movement for the country's apartheid-style policies toward the Palestinians or who backed "refuseniks," Israeli soldiers who decline to serve as part of an occupation force in the Palestinian West Bank. Levin also complained bitterly about court rulings requiring that Palestinians be treated in accord with the Geneva Conventions. One conclusion from Reiff's reporting is that there will be ever more blackballing of critics of the occupation by the present government.
The High Court (Sometimes) Recognizes the Rights of Palestinians
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