It’s Bibi again. Having unapologetically allied with a racist, Jewish-supremacist party, Benjamin Netanyahu has secured a fourth consecutive term as Israel’s prime minister. The Union of Right Wing Parties says Netanyahu promised it both the education and the justice ministries, and who are we to doubt it? Along with Netanyahu’s other right-wing allies, the URWP is already backing a new law that would protect the prime minister from being indicted on pending corruption charges.
Israel’s parliamentary election has consolidated the country’s position within a growing bloc of illiberal democracies around the world. Once again, Netanyahu has won by mobilising the people against the very state institutions that he’s supposed to uphold and defend. In this election cycle, he shamelessly lambasted the judicial system and the police for doing their jobs. He attacked the media for uncovering improper behaviour by his family and cronies. He pilloried public intellectuals for refusing to acknowledge his greatness. And he depicted the old Zionist ‘left’ as traitors.
As for the Arab parties, they lost around 25% of their seats, owing partly to voter abstention. With Netanyahu having pushed through a ‘nation-state law’ declaring the pursuit of ‘national self-determination’ in Israel ‘unique to the Jewish people’, Israel’s Arab citizens apparently are through lending credibility to a sham democracy. Throughout the campaign, they were treated as political lepers by practically every segment of the Israeli body politic.
Read the article by Shlomo Ben Ami on The Strategist.