Benjamin Netanyahu has good reason to celebrate a remarkable election victory that has set him on course to become, in July, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister since the Jewish state’s revered founder David Ben-Gurion. But he needs to be cautious. His pledge in the final days of the campaign to “impose Israeli sovereignty” over West Bank settlements was an unequivocal promise of annexation aimed at shoring up the backing of far-right religious parties. He anticipated, correctly, that he would need to rely on them to form government. But the issue needs careful handling if it is not to create a crisis.
The settlements, home to 400,000 Israelis living among three million Palestinians, are on land captured during the 1967 Six-Day War. They form part of what the Palestinians envisage as a future Palestinian state under a two-state solution, which has been the bedrock of Western-backed peace efforts since the 1993 Oslo Accords. Any move by Mr Netanyahu to make good on his promise, while it may be what far-right allies demand, would spell the end of prospects for a two-state solution. Doing so would put his government at odds with Western nations which regard the settlements as illegal under the Geneva Conventions. It would also add to the enormous security challenges facing the Jewish state, especially in confronting Iran.
Read the editorial in The Australian.