On supremacy and democracy – Tareq Bacon in LRB:

“On 29 december, the most right-wing government in Israeli history was sworn in, returning Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, to power. Unlike most recent governments – there have been five elections in less than four years – this one has a stable parliamentary majority, with 64 of the 120 seats in the Knesset. Alongside cabinet posts for members of his right-wing Likud party, Netanyahu has given senior positions to extremist ultra-religious and ultra-nationalist politicians.
The most notorious of them is Itamar Ben-Gvir of the far-right Otzma Yehudit party. He is now minister for national security, a new position created by expanding the police ministry to encompass control of the border police, which operates in the occupied territories. Ben-Gvir was once a member of Kach, a party banned for incitement to racism. In 1994 one of its members, Baruch Goldstein, murdered 29 Palestinians worshipping in the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron; until 2020, a photograph of him hung in Ben-Gvir’s home. Another senior member of the new cabinet is Bezalel Smotrich, leader of the Religious Zionist Party, who was arrested in 2005 on suspicion of trying to blow up a road to hold up Israel’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. More recently, he has called for the separation of Jewish and Arab mothers in maternity wards. Smotrich has been appointed minister of finance, with a second post in the defence ministry, where he will have significant power over approving new Jewish settlements and overseeing the eviction of Palestinians. And then there is Avi Maoz of the Noam party, who has argued for gender segregation and banning Jerusalem’s Pride parade. He has been put in charge of a new body aimed at promoting Jewish identity.”

(…)

“Together, these reforms would undermine the separation of powers between the executive and the judiciary – a particular worry given Netanyahu’s ongoing trial for corruption, fraud and breach of trust, and the legal challenges faced by some of his ministers.” (…)

“There have been tepid statements of concern about the new government from Israel’s allies, including the Biden administration. In December, Antony Blinken, the secretary of state, said the US would judge it ‘by the policies and procedures, rather than individual personalities’. Alarming policies and procedures were soon announced, but since then there has been no meaningful response from the US or European governments. Israeli journalists and public figures have started talking about Israeli ‘fascism’, yet allies abroad have been far more restrained: Keir Starmer ordered one Labour MP, Kim Johnson, to apologise for using the word.
The government has done little to mask its extremism. Levin has said the judicial reforms won’t be delayed ‘for even a minute’. One of Ben-Gvir’s first moves as minister was to visit the Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount, a highly provocative move intended to challenge the status quo agreement on Jerusalem, which prevents non-Muslims from carrying out religious ceremonies in the compound. The visit lasted thirteen minutes and didn’t involve any praying, but it elicited a strong reaction: King Abdullah, normally measured, declared such actions ‘red lines’ and said Jordan was ready to get ‘into a conflict’ to protect Jerusalem’s holy sites. Ben-Gvir must now decide whether to approve a request to allow right-wing Temple Mount activists, on whose behalf he has previously advocated (his wife is one of them), to slaughter a lamb on the site when Passover falls in April.”

(…)

“Of the roughly seven million Palestinians living in the same area, only the 1.7 million with Israeli citizenship have any political rights with respect to the entity that controls their lives. In 2021 Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and B’Tselem, Israel’s leading human rights organisation, all published reports substantiating the Palestinian narrative that Israel practises apartheid against the Palestinian people. The illusion that Israel is or has ever been a democracy is sustained by the myth of partition along the Green Line, which divides ‘Israel proper’ from the Palestinian territories it came to control after 1967.* Successive Israeli governments have abandoned the pretext that Israel is a liberal democracy somehow distinct from its occupation, even as this notion continues to be parroted by Western policymakers and by Palestinian officials tethered to Israel’s occupation.
But even Palestinian citizens of Israel can’t be said to have real democratic rights. Their experience of political life is fraught: it entails balancing their communal needs and struggles for equality with participation in a Zionist state structure. Israel’s previous government, which lasted from June 2021 to December 2022, was the first to include members of a Palestinian party, the Islamist Ra’am; Jewish Israeli parties have historically been opposed to sharing power with Palestinians, but decided to do so this time in order to keep Netanyahu out. During its brief period in power, Ra’am often found itself at odds with government policy: it didn’t in the end support the ‘family reunification law’ that bars people from living with Palestinian partners who don’t hold citizenship. The collapse of the coalition reaffirmed the fact that the Israeli state is premised on safeguarding Jewish supremacy, even as it opens the door for the political participation of a small number of Palestinians.”

(…)

“The Basic Laws which liberals want to protect are the same set of laws that have, since 2018, defined Israel as the nation state of the Jewish people exclusively. The Supreme Court which protesters are taking to the streets to defend is the same Supreme Court that provided the legal foundations for the expropriation of Palestinian land and property and for the state’s expansion of settlements in the occupied territories. Last year it ruled against evacuating unauthorised settlers who had seized land and built ‘outposts’, paving the way for settlements in the West Bank even beyond those sanctioned by government.”

(…)

“Shortly before Blinken’s visit, the Palestinian anti-apartheid coalition, comprised of political bodies and civil society institutions, had met to discuss and co-ordinate the continuing ‘struggle to expose and dismantle Israel’s system of settler colonialism, apartheid and military occupation’. For many Palestinians, the new government is simply a more extreme and even more repressive version of the governments that preceded it. That isn’t insignificant: it brings the threat of more violence, death and displacement. It doesn’t mean, however, that what came before was democratic. If democracy is what they really want, the protesters in Israeli cities should follow the Palestinians’ lead and seek to dismantle the regime of supremacy they’re upholding.” Read the article here

A flawed supreme court is better than no supreme court at all.

But generally speaking, much of what Baconi writes makes sense. The dire result of de facto annexation of most of the West Bank is a de facto apartheid or whatever you want to call it.
The status of the non-Jewish citizens with Israeli passports is slightly more complicated than Baconi thinks, but alas.

(Also, Moaz quit the government in the meantime.)

But the one-state-solution is as far away as the two-state-solution.
Violence didn’t bring any results, and fair enough non-violent protest turned out to be useless as well.
Also, the Palestinians themselves seem to be unable to dismantle their own corrupt institutions.

Ironically enough, Netanyahu the big lover of the continuation of the status quo might turn out to be a disrupter. Whether this disruption will bring more than a return to the status quo ante remains to be seen. But for the moment disruption is on the table.