Soma

The central point of Netanyahu's speech today, at the opening of the 26th Knesset, is that he is stuck. He is trying to pin his political future on two scapegoats—Iran and Israel's Arabs—and it is not working. But more important than his being stuck is that his personal fate is not far from the state's. The state is stuck on the question of its own identity. Does it have a single definition that includes everyone? No. Does everyone want to be defined the same way? No. I don't mean the Arabs—their calculations are different. I mean the great crossroads where the question of religious versus secular, Mizrahi versus Ashkenazi, has been parked since Israel's founding. Netanyahu's incitement today is nothing but a recycling of old tools, used by a man who has run out of tricks. Once, a speech this carefully prepared would have found a hearing with his rivals. Today, Eisenkot responded immediately by cancelling his negotiating meeting with Likud. This is the man recorded in Israel's history as one of those who tore it apart from within—systematically changing its elites and tampering with its institutions. When hundreds of thousands came out against the judicial coup he led three years ago, he rejected Herzog's compromise. Herzog, who had long warned of civil war. When his defense minister Gallant said at the time that the legislation had become a clear and direct danger to the state's security, Netanyahu fired him. Today he is calling on everyone he spent years inciting against. Calling them to unity. Calling on them to put every consideration aside and form a national unity government capable of facing the challenges. Adding that a narrow government cannot face them. Regardless of whether everyone shares Netanyahu's challenges—they may—the only consensus across every camp is to bring him down and push him out of the political scene. But what happens after he is pushed out? We return to the problem of the state's identity, this time with a legacy, or heirs, of a state whose institutions and elites no longer resemble its past and do not know the way to its future. Those Netanyahu placed in the key positions of government—to whom is their loyalty, to him or to the state? And what does the far right mean as an ideology, not just as parties—will it agree to step back even one step? Will it accept, say, less extremism on settlement in the West Bank? We don't know. We will wait and see. My question: where will this lead? Israel has come to realize that the same debate will accompany every coming election, whether in the spring soon ahead or four years from now. The debate over the Arabs with their electoral power—who voted this time on the fate of their people more than for a Knesset. The debate over the Haredim—their conscription law, the money spent on their schools. What about a unity government without Netanyahu? Here we come to the question of Likud's fate—the biggest party in Israel—and who will inherit it if it survives as one party. Some see its fate as a miniature of the state's. We'll see—and soon.

I've written before about Israeli settler attacks as part of a deliberate, organized campaign to impoverish the West Bank and choke the life out of its economy, pushing Palestinians to leave. Two nights ago, settlers attacked an industrial area in Beita, south of Nablus. Yesterday, the same group hit garages and auto-parts shops in Al-Luban Al-Sharqiya, south of Nablus. The Israeli army and political leadership back these plans, clear the way for them, and provide direct protection when needed—never arrests, never accountability. This is a standing government policy to crash the West Bank's economy and freeze its financial life. The political leadership has shown this many times through its moves. Ignoring settler attacks on farms and factories. Abolishing administrative detention for settlers. Withholding the clearance funds that let the Palestinian Authority pay tens of thousands of workers, freezing financial life. Restricting dealings with Palestinian banks. The shekel crisis—the Israeli currency Palestinians are forced to use. Barring Palestinian workers from jobs in the occupied interior. Setting up checkpoints with long inspection lines between cities. A severe fuel crisis. Rising prices. Destroying homes and expelling thousands of families from camps and neighborhoods. Spreading fear through nightly arrest raids.