The health of Israeli democracy also hangs in the balance.
As inside baseball as the coalition-forming process is likely to be, the outcome really, really matters. Another Netanyahu term could imperil both the chances for a two-state solution to the conflict with the Palestinians and the very survival of Israeli democracy itself.
During the campaign, Netanyahu released a proposal to annex a chunk of the West Bank, the heavily Palestinian-populated area occupied by Israel in the 1967 war. Most of the proposal covers the Jordan Valley, which runs along the eastern edge of the West Bank and marks its boundary with neighboring Jordan. The valley contains both Palestinian population centers, like the city of Jericho, and a number of Jewish settlements.
Netanyahu said in a speech last week that he would not be “annexing even one Palestinian,” despite proposing to take territory that amounts to 30 percent of the West Bank. To adhere to that, he exempted Jericho and nearby Palestinian villages (the orange blob in the map below) from the annexation proposal, opting instead to encircle them with the newly annexed Israeli land (the much bigger blue chunk).
If Netanyahu does follow through on the land grab, it would force Israel down the path toward one of two “one-state” scenarios.
The first option is to give Palestinians living in the West Bank the right to vote and make them full citizens of Israel. That would create an Arab demographic majority in Israel that would threaten its identity as a “Jewish” state (Jews currently make up around 75 percent of the Israeli population inside its internationally recognized borders). Experts warn that situation would be a recipe for violence between Muslims and Jews. It would also be unacceptable to Netanyahu and his right-wing allies.
The second option would be to extend indefinite Israeli rule over Palestinians without granting them citizenship or the right to vote. There’s a word for keeping an ethnically defined part of your population in permanent second-class citizenship: apartheid.
But this isn’t the only threat to Israel’s future in this election. The second comes from Netanyahu’s authoritarian instincts at home.
Read more
As inside baseball as the coalition-forming process is likely to be, the outcome really, really matters. Another Netanyahu term could imperil both the chances for a two-state solution to the conflict with the Palestinians and the very survival of Israeli democracy itself.
During the campaign, Netanyahu released a proposal to annex a chunk of the West Bank, the heavily Palestinian-populated area occupied by Israel in the 1967 war. Most of the proposal covers the Jordan Valley, which runs along the eastern edge of the West Bank and marks its boundary with neighboring Jordan. The valley contains both Palestinian population centers, like the city of Jericho, and a number of Jewish settlements.
Netanyahu said in a speech last week that he would not be “annexing even one Palestinian,” despite proposing to take territory that amounts to 30 percent of the West Bank. To adhere to that, he exempted Jericho and nearby Palestinian villages (the orange blob in the map below) from the annexation proposal, opting instead to encircle them with the newly annexed Israeli land (the much bigger blue chunk).
If Netanyahu does follow through on the land grab, it would force Israel down the path toward one of two “one-state” scenarios.
The first option is to give Palestinians living in the West Bank the right to vote and make them full citizens of Israel. That would create an Arab demographic majority in Israel that would threaten its identity as a “Jewish” state (Jews currently make up around 75 percent of the Israeli population inside its internationally recognized borders). Experts warn that situation would be a recipe for violence between Muslims and Jews. It would also be unacceptable to Netanyahu and his right-wing allies.
The second option would be to extend indefinite Israeli rule over Palestinians without granting them citizenship or the right to vote. There’s a word for keeping an ethnically defined part of your population in permanent second-class citizenship: apartheid.
But this isn’t the only threat to Israel’s future in this election. The second comes from Netanyahu’s authoritarian instincts at home.
Read more
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