World-Worrying Israeli Government to be Installed This Week
The international community’s response to Netanyahu’s imminent return to the Prime Minister’s Office at the head of a right-wing coalition is guaranteed to be less than warm.
News reports in Israel indicate that the country’s new government will be sworn in at the Knesset this coming Wednesday or Thursday. This will be more than seven weeks after the general election, and just before the time allotted Prime Minister-designate Benjamin Netanyahu to cobble together a coalition runs out.
Widespread hostility is expected to greet the incoming leadership which, from the moment the election results were announced, has been predicted by international and Israeli news organisations and commentators to be “extreme”. The New York Times Saturday warned that the government-to-be poses a “significant threat to the future of Israel – its direction, its security, and even the idea of a Jewish homeland”.
Foreign governments, most notably the Biden administration, have been visibly anxious about the direction the new coalition might take. Especially troubling to them is how Israel will move to secure itself against heightened threats internally (Arab terrorism) and from outside (Iran), and how it will go about strengthening the Jews’ presence in their ancestral lands of Judea and Samaria.
US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken has tried to guard his words, but has permitted his ambassador to Jerusalem, Tom Nides, to threaten a diplomatic war against the incoming government’s potential policies in “the territories”.
Even more than expressions of unhappiness and interference, on-the-ground efforts are well underway by both Arab and other unfriendly foreign forces to stymie and oppose the new administration on every possible battlefield. These include warnings of intensifying terrorism; threatened intervention via the International Court of Justice, and gloves-off political pressure from global institutions like the United Nations and the European Union.
The EU last Wednesday dictated
to the incoming Netanyahu administration that it had better
affirm its support for the “Two State Solution”
In what some Israelis saw as an act of unprecedented hutzpah, the EU last Wednesday dictated to the not-even-installed Netanyahu administration that it had better affirm its support for the “Two State Solution” – a diplomatic direction pursued for over three decades that has proven only to increase, and not reduce, the danger to Israel’s existence.
The “Palestinians” and their nearest Arab allies are, as usual, rallying around Israel’s holiest site – the Temple Mount. Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestinian Authority, and the Kingdom of Jordan co-launched an “initiative to prevent any change to what they falsely insist is the status quo at the site where Israel’s Temples once stood, and Hamas has added its threats to theirs.
Instead of uniting with their fellow Israelis against such extortion and interference, the ousted left-wing political parties and the prodigiously skewed domestic news media have been fuelling paranoia and dread, while threatening what some have warned is seditious anti-democratic behaviour.
Defeated outgoing Prime Minister Yair Lapid has described his imminent successor’s administration as “the most extreme and insane government in our history”, and has urged local authorities to defy laws which the new government might pass.
Fears are being expressed of the potential for a “religious war”, and in Tel Aviv on Saturday a Left-Wing demonstration was held, with protestors wielding inciting banners and speeches against the incoming government. This followed a call for a public uprising published earlier on the ultra-left Ha’aretz news site.
It should be noted that while the number of attendees at this protest was small (hundreds and not the thousands the Left has been able to field in the past), the message doggedly being communicated by the media is that Israel is split almost 50-50 between those who will support the new government and those who will oppose it.
Increasing evidence, however, indicates a growing majority have awoken to the fact that the “Land-for-peace” approach is bankrupt, that threats to Israel are increasing, spurred by growing antisemitism and hardening anti-Israel attitudes in the world, and that the Jewish state’s security in fact is best held in its own hands.
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