The resignation of Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon should make Israelis more concerned about the country’s future. Ya’alon’s departure will cement the rise of a right-wing government committed to the indefinite occupation of millions of disenfranchised Palestinians, a new round of violence, rising religious extremism and growing international isolation.
Ya’alon is a senior leader in Prime Minister Benjamin’s Netanyahu’s conservative Likud Party, and quit amid the prime minister’s political maneuvering to broaden his governing coalition, which has only a one-seat majority in parliament. Ya’alon had been in a protracted public argument with Netanyahu over the Israeli military. The issue exploded in March when military leaders criticized a soldier who was caught on video fatally shooting an already-wounded Palestinian attacker in the head. While Ya’alon backed the military, hard-liners backed the soldier. Netanyahu, for his part, called the soldier’s family to express sympathy.
Ya’alon is set to be replaced by the right-wing politician hawk Avigdor Lieberman, who leads the Yisrael Beiteinu Party. Netanyahu’s Likud Party has been in negotiations to expand his narrow 61-seat coalition in the Knesset by bringing Yisrael Beiteinu into the government. In the past, Lieberman has pushed for legislative proposals that were discriminatory against Israel’s Arab minority, including a failed attempt to require that Israelis sign a loyalty oath or have their citizenship revoked. He has expressed skepticism over pursuing peace with the Palestinians, and is now pushing a proposal to impose the death penalty against Arabs convicted of acts of terrorism. As a Cabinet minister last decade, he called for the bombing of Palestinian gas stations, banks and commercial centers and once even threatened to bomb Egypt’s Aswan Dam.
Yaalon’s departure also paves the way for Yehuda Glick to enter the government. An Israeli-American activist, Glick has campaigned to allow Jewish prayer at Jerusalem’s holiest site, Haram Al- Sharif. Changes to the status quo that bans Jews from praying at the site sparked the Palestinian violence which erupted in September, followed by months of bloodshed. The addition of Lieberman to the government would further cement the rightist nature of Netanyahu’s coalition. His joining the government could shore up Netanyahu’s shaky parliamentary coalition but deepen his international isolation. With Palestinian-Israeli peace efforts moribund, Lieberman’s addition to the government would push any hopes of reviving talks dashed further. Netanyahu is already facing criticism from his closest allies, the US and key European countries, for not doing more to revive the talks which crashed due to his settlement drive. But with peace talks unlikely in any case,
Netanyahu, whose coalition has just a one-seat majority in the 120-member parliament, appears to be more interested in expanding the government. Netanyahu viewed his decisive re-election victory last year as an opportunity to do away with talks with the Palestinians, replacing it with opposition to any territorial change in the West Bank. While paying occasional lip service to the two-state solution, he has declared that Israel must control the entire territory in the foreseeable future.
Emboldened right-wing politicians have grown more explicit than ever before. Breaking long taboos, they advocated Jewish worship at Haram Al-Sharif, called for annexing the West Bank into Israel and promote bills and regulations to silence human rights NGOs and other critics of the occupation. Moderate voices are targets of virulent attacks on social networks. Ya’alon was one of the last relatively moderate voices in the Likud Party. To be replaced by Lieberman means Netanyahu is starting a revolution, heading a dangerous nationalist movement. If Lieberman’s six-seat Yisrael Beiteinu joins the coalition, the Cabinet will become the most right-wing in Israel’s history. Israelis who worry about the direction of Israel in Netanyahu’s fourth term must decide whether his aggressive march toward right-wing extremism will be embraced or rejected.
