By Mohammad El Sahily | Staff Writer
As the Netanyahu government enters its third month in power, it has stepped up the volume of condemnable actions, provoking massive protests by opposition members and civil rights activists. Last week, Netanyahu announced that Israel will legalize nine settlements in the West Bank, effectively annexing them to Israel and extending government jurisdiction to them. This announcement was met with strongly worded condemnation statements from many governments, notably the United States and the United Arab Emirates. Even Saudi media strongly condemned the move, which throws into question the perceived normalization efforts Netanyahu plans to launch with Saudi Arabia to normalize relations.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced the decision in a statement, listing the illegal outposts as Avigayil, Beit Hogla, Givat Harel, Givat Arnon, Mitzpe Yehuda, Malachi Hashalom, Asahel, Sde Boaz, and Shacharit. To legalize the outposts, the government will have to prove that they were established on what Israel considers to be state land. This will likely be difficult given that many of them, including all of Sde Boaz and Givat Harel, were built on private Palestinian land. The Israeli Supreme Court is likely to contest the legality of these settlements, but this could take several months, if not years.
This issue comes at a critical time in the Israeli political crisis. President Isaac Herzog has called for a suspension of the legislative blitz planned by the Netanyahu government, which aims at severely curtailing the powers of Israeli courts and judges. Herzog called for negotiations between the government and the opposition, a call that was enthusiastically echoed by Yair Lapid, leader of the opposition, and many other politicians. Justice Minister Yariv Levin, a pioneer of the legislative “reform” and a Likud partisan, rejected the call. However, Netanyahu reportedly met with Lapid to discuss avenues of negotiation to resolve the crisis.
Netanyahu’s government has been receiving sharp and escalating criticism from the United States to perhaps unprecedented degrees. Numerous senators, congresspeople, Secretary Blinken, and even Biden himself have, in no uncertain terms, called for ending the judicial crisis and protested the expansion of settlements; but the government seems unfazed until now. On the other hand, hundreds of thousands of people continue to protest weekly against the government, and on Monday, Israelis went on a nationwide strike which paralyzed many significant services and cities. The protests are expected to continue as the crisis worsens, despite the purported negotiations regarding the judiciary reform.
Cracks in Israeli society are showing: the divide between the practices of the occupation and the purported democratic demands of the protestors is exposing a deep rift and a dangerous trend in Israel. A more dangerous phenomenon was bare when IDF reservists staged a protest decrying the Netanyahu government’s plans to weaken the courts. It remains a matter of speculation whether the next few weeks will spell the end of the Netanyahu coalition, especially as Shas recently tried to introduce legislation to alter the status quo at the Western Wall, a step that would cause untold damage in the future.