Scenes of violence in Jerusalem, with Israeli Arab citizens barred from movement by authorities, Palestinian protesters and police clashes inside the Al-Aqsa Mosque, and racist movements freely marching through the streets, are the portrait of a country stretched to the extreme. during years of populism.
Trapped between the post-election negotiations in the conservative camp and his countless judicial lists, Binyamin Netanyahu resorted to the old strategy of omitting himself and then positioning himself as the sole shield against chaos. The convergence of the elections in Palestine, the court rulings on the expulsions of Palestinians in Sheikh Jarrah, a neighborhood in East Jerusalem, and the nervousness inherent in the pandemic, had everything to make this year’s Ramadan particularly explosive.
Netanyahu, who despite the arsonist rhetoric has never given up on his founding promise to prevent another intifada at all costs, has disappeared from public space to give an idea of what Israel will be like without its leadership. Now he is operating to ensure that his rival Naftali Bennett fails to form a new government and plunges the country into the fourth election in two years.
This cycle of self-destruction in Israeli politics is Netanyahu’s greatest work. In power since 2009, he slaughtered Israeli democracy to save his political dynasty. Like Alberto Fujimori, he radicalized society by stimulating the entry of extremist movements into parliament, undermined the legitimacy of the party system by saturating the population with a succession of electoral processes and hijacked the public authorities to become to avoid judicial inquiries.
Israel’s transformation under Netanyahu has also had profound implications for its international inclusion. Two weeks ago, Human Rights Watch declared, in a decisive paradigm shift, that the government’s policy of “dominating Israeli Jews over Palestinians” constitutes a crime against humanity of apartheid and persecution. This turnaround signals a change of direction in relations between the Western powers and Israel.
The UN has raised its voice on warning of a possible “war crime” in the expulsions of Sheikh Jarrah, and the Biden administration appears to be anxiously awaiting Netanyahu’s demise to list its new Middle East policy.
But the eternal Prime Minister, aware that the authoritarian drift could create problems with the allies of the North Atlantic, has already taken all the precautions to perpetuate the diplomatic gains obtained during the Trump era. In recent years, Israel, totally dependent on the United States for military purposes, has carried out a bold and successful realignment of its foreign policy, characterized by the expansion of its area of influence in Africa and the rapprochement with the autocracies of the United States. Emirates.
To perpetuate himself in power, Netanyahu tied the future of Israel to his personal destiny. We are a family business.
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