Apartheid Anyone?

A few years ago, Benjamin Netanyahu ceased thinking of the US as an ally and starting thinking of only the Republican party as an ally. That was when Paul Ryan invited him to speak to the House against the Iran nuclear deal. It was an unprecedented event, for a foreign leader to loudly oppose US foreign policy in Congress itself.

Now he is in a tough reelection campaign, that he has to run while under indictment for bribery. The first thing he did was enable a merger between two extreme right wing parties. Either alone would likely not get enough votes to have a seat in the Knesset. Together, they might get one or two seats, and that could be the margin of a majority.

The problem is one of those parties is what used to be the party of Meir Kahane. You have to be a little old to remember Kahane. He advocated the violent expulsion of all Arabs from all of biblical Israel. The US State Department listed him as a terrorist, and he was persona non grata in the Knesset. Baruch Goldstein, the man who assassinated Yitzhak Rabin for attempting to reach a two state solution with the Palestinians, was one of his followers.

Kahane is dead, but his party survives and its attitude is unchanged.

So Nethanyu has explicitly invited right wing terrorists into a governing coalition. That alone should have made him a pariah.

But now he's gone further. Yesterday, he announced plans to annex all of the occupied West Bank with settlements. He feels safe in doing this, in the face of international condemnation, because it is OK with Republicans and with Donald Trump. After all, Trump just recognized annexation of the Golan Heights. Why would he worry about the West Bank?

Netanyahu likes to say that land captured in a defensive war is yours forever. That's not true. The Geneva Conventions require the occupying force to leave as soon as feasible, and to, in no way, permanently occupy any of the conquered territory. This puts Netanyahu in fine company -- Stalin, Putin, and so on.

Today, for the first time in at least half a century, a politician running for US president has dared to describe Netanyahu as what he is. Beto O'Rourke called him a racist.

This should be deeply worrying to every Israeli. Netanyahu's alliance with the Republican party is significantly weakening its alliance with the US. That can only last so long as Republicans are in power.

It works for Netanyahu's personal short term interest in maintaining power by doing the same thing Trump did -- maximize turnout by his racist base.

But over the long term, he is transforming Israel into an apartheid state. Between the Mediterranean and the Jordan, Jews are outnumbered by Arabs. So Israel can maintain itself as a Jewish state by disenfranchising or expelling Arabs, and no longer being a democracy. Or it can be a democracy by no longer being a Jewish state.

Frankly, I'm betting on the former. Israel's polity changed in significant ways after the fall of the Soviet Union. There was a huge influx of Eastern European Jews, and they are extremely conservative. They see no problem with treating Arabs in Israel (or what they conceive to be Israel) the same way they were treated in Russia.

If Netanyahu wins, Israel's long term future is not a peace deal with the Palestinians. It is to become the new South Africa, an explicitly apartheid state and an international pariah. Netanyahu has burned Israel's relationship with the US to hold on to power just as Trump wants to burn our relationship with NATO. Neither of them views their country as made safer by its alliances. The only thing they see is an obstacle in the way of power.