Elizabeth Ferrari 🇵🇸 🇻🇪 🇨🇺

Netanyahu’s Likud party may have lost votes in Israel's election but the right is still very much in the ascendant. Of the 120 Knesset seats, 93 went to hardline religious, ultra-nationalistic or militaristic factions. The leader of the opposition, Gadi Eisenkot, is a military general and father of the infamous Dahiya Doctrine of indiscriminately bombing and levelling the urban spaces of Israel’s neighbours – central to Israel’s strategy both in the Gaza genocide and in its onslaught on southern Lebanon. Eisenkot’s allies in the opposition bloc include Avigdor Lieberman, a far-right, secular politician who makes Netanyahu look moderate, and Naftali Bennett, who shares the religious Zionist ideology of the West Bank’s illegal settlers and was once a close ally of Netanyahu’s. Even the slightly more centrist Democrats party of Yair Golan, which won just eight seats, has equivocated over the creation of a Palestinian state, with Golan calling recent moves to recognise Palestine by Britain, Canada and France “a destructive move for Israel’s security”. Whatever the eventual ruling coalition, there is no Jewish partner to be found in Israeli politics for the two-state solution that western capitals have been backing ever more frantically, supposedly as their contribution to ending Israel’s dispossession and slaughter of the Palestinian people. More likely, parts of the opposition may already be considering joining Netanyahu inside a Jewish unity government, setting aside their personal antipathies with him, rather than engage meaningfully with the Palestinian parties they must ally with if they are to oust him. This is an extract from my latest article Israel’s election shows its democracy is a sham, but the West can’t stop buying the lie. Find a link to read the rest in the reply post ⬇️