Israel stands on the brink of another war in Gaza, and of patchy civil-war conditions in the West Bank and inside Israel itself.
The new Israeli government, with hard-right leader Benjamin Netanyahu and ultra-rightists in key posts, has stepped up Israeli killings in the West Bank and given a signal for further violence there by Jewish settlers.
On Monday 30 January, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that just over the previous weekend “Israel... recorded 35 cases of nationalist crimes targeted at Palestinians in the West Bank, including of throwing stones at cars and vandalizing property... No arrests were made in any of the cases”.
So far Hamas’s ally Islamic Jihad has fired a few rockets from Gaza into Israel, hitting no-one, and Israel has responded with a bout of bombing. Many of Netanyahu’s ministers, at least, seem not at all bothered about the risk of pushing Hamas into concluding that it has to make a show of hitting back and of a new war starting on the lines of 2008-9, 2012, 2014, and 2021.
A war will serve Netanyahu’s far-right team by pushing aside the big movement of protest inside Israel about its moves to check the courts’ ability to restrain the government and against LGBTQ +rights.
There have been big street protests every Saturday in Tel-Aviv, the latest with 60,000 there, the equivalent of over 400,000 in Britain.
The demonstrations draw in many conservative and nationalist people. There have been special protests by workers in Israel’s pivotal high-tech industries, carrying Israeli flags. The Jewish-Arab movement Standing Together has also been there, with the message: “We say that there is another way: the end of the occupation and Israeli-Palestinian peace, which will guarantee justice and independence for both peoples. Only in this way will we all gain security and bring hope.”
972 magazine reports that on one Saturday protest, “several people carrying Palestinian flags or chanting anti-apartheid slogans were repeatedly reproached — and at times physically confronted — by other demonstrators for ‘diverting’ the messaging from ‘defending Israeli democracy’ to issues such as the occupation.
“When [Israeli-Palestinian political leader Ayman] Odeh or Palestinian activists from Standing Together took to the stage, some yelled that they didn’t want Arabs in the demonstration, and that the occupation should play no part in the protest”.
Activists retorted “that the country they are fighting for is one without a military regime and racist discrimination. ‘This struggle is for all of us — against fascism’, Odeh told the crowd. ‘Arabs and democratic Jews together. There will be no democracy without solidarity’.” (Protesting in Israel against apartheid-like laws in the West Bank is different from the “Israel is an apartheid state which must be wiped off the map” message common in some circles in Britain.)
The most hopeful sign in the 2021 conflict was the mobilisation on the streets of Israeli-Palestinians, who may paradoxically have more political leverage than Palestinians cooped up in the cities and villages of the West Bank (islands within the Israeli-controlled “Area C”) and Gaza (independent, but blockaded by Israel and Egypt, and dependent on subsidies from Qatar).
This time, however, Palestinian participation in the protests has so far been small. There have been sporadic individual attacks on Jews by “lone-wolf” Palestinians. “The West Bank and Arab towns in Israel are flooded with guns”, reports 972 magazine. An East Jerusalem Palestinian told the New York Times: “When Palestinians are being killed daily, they see any attack that kills Israelis as something that redeems their dignity.”
That offers no hope of political progress, and may make it easier for the Israeli government to increase repression in the West Bank, to clamp down in majority-Arab areas in Israel, maybe to expel Arab citizens it classifies as “terrorist”. But then at present it is hard for Palestinians to see any political openings. A much stronger Arab-Jewish democratic movement inside Israel is needed to change that calculus, but has not revived yet.
As in 2021, a lurch into war and civil war in Israel-Palestine is likely to enliven antisemitism in countries like Britain. Our response is to insist that self-determination for both peoples in Israel-Palestine — Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and a real independent Palestinian state alongside Israel: two nations, two states — is the only democratic way out, and that targeting Israeli Jews, or all Jews, is a reactionary response.
Netanyahu has some “realpolitik” reasons for stopping short of war. He wants to keep Israel’s renewed friendly links with Turkey, and get Saudi Arabia to recognise Israel.
But those factors give no guarantees for peace and no hopes for progress.
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