Benjamin Netanyahu’s tenure as Israeli Prime Minister is looking to be in jeopardy after the police recommended that he should be charged with corruption. But what does this mean for the Palestinians. Many in the UK would see this as positive step in removing the who said that he wants to wipe Palestine off the map. But it is well noted by Palestinians that the situation today is as worse than it has ever been.
Danny Rubinstein wrote in the Middle Eastern Eye, “A broken society mired in poverty and subject to the partial rule of the Palestinian Authority whose security forces have become, to a great extent, collaborators with Israel.”
Netanyahu backed into a corner?
The potential that this could effectively increase Netanyahu’s grip on power is greater than the possibility of him losing power.
Human rights’ organisations have been fierce opposition to the regime in Israel and this has kept Palestinians within Israel largely ok, evidence is from Netanyahu’s governments continuous attacks on those NGOs. A significant number of organisations such as, Civil Rights in Israel and the New Israel Fund plus more have existed for more than 20 years but it has only been in recent that Netanyahu has begun to see them as enemy number one.
This proves the effectiveness of the NGOs against the regime but the problem with the corruption charge is that it could see him grapple onto the far-right hard-line nationalist supporters of the regime to remain in power, using the rhetoric that this is another attempt by the ‘treasonous left’ to remove him from his position.
What could be worse is that he uses this as an excuse to go back to hard-line support as a position he is more familiar and comfortable with. Either way the backlash would hit the Palestinians hard and he could use the attempt to crackdown further on their rights, annex more land and increase the violent and murderous raids on Palestinian communities.
Previously, Netanyahu said that ministers would grant formal authorisation to a rogue West Bank settlement in response to the murder of a rabbi last month. During the start of the year, Israeli Defence Minister, Avigdor Lieberman, approved the building of 1,100 new settlements in West Bank. The intent to build more settlements in West Bank is to annex more land from Palestine as only 400,000 Israeli’s live there compared to the 2.6 million Palestinians.
Last year, Israel moved forward with the plans to move a military checkpoint a few 100 metres further into the occupied West Bank, closer to al-Walaja, an agricultural village cultivated by locals for millennia. The village lost 296.5 acres from their land and the UN stated that since 1948, due to gradual annexation, al-Walaja have lost 85% of their land. Which is a microcosm of what is occurring throughout Palestine.
