Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu thanks supporters after his Likud Party did better than expected in Israel’s elections, 28 October. Kyodo/Newscom
Israel's election produced no real alternative for Palestinians, because every Zionist party from Eisenkot's Yashar to Golan's Democrats shares the same commitment to apartheid, occupation, and genocide.
Originally published in Electronic Intifada.
In 2015, after an election that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was expected to lose, I surprised many by writing that I was relieved he had won.
I stressed that he was already a blood-soaked killer who should be put on trial. Now he’s actually a fugitive from the International Criminal Court.
But the reasons I set out then still hold after Netanyahu again beat expectations in this week’s Israeli election.
With counting almost complete, Netanyahu’s bloc holds 53 seats in the 120-member Knesset, the Zionist opposition led by former army chief Gadi Eisenkot 48, and the two Palestinian-led parties a record 19.
Neither Zionist bloc reached the 61 seats needed to govern alone. But final pre-election polls had generally put Eisenkot’s Yashar party ahead of Likud and the Zionist opposition ahead of Netanyahu’s coalition.
Netanyahu therefore emerged from the deadlock stronger than expected.
I discussed the results and why Israel’s so-called opposition offers Palestinians no alternative on The Electronic Intifada Livestream on 29 October, as seen in the video above.
Zionism is racism
The election produced an apparent anti-Netanyahu majority: With the Eisenkot bloc’s 48 projected seats and the Palestinian-led parties 19 – 67 altogether – there could in theory be a new government with a comfortable majority.
There are 1.7 million Palestinian citizens of Israel, mostly survivors of the 1948 Nakba and descendants of Palestinians who escaped expulsion by Zionist forces.
Although they face systematic legal and social discrimination just for not being Jewish, Palestinian citizens of Israel are allowed to vote in Israeli elections – unlike Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.
But Eisenkot ruled out even Ra’am, the small Palestinian party headed by Mansour Abbas that joined a previous Israeli coalition.
Eisenkot claimed that no Arab party meets his criteria for joining the “Zionist government” he would head.
Moldovan settler Avigdor Lieberman was similarly blunt: the only coalition he would consider must consist “only of Zionist parties,” specifically excluding Palestinians.
This racism, deeply embedded in every shade of Zionism, allows Netanyahu to lose his majority while still emerging as the likely winner.
That will disappoint liberal Zionist Western politicians like US Senator Bernie Sanders who relentlessly focus criticism on the “Netanyahu government” as a way to absolve the rest of Israel.
Recently, for instance, Sanders blamed Netanyahu for the genocide in Gaza, as if it were not supported by the vast majority of Israeli Jews and did not require tens or hundreds of thousands of them to actively carry it out.
Sanders also demanded, “No more US taxpayer funding for the extremist Netanyahu government in Israel.” The implication is that Sanders would be fine with funding a presumably “non-extremist” government headed by someone else.
This flag-bearer of US “progressives” is not the only Western liberal desperate to get rid of Netanyahu in order to whitewash Israel’s image and relieve its mounting isolation.
But as I wrote in 2015: Netanyahu is like the “Nutrition Facts” label on a box of junk food: it tells you about the toxic ingredients inside.
The Dahiya Doctrine candidate
If Israel gets a new government, there’s no reason to believe there would be any change in its policies of genocide, apartheid, occupation and settler-colonization. Indeed, with international pressure relieved, they may well intensify.
Eisenkot has been marketed as the sober general who can rescue Israel. The New York Times even ran a headline claiming that “Gadi Eisenkot Couldn’t Be More Unlike Netanyahu.”
In fact, he is one of the chief architects of Israeli military brutality.
In 2008, as head of the Northern Command, Eisenkot formulated what became known as the Dahiya Doctrine, named after the southern Beirut suburb Israel devastated during its 2006 invasion of Lebanon.
Eisenkot promised to “apply disproportionate force” against civilian communities and inflict “great damage and destruction,” declaring that villages were military bases. “This is a plan. And it has been approved,” he added.
Building on Eisenkot’s doctrine, General Giora Eiland, a direct participant in the Gaza genocide, developed the same logic, arguing that Israel should destroy Lebanon’s infrastructure and deliberately cause “the suffering of hundreds of thousands of people.”
Eisenkot’s record has matched his bloody doctrine. Before the Great March of Return began in 2018, he announced that the army had deployed more than 100 snipers around Gaza.
Those snipers killed some 200 unarmed Palestinians and injured thousands more with live fire.
Eisenkot’s sharpshooters deliberately targeted children.
After 7 October 2023, Eisenkot joined Netanyahu’s war cabinet, helping to direct the genocide in its brutal initial phases.
His disputes with Netanyahu concerned tactics and management, not opposition to mass killing and destruction.
His current program declares that a Palestinian state is “not on the agenda,” vows no evacuation of settlements and indeed supports expanding and establishing new Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank.
No Zionist alternative
Israel’s other “opposition” leaders are no less unsavory.
In October 2023, Yair Golan, leader of the supposedly left-wing Democrats, let Palestinians in Gaza know that “as far as we care you can starve to death.”
For emphasis, he added that that was “completely legitimate.”
In 2007, Golan was reprimanded but not prosecuted after forces under his command used Palestinian civilians as human shields in the West Bank.
More recently, Golan appeared to criticize Israel’s genocide, stating that a “sane country” does not “kill babies as a hobby” and does not “set itself the aim of expelling populations.”
But he quickly backed off under pressure, denying that he was criticizing the Israeli military carrying out such atrocities.
As for former prime minister Naftali Bennett – who has previously bragged about how many Arabs he’s killed — he responded to a question about Gaza hospital patients and babies in incubators deprived of electricity by demanding, “Are you seriously asking me about Palestinian civilians?”
Yair Lapid was prime minister when Israel launched its August 2022 assault on Gaza. It killed 49 Palestinians.
During its brief tenure in 2021-2022, the Bennett-Lapid government advanced plans for 7,292 settlement housing units in one year, 26 percent more than the annual average under Netanyahu between 2012 and 2020.
Lieberman, meanwhile, was defense minister during the Great March of Return, justifying the deliberate massacre of civilians by asserting that “there are no innocent people in the Gaza Strip.”
He later quit Netanyahu’s government because he considered it too soft on Gaza, accusing the prime minister of “capitulation to terror.”
These gruesome settler-colonial racists and war criminals are not alternatives to Netanyahu.
Their only quarrel concerns who can manage Israel’s system of apartheid, genocide and relentless aggression more competently while winning back the support of Western liberals.
Ali Abunimah is the co-founder of The Electronic Intifada and author of The Battle for Justice in Palestine, now out from Haymarket Books.
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