Prime Minister Netanyahu Interview with CNN's Wolf Blitzer
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As 13 parties struggle with Israel's complex post-election maths, seeking alliances that can assure them power, the most significant outcome of the vote is easily missed. The religious fundamentalists and settler parties - Israel's far right - won an unprecedented and clear-cut victory last week.
Even on the most cautious assessment, these parties together hold 72 seats in the 120-member parliament. For more than a decade they have underwritten Benjamin Netanyahu's uninterrupted rule. That is why all the current talk in Israel and the western media about two equal camps, right and left, pitted against each other - implacably hostile and unable to build a majority - is patent nonsense.
The far right has a large majority. It could easily form a government - if it wasn't mired in a now seemingly permanent crisis over the figure of Netanyahu.
Standing against the far right are what are loosely termed the "centrists", equally committed to the takeover of swaths of the occupied territories, if in their case more by stealth.
There are two parties on the "centre-right" - Yesh Atid and Blue and White - that won between them 25 seats. The "centre-left", represented by the Labor party and Meretz, still struggling to maintain the pretence that they comprise a "peace camp", secured 13 seats. A final 10 seats went to the various parties representing Israel's large minority of Palestinian citizens.
Both the far right and the "centrists" subscribe to versions of the settler-colonial ideology of Zionism. To outsiders, the similarities between the two camps can sometimes look stronger than the differences. Ultimately, with the possible exception of Meretz, both want the Palestinians subjugated and removed.
The "centrists" may best be understood as the apologetic wing of Zionism. They worry about Israel's image abroad. And that means they have, at least ostensibly, emphasised dividing territory between Jews and Palestinians - as the Oslo accords proposed - rather than visibly dividing rights. The centrists' great fear is that they will be seen as presiding over a single apartheid state.
Jewish supremacyThe 60 percent of the parliament now in the hands of extreme religious and settler parties takes the opposite view. They prefer to divide rights - to create an explicit apartheid system - if they can thereby avoid dividing the territory. They want all of the region, and ideally only for Jews.
They care little what others think. All subscribe to an ideology of Jewish supremacy, even if they differ on whether "Jewish" is defined in religious or ethnic-nationalist terms. In 2018 Netanyahu's government began the process of legislating this worldview through the Jewish Nation State Law.
The far right explicitly views Palestinians, the native people whose homeland the European-led Zionist movement has been colonising for the past 100 years, as interlopers or unwelcome guests.
Unlike the centrists, the far right places little weight on the distinction between Palestinians under occupation and the fifth of Israel's population who are Palestinian and have degraded citizenship. All Palestinians, wherever they live and whatever their status, are seen as an enemy that needs to be subdued.
Allying with centristsSo why, given the far right's incontestible triumph last week, are the media filled with analyses about Israel's continuing political impasse and the likelihood of a fifth election in a few months' time?
Why, if a clear majority of legislators are unapologetic Jewish supremacists, has Netanyahu kept courting centrists to stay in power - as he did after the last election, when he ensnared battle-hardened general Benny Gantz into his coalition? And why after this election is he reported to be reaching out for the first time to a Palestinian party for support?
Part of the answer lies in a deep disagreement within the far right, between religious fundamentalists and its more secular components, on what "Jewish rule" means. Both sides focus on the supremacy of Jews over Palestinians and refuse to make a meaningful distinction between the occupied territories and Israel. But they have entirely different conceptions of Jewish sovereignty. One faction thinks Jews should take their orders from God, while the other looks to a Jewish state.
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