If Israel<\/a> were a democracy, as the Jewish diaspora claims, a government would now be formed that reflects the result of last night\u2019s election<\/a>.<\/p>\n This would be a majority or minority administration of Gadi Eisenkot with the participation, either formal or informal, of the two Palestinian<\/a> blocs.<\/p>\n If Benjamin Netanyahu honoured this result, there would be no way back to power for his ultra-rightwing bloc. For Israel\u2019s longest-serving prime minister, it would be the end of an era.<\/p>\n But Israel is not a democracy, and Netanyahu is no democrat.<\/p>\n It is a settler state that has moulded itself increasingly tightly around the identity and views of Jewish fascists.<\/p>\n It\u2019s an occupying power where Palestinians are ejected from their homes, as they are in Hebron<\/a>, with no court judgement, no right of redress or compensation, nor any legal process at all.<\/p>\n The central issue Jews face was not even on the ballot.<\/p>\n On the ballot were Netanyahu\u2019s leadership, his judicial coup<\/a>, the refusal of the ultra-Orthodox<\/a> to take part in military service, Israel\u2019s international isolation – anything but the genocide in Gaza<\/a>, the pogroms in the occupied West Bank, and the future of Palestinians.<\/p>\n Every Zionist party in this campaign acted as if one half of the population of the land Israel dominates did not exist and should be excluded.<\/p>\n Bezalel Smotrich, promised to \u201cJudaise\u201d the Galilee and the Negev, home to hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. Click to enlarge<\/p><\/div>\n Several parties made the deportation and displacement of Palestinians key parts of their campaign.\u00a0Religious Zionism, led by Bezalel Smotrich, promised to \u201cJudaise\u201d the Galilee and the Negev<\/a> (Naqab), home to hundreds of thousands of Palestinians.<\/p>\n The Palestinian population of Israel rightly concluded that they were facing an existential threat, and voted in record numbers<\/a> in an attempt to prevent this from happening.\u00a0Palestinians who had boycotted the vote for decades went to the polls.<\/p>\n \u201cWe do not feel safe. A sense of security has completely vanished – and I mean security on every level,\u201d Ibrahim Said told Middle East Eye<\/a>. \u201cI feel not just like a second-class citizen, but like a twentieth-class one.\u201d<\/p>\n Around 80 percent<\/a> of Palestinian citizens of Israel voted. This result will be a red flag for National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, who will remember the shock of this election in future attempts to restrict and limit the voting power of Palestinians.<\/p>\n Jewish and Palestinian citizens were never equal, but the disparity between them has now become grotesque. Nor were their politicians, one of whom – Sami Abu Shehadeh<\/a>, the leader of Balad – was barred for running for election because of an article he wrote analysing the 7 October Hamas attack and its ramifications.<\/p>\n Nor are their votes. Israel is now a country where you can be beaten up and stabbed for speaking Arabic<\/a>, as happened to three Druze citizens in a nightclub in Tel Aviv. If you are a doctor or health worker, you can lose your job.<\/p>\n Being a Zionist Arab, like the Druze who serve in the military, is no protection from fascists.<\/p>\n Arabs are seen as the existential enemy not just of supremacist Jews, but of all Israeli Jews – and consequently, Eisenkot himself and each of his partners, bar one<\/a>, have specifically pledged that they would not come to power on the back of a deal with the two Palestinian blocs: the Joint List and Ra\u2019am.<\/p>\n A Jewish state cannot be run by Arabs, whether Zionist or not, they said.<\/p>\n In any other country, a result like this would clearly put the Arab parties in the position of kingmaker, as they were projected to take 17 seats<\/a> combined.\u00a0But we do not live in an age of graceful losers.<\/p>\n Like Flavio Bolsonaro, who refused to concede<\/a> after a stunning victory by President Lula da Silva in Brazil, or indeed US<\/a> President Donald Trump after Joe Biden was declared the victor<\/a> in 2020, Netanyahu is not about to go quietly.<\/p>\n We already know he tried hard to reignite the war with Iran<\/a> in the days leading up to the election, and only failed when army chief of staff Eyal Zamir<\/a> refused to play ball, according to Israeli media.<\/p>\n When that attempt failed, Netanyahu posted an AI-generated image of a mushroom cloud over Tel Aviv<\/a>, and briefed widely on Zamir\u2019s betrayal, to cast military chiefs as soft on Israel\u2019s defence.<\/p>\n In the weeks or months of political manoeuvring to come, an attack on Iran is more, not less likely – if only to predetermine the policy of his successor.<\/p>\n Like Trump, Netanyahu is a pathological liar. But he is far more intelligent and deceptive, hence his longevity.<\/p>\n Facing justice for corruption, or a commission of inquiry for the gross security failings that left southern Israel exposed to the Hamas attack on 7 October 2023, are the lesser of his three primary concerns.<\/p>\n The third and most important is to fulfil the dream of his father, Benzion Netanyahu<\/a>, the Polish-born scholar and Revisionist Zionist, to annex the occupied West Bank<\/a>, or in their words to return the kingdom of Judea and Samaria to the Jewish state.<\/p>\n To underestimate the fundamentalism of Netanyahu is to be lured by his Pennsylvanian American English into a carefully laid trap that one US president after another has walked into.<\/p>\n Netanyahu has also been in this position before. He knows how to offer his political enemies a national unity government and then crush them.<\/p>\n He knows how to play for a second election, aware that the second time around, thousands of Jewish voters<\/a> from abroad would not fly in again to vote against him. And he remains a caretaker prime minister, a position that could last for many months.<\/p>\n As leader of the largest party, Likud, Netanyahu could even be pardoned by Israeli President Isaac Herzog on the corruption charges he is facing, and Herzog could ask him to form the next government.<\/p>\n It would be the same folly to imagine that Ben Gvir and Smotrich will walk away with their hands up.\u00a0They now have their own armed militia, after Ben Gvir announced that 100,000 gun licences<\/a> had been issued by his ministry since 7 October.<\/p>\n Most of these guns go to settlers. Even before the Hamas attack, settlers were prioritised for gun ownership<\/a>, because they were living in a \u201cdanger zone\u201d. According to a 2024 analysis, one third of all adults in the settlements of Adora<\/a>, northwest of Hebron, had a gun licence.<\/p>\n In truth, Ben Gvir and Smotrich should be wearing military fatigues, not suits – for they also have the youth vote.<\/p>\n In the US, almost half of Jews under 35 have rejected the concept of a Jewish supremacist state, in favour of equal citizenship for Palestinians and Jews in a single binational state, according to a recent poll <\/a>conducted by the Jewish Voters Resource Center.<\/p>\nExistential threat<\/strong><\/h2>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/Smotrich.jpg\")
<\/a>Political manoeuvring<\/strong><\/h2>\n
Settler terrorism<\/strong><\/h2>\n