More than Netanyahu’s election to a fifth term as prime minister, the collapse of the Zionist left was the night’s historic result.
At least since Netanyahu’s election in 2009, Labor has repeatedly tried to defeat Likud by tacking right. Labor voters elected Avi Gabbay, a millionaire telecom executive and former minister in Netanyahu’s government, to head the party in 2017, in the hopes that he could reach voters beyond the party’s base. Gabbay, the son of Moroccan immigrants and raised in a poor Jerusalem neighborhood, was meant to take the party of the kibbutzim in a new direction. And in a sense, he did. He joined the right-wing attacks on the legitimacy of Arab political participation; when asked if he would form a governing coalition that included the Arab-led parties, he responded, “We have nothing in common with them.” He pledged not to evacuate Jewish settlements from the occupied West Bank. When, two weeks before the election, a rocket fired from Gaza hit a house in central Israel, Gabbay accused Netanyahu of being weak for not authorizing a more forceful military response. But voters who truly want ethnonationalism will always choose the real, bloody thing. Triangulation only moves the center of political gravity rightward, and when the center moves right, the left loses.
The extreme police violence during protests outside the new US embassy on Monday turned out to be a prelude to the Israeli police’s response to protests on Friday in the mixed city of Haifa. In what can only be described as a police riot, heavily armed border police officers and Special Forces troops charged a peaceful crowd of predominantly Palestinian demonstrators, punching and throttling and kicking chairs at them and throwing them to the ground. By the end of the night, Israeli police had arrested twenty-one people, at least four of whom were hospitalized for serious injuries.
Since 2012, the Israeli government has taken a range of draconian measures to force asylum seekers out of the country. Israel has granted refugee status to just one Sudanese man and 11 Eritrean nationals, rejecting thousands of asylum seekers’ claims. In Europe, by comparison, 91.4 percent of Eritrean asylum requests are accepted. The asylum seekers must renew their visas every two months. They can be detained for extended periods at the Holot facility. The government confiscates 20 percent of their monthly paychecks, claiming the money will be returned to them upon their departure, and fines their employers. In 2012, the government deported over a thousand South Sudanese asylum seekers, including children, back to Juba, the capital of the newly independent state. Tens of thousands of asylum seekers have already left Israel 2013. Some have received asylum in Canada, Sweden, and the Netherlands. Others have attempted to make the dangerous journey to Libya and from there, across the Mediterranean Sea, to Europe.
