The present government is dangerous to many Jews, also those who voted for the parties in the government coalition. But first and foremost it is dangerous for all Palestinians, on both sides of the Green Line. It could carry out various expulsion plans, which its senior ministers – Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir – have been advancing openly.
They are not making do with just the “small” and indirect types of banishment that previous Labor and Likud governments conducted – such as construction bans for Palestinians and crowding them into Area A, sending them to the penal colony in Gaza and revoking their residency status. But for the big expulsion, outside the borders of the Greater Land of Israel, political-military chaos must be created. In other words, war. During a war it will be easier to reprise the Nakba of 1948.
If mass expulsion seems like fiction, let us remember that until recently, talk about an antidemocratic legislative blitz sounded delusional. After all, long before justice ministers acted to weaken the judiciary – which never stopped the dispossession and discrimination – expelling Palestinians from their homeland was burnt into Israeli ideology and praxis as a realistic option. Even before the state was founded, it viewed the indigenous people as an unnecessary surplus, who in the worst case are to be ignored and in the worst case to be gotten rid of.
The danger of expulsion is concrete because most of the protesters against the government are convinced that until now, Israel was a democracy. They have been and still are willfully blind to the fact that their democracy for Jews has been a military junta for Palestinians. The dictatorship they are warning about has been operating already for six decades. Not just Israel’s Jewish and Druze citizens maintain it, but also the Diaspora Jews who support it emotionally and financially, and the West– enlightened in its own eyes – that treats it with never-ending tolerance.
Israel’s military regime over the Palestinians is a parliament, government, courts, jailer and hangman all together. There is no greater lack of separation of powers than this. We control a conquered population, deprive it of civil rights and, even before the invention of fake news, claimed everything was legal and proper. Generations of Israelis, including most of today’s protesters, were tamed into seeing all the “small” types of expulsion that were developed and implemented as a natural condition. The residents of Masafer Yatta and their eviction – with the approval of the High Court of Justice – do not interest them.
The LGBT community will make it difficult to pass the legislative initiatives against them. Exclusion of women will arouse greater opposition than what the Noam party assumes. The planned harm to the elderly, the sick, salaried workers and students will sow seeds of dismay also among Shas and Likud.
But the worsening harm, planned against the Palestinians, has Knesset majority larger than the size of the coalition. Labor MKs Naama Lazimi and Gilad Kariv, who were regarded as the progressive social hope, have already proved that discrimination against the Palestinians is part of the consensus. They are among the opposition members who voted – so disgracefully! – with this poisonous, destructive government to allow revocation of the citizenship of Palestinian citizens of Israel. Today they are clinging to a specific excuse, tomorrow they will grab onto another one to support a measure for a broader expulsion. They, their voters and the supporters of the “moderate” right of Benny Gantz, Gideon Sa’ar and Avigdor Lieberman will not lie down under the wheels of the trucks to prevent the nightmare that the settler right is piecing together.
This is not prophecy. It is forbidden to prophesy over a manmade disaster as if it is an existing place in space, and it’s just a matter of time before we reach it. This is a warning, an alert, an S.O.S. cry.