A Statement of the Internationalist Socialist League (RCIT Section in Israel / Occupied Palestine), 21.04.2019, http://www.the-isleague.com
Now that the counting of the ballot boxes has ended, the right wing bloc that is 65 MP’s strong is set the form the next coalition. The last thing we can say about those elections is that the results surprised us. We predicted that the next coalition will be a right wing one, with Netanyahu at its head and will be even farther to the right. That government will probably announce the annexation of Area C of the West Bank, which composed 60% of the West Bank, but only around 80,000 Palestinians. And so, Israel will mark another step on the road to an open Apartheid. The shifting of the Israeli population to the right is not new, and the removal of the last liberal masks of the Jewish State is just a matter of time.
We will look at the following seven factors:
1. The character of the Zionist State as a Settler Colonial state: One of the most prominent examples is the open racism all the Zionist parties display towards its Palestinian citizens. The Blue White party has refused to consider a coalition of the Hadash Arab party because of Hadash’s commitment to a two state solution and its demand to the abolition of the racist Nation Law. The Blue White leadership refused because it feared a flight of Zionist votes. It is also not surprising the Hadash went with Ahmed Tibi (who engineered the splitting of the Joint List), was willing to support a right wing bourgeois government with the Blue White party (whom amongst its leaders was one of the initial proposers of the Nation Law, and its leader, Benny Gantz, has bragged about the number of Arabs he killed in the last Gaza war)!
2. The class character of the votes in a colonial state: The members of the lower classes, that are mostly composed of oriental Jews, remember that they were brought as cheap labor force. After the occupation of 1967, their situation improved as they became small business owners and were successful in making their way into parliament and the ministerial offices. The simple reality is that if the Zionist left pass a peace treaty with the Palestinian Authority, and the Palestinian workers will go from direct exploitation by the Israeli bourgeoisie to an indirect one, those lower classes might slide back into the position of cheap labor. Therefore, only a class analysis can show why they voted for Netanyahu and not the Zionist left.
There are persons in Zionist left who are comparable to a camel who cannot see his hump and claim that the oriental Jews are racists towards Arabs and even Ashkenazi Jews. If so, why have they voted for a party that has a overwhelmingly Ashkenazi majority and at the same time have not opted for the fascist right who aims to transfer the Arab population and even annex all of the West Bank, as the New Right and Feiglen’s party seek? The answer is that such a move will allow the Palestinian petty bourgeoisie to compete with the Israeli one.
On the other hand, the well off, including Netanyahu’s neighbors in Caesarea, mostly Ashkenazi have supported the Blue White party. This is because they have not a lot to lose if a mini Palestinian state will come to exist, and they have a more to lose if the supporters of democracy around the world will start to recognize Israel as an Apartheid state and will pressure their governments to put sanctions on Israel.
3. Out of 300,000 votes of soldiers, prisoners, Israelis outside of Israel and hospital patients, whose vote accounts came later, approximately 30,000 voted for the Meretz party and the rest for right wing Zionist parties.
4. The repression and the disillusion of getting anything from the Israeli Parliament led a section of the Palestinians not to vote at all which is a motion to the left and at the same time the failure of the Arab Revolutions in Egypt and Syria along with the investment fund in Arab towns by the right wing government have pushed another section of the Palestinians into voting the left Zionists party and even right wing instead for Balad which is an anti-Zionist party of the oppressed nationality. This is the party we voted for, and it barely cleared the voting threshold and got only 4 seats in parliament. In addition, the Likud party installed secret cameras in voting booths in Arab town in order to suppress voter turnout and hired advertising agencies to smear the Arab parties and further decrease the voter turnout.
5. Putin and Trump also intervened on Netanyahu’s behave.
6. The religious parties have increased the seat count because of financial and ideological support from secular Zionism in return for support for the settlements and annexation.
7. The decline of the Zionist left is a long process which began in the Oslo agreement. It seems that many who voted for the Labour Party/Zionist Camp last time, voted for the Blue White party this time. The election results show that their attempt the surpass Netanyahu from the right failed.
The right wing trend among the Palestinians can be seen in the fact that last elections, the Joint List got 13 seats, and this time the different Arab parties got only 10. The Zionist left collapsed from 29 seats to just 11. This shows that there is no social force inside Israel who can bring about a change to our current reality. The change will only come when that Arab revolution will be victorious and solution will be a one democratic state
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We refer reader for more information on the ISL’s and the RCIT’s stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people to our websites http://www.the-isleague.com and https://www.thecommunists.net/worldwide/africa-and-middle-east/.
The ISL’s program can be read here: http://www.the-isleague.com/our-platform/ and https://www.thecommunists.net/theory/summary-of-isl-program/
See also Yossi Schwartz: Israel’s War of 1948 and the Degeneration of the Fourth International, http://the-isleague.com/1948-war-5-2013/ and https://www.thecommunists.net/worldwide/africa-and-middle-east/israel-s-war-of-1948/
Michael Pröbsting: On some Questions of the Zionist Oppression and the Permanent Revolution in Palestine, http://the-isleague.com/zionist-oppression-and-permanent-revolution/ and https://www.thecommunists.net/theory/permanent-revolution-in-palestine/