PALESTINIANS have denounced Binyamin Netanyahu’s swearing-in as Israel’s prime minister in his return as head of the Tel Aviv regime’s most far-right cabinet in history.
Israel has declared it will expand illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank and pursue other anti-Palestinian policies.
Netanyahu, who is facing corruption charges in court, told the Knesset (Israeli parliament), that his top goal is to thwart Iran’s nuclear programme and ‘ensure Israel’s military superiority in the region’.
He also voiced hopes that more Arab countries will sign normalisation deals with Israel following United States-brokered agreements with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco.
Opponents heckled him with chants of ‘Weak! Weak!’ They said Netanyahu will have to make costly deals to secure new partners to stay in power after some parties boycotted him over his upcoming trial on corruption charges.
However, the parliament voted to approve his cabinet and elected former minister Amir Ohana as the Knesset’s speaker.
Ex-Israeli intelligence minister Eli Cohen, an architect of the so-called Abraham Accords, was named as foreign minister.
Israel’s new minister of military affairs, Yoav Galant, is a former general, an ally of Netanyahu and an advocate of Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.
Netanyahu was ousted in June 2021 by a grand coalition, which included Arab parties, headed by right-wingers Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid.
It didn’t take him long to come back.
Following his November 1st election win, Netanyahu entered into talks with ultra-Orthodox and extreme-right parties.
His allies include the Religious Zionism formation and Jewish Power Party, whose leaders Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir oppose Palestinian statehood, and both have a history of inflammatory remarks about Palestinians.
Smotrich will now take charge of Israeli settlement expansion policies in the West Bank, and Ben-Gvir will be the national security minister with powers over the police, which have also operated in the occupied territories since 1967.
Senior security officials have already voiced concern over the new Israeli administration’s direction, as have Palestinians.
Smotrich and Ben-Gvir’s priority remains the expansion of West Bank settlements, Denis Charbit, professor of political science at Israel’s Open University, said.
Charbit added: ‘The cabinet is the result of Netanyahu’s political weakness, linked to his age and his trial.’
Netanyahu’s conservative Likud party said in its guidelines for the new Israeli administration that it would ‘promote and develop settlements’.
‘These guidelines constitute a dangerous escalation and will have repercussions for the region,’ Nabil Abu Rudeineh, the spokesman for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, warned.
Abbas has condemned Netayahu’s cabinet, saying its ‘motto is extremism and apartheid’.
Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh also voiced his disapproval of Israel’s administration.
Shtayyeh said during a rally in the occupied central West Bank city of Ramallah: ‘This cabinet is the most extremist, the most threatening, and the most insolent.
‘I know for a fact that the international community will not deal with many members of this administration, therefore to us, we are against all the cabinets that practice killing and oppression on our people.’
The Palestinian Hamas resistance movement expressed its dismay with Israel’s new administration.
Hamas spokesman Hazem Qasem said: ‘It is clear that a cabinet that is led by Netanyahu and includes Smotrich and Ben Gvir as members, will surely create policies that are far more provocative.
‘It is playing with fire, whether by trying to change the status quo of the Al-Aqsa Mosque, or the developing settlement craze, or the aggression against Palestinian prisoners.
‘This administration has created a wide opportunity for a massive escalation on the ground, on all fields, and we in Hamas, clearly warn against these policies that provoke the Palestinian people, and create an explosion detonator.’
Netanyahu’s cabinet, the most right-wing in the Israeli regime’s history, is facing opposition even from its own officials who hold fascist views, according to a political commentator.
Sa’d Nimr, professor of political science at Birzeit University in the occupied West Bank, has said that in the past days, many Israeli regime officials have protested against Netanyahu’s cabinet, and called it a sign of weakness in the political structure and warned that it could pose serious dangers to the regime’s survival.
Jordanian King Abdullah II says his country, which serves as the custodian of the al-Aqsa Mosque compound – Islam’s third holiest site, is prepared for conflict if its ‘red lines’ over the sacred site in the Old City of al-Quds (Jerusalem) are crossed.
He also said that a third Palestinian Intifada, or uprising, might break out amid rising Israeli brutality in the occupied territories.
Abdullah said: ‘If people want to get into a conflict with us, we are quite prepared.
‘We have set red lines and if people want to push those red lines then we will deal with that.’
Intifada refers to uprisings against the Israeli regime, the first of which took place between 1987 and 1993, where more than 1,300 Palestinians were killed.
The second Intifada took place between 2000 and 2005, where Israel killed at least 4,973 Palestinians.
Since the start of 2022, Israeli troops have killed over 220 Palestinians, including more than 50 children, in the occupied West Bank and East al-Quds (Jerusalem) as well as in the besieged Gaza Strip.
According to the United Nations, the number of Palestinians killed by Israel in the occupied West Bank in 2022 is the highest for 16 years.
- Popular demonstrations in Arab countries against the normalisation of ties with Israel show that the United States is gradually ‘losing ground’ in the region and is not dominant anymore, said Charlotte Kates, the international coordinator of Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network.
She was speaking at a press conference, following protests against Israel which started during the World Cup in Qatar and continued last week throughout Tunisia and Morocco on the second anniversary of the normalisation of ties week with the Tel Aviv regime.
Kates said: ‘The United States, as an imperialist power, wants to control and dominate the region for the profit of its military-industrial complex and huge corporations.
‘Therefore, it benefits from the division of the Arab people.’
What happened in the World Cup made it clear that Palestinians and the Palestinian cause remain at the centre of the Arab people’s struggle and in the Arab people’s hearts and minds and really of the hearts and minds of people of the world.
She added: ‘It is clear that no signed paperwork between Zionists, imperialists, and reactionary rulers and kings can do anything to dampen the true enthusiasm and spirit of the Arab people and indeed the people of the world for Justice in Palestine.’
