Itamar Ben Gvir’s raid of the Al Aqsa compound has strained the Abraham Accords and made it harder for Arab states to justify continued normalization with Israel.
These increasingly provocative actions by Israel don’t merely raise serious concerns for the UAE and other Abraham Accords participants; it also raises worries anew in Egypt and, especially, Jordan. Both countries have maintained long term peace accords with Israel, against the wishes of the vast majority of their citizens.
Last month, Secretary of State Antony Blinken declared that the Biden administration would judge incoming Israeli leaders on their actions. So far it has remained silent as the new Israeli leaders have taken proactive actions in Jerusalem, and Israeli forces have killed four Palestinians in the first week of 2023.
Itamar Ben-Gvir, the Jewish supremacist who serves as police minister in the new Jewish supremacist government of Israel, today made a provocative visit to the “Temple Mount” — the Haram al-Sharif in Jerusalem — that ought to alarm the world. Some Jewish Israeli extremists, including some in Ben-Gvir’s camp, actually want to destroy the Al-Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock shrine. These extremist views are not typically represented in the western media.
Liberal Zionists like David Grossman have to own up to their ideology and admit that Israel’s drift towards the right is because of Zionism, not in spite of it.
The New York Times appears to be tired of cheerleading for Israel, witness two opinion pieces this weekend: a long report by Thomas Friedman in which the columnist admitted at the start that “the prospect for a two-state solution has all but vanished;” then, a full page offering by the entire Editorial Board headlined that says that Benjamin Netanyahu’s likely next coalition government “is a significant threat to the future of Israel.” Neither article mentions apartheid.
Israeli settler violence against Palestinians soared in 2022. Palestinians say the worrying trend will only worsen as right-wing extremists make their home in Israel’s new government.
The masks have fallen. Israel’s new government, supported by far-right parties with outright racist tendencies, represents one step further in the repression between the river and the sea.
Racist rightwinger Itamar Ben-Gvir gets the security portfolio in Netanyahu’s next government and promises to visit the Al-Aqsa mosque in a provocation to Palestinians reminiscent of Ariel Sharon’s deadly visit there in 2000. But this is not news for the New York Times, which blinds its readers to the frightening developments in Israel.
It is only a matter of time before the Israeli military and security apparatus unleashes its next wave of collective punishment in response to the Jerusalem twin bombings. We are merely waiting before the calm inevitably gives way to the storm.
Once again the “New York Times” launders the dark forces gaining power in Israeli politics. Tensions in the occupied Palestinian West Bank are already at their highest level in years, and yet Israel’s security policy is now in the hands of a fascist who was considered so extreme that he wasn’t even allowed to serve as a foot soldier in the Israeli army when he was younger.