Settlement issue spurs coalition tensions

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, right,  and Minister of Economy Naftali Bennett during a  session in the Knesset last July.                                   [Israel Sun photo]

Ever since the leader of Israel’s Communist party, Meir Vilner, popularized the phrase “Yisrael, Palesteen: shtei medinot leshtei amim” (“Israel Palestine; two states for two peoples”) in the late 1970s, the idea of two states for two people – better known as “ the two-state solution” – has been understood to mean two ethnically/culturally homogenous nation- states sharing the land west of the Jordan River.

On this view, Israel – which is mostly Jewish, but includes 1.3 million Arabs – would in the future co-exist alongside Palestine, which would be home to both Christians and Muslim Arabs. More recently, the ethnic/cultural purity of Israel has been zealously pursued by the Russian-born Israeli foreign minister, Avigdor Liberman, who has declared that any final-status agreement must include large land swaps in which Arab-Israeli towns such as Umm el Fahm in the Northern Galilee would be annexed to the future Palestinian state, even as Jewish settlements in the West Bank would be threaded to produce a new Israeli map.

Liberman’s numerous provocations have incensed Arab-Israeli leaders and helped undermine the loyalty of many Arab citizens of Israel who have lived under Israeli rule since the establishment of the state in 1948. Especially hurt and enraged is the Druze population, whose sons not only serve in the IDF, but have been instrumental in the formation of some of the IDF’s most formidable units, including the legendary Shaked reconnaissance unit in which I had the honour of serving.

Naftali Bennett, leader of Israel’s third-largest political party, the Jewish Home, was ushered into office largely on the basis of his declaration that the Zionist pioneer’s dream of Israel as a secular cosmopolitan state is dead and that Israelis, including old-school Israelis, should replace Theodor Herzl’s multicultural fantasy with the dominant view of Israel as a Jewish homeland. Over the course of his campaign, Bennett castigated ultra-Orthodox Jews for spoiling Judaism for their secular counterparts. Judaism, Bennett claimed, needed to remain a big tent receptive to Jews of all stripes. After the 2012 election, in which his upstart party won 12 seats, Bennett joined the Likud-led coalition, believing that, like him, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had eschewed or never really bought into Herzl’s idea of Israel as a commonwealth of diverse cultures.

When Netanyahu publicly suggested that a final-status agreement might see some remote Jewish settlements remaining under Palestinian rule, Bennett was caught entirely off guard. For a moment, the young leader (Bennett is 41) must have wondered whether the prime minister was in fact abandoning the idea of Jewish unity. If that were the case, Bennett, who had once been Netanyahu’s chief of staff, would not tolerate it.

And rather than clarify matters with Netanyahu, Bennett took an opportunity on Jan. 29 to lash out publicly and in a manner that reminded some Israeli pundits of his campaign faux pas in which this inexperienced leader and former army officer declared that if he were ordered to evacuate settlers, he would disobey orders. That outburst unhinged a large swath of Bennett’s supporters and moved his party from second position behind front-running Likud to third behind Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid. This latest outburst, some journalists speculated, could cost Bennett his seat in cabinet.

Indeed, Netanyahu’s office demanded a public apology, which Bennett withheld for a while and finally offered without ever backing off his substantive criticism. In private, Bennett spoke of Netanyahu’s position as a hoax aimed at riling the Palestinian leadership and showing U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, who has been preparing to present an American “framework” for a peace deal, just how committed to resolving the conflict he is.

Bennett has said that if Netanyahu were to declare his support for an American initiative that calls for a Palestinian state to be established along the 1967 borders with east Jerusalem as its capital, he would quit the coalition. Two of Netanyahu’s other coalition partners, Justice Minister Tzipi Livni and Lapid, the finance minister, would likely leave the government if Netanyahu doesn’t continue to support the American initiative. 

The notion that settlers could and would remain under Palestinian rule is not new. In the run-up to the 2005 disengagement from Gaza, several settler leaders declared their unconditional commitment to the Holy Land. Jewish settlers in the Gush Katif bloc in southern Gaza served the Israeli government with several major petitions insisting on their right to stay put. Then-prime minister Ariel Sharon shrugged them off.

In the West Bank, a small group of settlers in the Gush Etzion region have adopted the strategy made famous by the ultra-Orthodox teachings of recently departed Rabbi Menachem Froman, who argued that Orthodox Jews should not defer to ephemeral political arrangements and must remain steadfastly committed to the Promised Land. Rabbi Froman went so far as to broker a draft agreement with Hamas that permitted Jewish settlers to remain true to this most profound conviction.

David Berlin is the founding editor of the Walrus magazine. His book The Moral Lives of Israelis: Reinventing the Dream State was recently issued in Vintage Paperback.