Israel / Palestine: New hard-right government escalates politics of hate

By James McCabe

IN2021, the New York-based Human Rights Watch released a report titled Threshold Crossed: Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution. Historically, US-based NGOs have steered wide of exposing the full extent of the day-to-day violence and discrimination meted out against Palestinians by the state of Israel. Long deemed a key ally of US imperialism in the Middle East, the Israeli state receives $3.8 billion in military funding from the US government each year. So, the unambiguous condemnation of Israel in the Human Rights Watch report represented a certain watershed.

Nevertheless, Joe Biden released a statement expressing enthusiasm for working with prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s (a “friend for decades”) new government. This is just the latest example of the hypocrisy of US imperialism’s supposed defence of “democratic values”. Netanyahu’s new government has been described as the most right-wing, ultra-nationalist and outright racist government in the history of the state of Israel.

A cabinet of racist thugs

Many of the new government ministers from far-right parties are nothing more than bigoted thugs. The new finance minister once called for segregating Is- raeli maternity wards between Jews and Palestinians because he said that he didn’t want his wife “to be forced to give birth next to an enemy”.

The new minister for national security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, lives in a settlement in the occupied West Bank. In 2007, he was convicted of incitement to racism and of supporting a terrorist organisation. Although only convicted once, he was indicted over 50 times. For years, Ben-Gvir hung a photo in his living room of Baruch Goldstein, an Israeli-American who in 1994 killed 29 Palestinians at a mosque in Hebron. This is the man who is now responsible for border police in the West Bank at a time when violence and the killing of Palestinians have already been surging.

In 2022, one of the deadliest years on record, 220 Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces, including 48 children, according to a report by Middle East Eye

Rise in violent repression

Netanyahu has agreed to advance annexation of the West Bank as part of his coalition deal with ultra-nationalist parties. As it stands, there are almost 630,000 Israeli settlers living in the Occupied Territories of the West Bank and East Jerusalem. The settlers have the