Published: 21 May 2020
Last updated: 4 March 2024
IT WOULD BE EASY for Australians reading news about Israel to assume the issue dominating the country’s national conversation is the proposed annexation of the West Bank. It seems that almost every story covers the impact such a move would have on the two-state solution.
These reports include a spectrum of fears and hopes from advocates and politicians across the Diaspora who strongly oppose such a move. People in this camp range from Shadow Foreign Minister Penny Wong, to European and American Jewish leaders, to those who are indifferent and are happy to leave the decision in Israel’s hands, and to US evangelicals who see such a move as a political imperative.
As Israel’s former prime minister Ariel Sharon famously said, in explaining his surprise decision to support the Gaza disengagement in 2005, “What you see from here, you don’t see from there.”
Conversations heard on the benches of any public park, beachside promenade or quarantine living room are unlikely to include the issue of annexation.
Instead, like almost every country, Israel is divided between those who think lockdown rules should remain until a vaccine is found, and those who think everything should be opened again because the shutdown economy is causing more pain than coronavirus ever will.
Israel's unemployment rate has jumped from 3.9 per cent to 26.5 per cent in the past three months. While Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has kept the death toll low, he has badly managed the economic fallout. Unlike Australia, Israel has no JobKeeper payment for employers and businesses have largely been closed.
The government’s coronavirus aid package is around half the size of that being offered by other developed countries with similar economic characteristics. Israel is preparing to spend just 5.5 per cent of its gross domestic product to support more than a million unemployed workers and 75,038 collapsing businesses, which puts it 13th out of 17 countries analysed, above Italy, Japan, Holland and Greece.
The rescue packages of Sweden and Belgium more than double the size of Israel’s, despite having similarly sized economies.
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This has led to huge protests almost every day, especially from independent workers such as those in the arts industry, market and restaurant workers. In stark contrast, there has been almost no-one marching in the streets or signing petitions, either for or against annexation.
When US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo visited Israel last week to hear Netanyahu’s plans for the West Bank, a protest organised by activists against the occupation drew about 30 people.
Many Israelis may be indifferent to annexation because of the uncertainty about whether it will ever happen. Netanyahu has been trumpeting annexation as his key policy agenda for three elections, over 500 days, and each time he says he is about to do it, he has backed away.
Before the second election, in September 2019, he blamed his lack of action on Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit, who indicted him on charges of bribery, fraud and breach of trust. “I want to act on [annexation] immediately,” he said at the time. “Therefore, I wanted to already bring it to the Knesset last week, [but] the Attorney General said to me, ‘You can’t because it is a transitional government. So here I am asking for the mandate.”
Some political analysts speculate that Netanyahu may again be bluffing about annexation. As journalist Anshel Pfeffer wrote in Haaretz: “Netanyahu has worked for decades to achieve the current status quo whereby the Palestinian issue has all but disappeared from the global agenda; it serves him well. Why jeopardize it? The last thing Netanyahu wants is to make the Palestinians relevant and newsworthy again by rushing to annex.”
According to this view, Netanyahu’s political strategy is to put forward ambitious legislation for Jewish sovereignty in Judea and Samaria in the West Bank, generate a national debate for months, only to have the bill blocked at the last minute by one of his enemies.
Some political analysts speculate that Netanyahu may again be bluffing about annexation. According to this view, his strategy is to put forward ambitious legislation, generate a national debate for months, only to have the bill blocked at the last minute by one of his enemies.
Ideally, this would be the Supreme Court, but it could also be the media, the Left, US Jewry, Benny Gantz, the EU, the International Criminal Court or the US Democratic Party. If any of these were able to pressure Israel to stop annexation, it would benefit Netanyahu more than actually annexing any territory.
He could enter his next election campaign with a clear culprit he could point to -as the cause of preventing Jewish sovereignty on the biblical homeland and use this to attract conservative voters.
More broadly, Netanyahu is a risk-averse politician. He works hard not to make waves while furthering his ideological aim of preventing a two-state solution. If, as he has indicated, he were to annex the entirety of Area C, which constitutes about 61 per cent of the West Bank, he knows this would lead to the end of security cooperation with the Palestinian Authority, and possibly the evaporation of the peace agreements with Jordan and Egypt.
This outcome would pose a great risk to Israeli security and make Netanyahu hugely unpopular as most of Area C has already been de facto annexed to Israel. It benefits Netanyahu far more to have someone to blame for preventing annexation, than actually doing it.
The majority of Israelis aren’t paying attention. They are longing for a time when their national energies are again devoted to winning Eurovision and sending rockets to the moon instead of having to survive a global pandemic. Annexation is not on their radar.
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Photo: Israeli activists protest against the US peace plan in front of the US ambassador's residence in Jerusalem, on May 15 (Emmanuel Dunand/AFP)
