Israeli Moderates Are Fed Up with Netanyahu on Settlements

Maybe because it’s Chanukah, moderate Israeli politicians suddenly have found the courage to speak truth to power – and they’re finally telling Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to stop undermining the two-state solution.

Five Labor Party members of the Netanyahu coalition, including Defense Minister Ehud Barak – a one-time liberal who may now regret joining the unholy alliance of settlers, Russian emigres, ultra-nationalists, and ultra-orthodox that make up the Netanyahu coalition – yesterday broke ranks and voted against a “national priorities” map that Netanyahu’s government redrew. The redrawing will give special benefits, education, employment, and 110 million Israeli shekels [U.S. $29 million] in funding to 110,000 settlers in 90 settlements in the occupied West Bank.

Residents of the West Bank village, Yasuf, after their mosque was burned and vandalized. Photo credit: Rina Castelnuovo for the New York Times.

This at a time when Netanyahu claims to be enforcing a 10-month moratorium on settlement construction to encourage the Palestinians to restart the peace process. As Knesset member Meir Sheetrit (Kadima) put it, “With one hand, [the government] freezes settlement construction and with the other it pays hush money to the hilltop youth in unauthorized outposts.”

After the vote, Barak noted that certain settlements have been “consistent sources of extremist activity that damage the fabric of life in the West Bank, as in last Friday’s severe incident at the mosque,” referring to arson in the northern West Bank village of Yasuf. “I don’t think we ought to give them a prize in the form of including them in the national priority map.”

It’s about time someone joined opposition leader and Kadima Party head, Tzipi Livni, in support of the peace process.  Said she about the latest government action: “I don’t understand how responsible leadership, which understands what is needed to maintain Israel as Jewish and democratic, can encourage Israelis to settle in isolated places when everyone knows that they are the price being asked to create a future for the whole Jewish people.”

Barak took another honorable step this weekend, ordering the “Israel Defense Forces … to sever ties with the Har Bracha yeshiva in the West Bank, whose dean urged his students to defy military orders if they are told to evacuate settlements or halt settlement construction while serving in the army. The move came after Rabbi Eliezer Melamed, the dean of the religious seminary, refused to report for a meeting with Barak to discuss his support for resisting army orders.” [Lots more about the explosive issue of religious extremism in the military in Didi Remez's blog.]

Another welcome move came from one of Israel’s chief rabbis, Yona Metzger, who visited Yasuf and evoked the Holocaust: “Seventy years ago, the Holocaust, the biggest tragedy of our history, began with the torchings of synagogues during Kristallnacht.”

On the other side of the future peace deal, the voices weren’t so helpful. The Palestinians got a big promise of support from what is probably the worst possible voice, in terms of giving the Israelis confidence in the peace process: Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

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