Palestinian parties must not help Eisenkot rescue Israel from collapse - Middle East Eye
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Gadi Eisenkot, leader of the "opposition" Yashar party, have both been principal perpetrators of Israel's genocide of Gaza's Palestinians.
Eisenkot, a former army chief and author of Israel's genocidal "Dahiya Doctrine" of mass destruction targeting civilians, served in Netanyahu's emergency "war cabinet" from October 2023 to June 2024.
Both are equally committed to Jewish supremacy in Israel and the 1967 occupied territories and to excluding so-called "Arab" parties from any coalition government.
It is therefore unclear why any segment of the Palestinian people, let alone those who are citizens of Israel and who have suffered the longest at the hands of their Zionist conquerors, would express a preference for either of these genocidal choices.
All the political parties representing Palestinian citizens of Israel have nonetheless offered their services to Eisenkot in order to end Netanyahu's rule.
In so doing, they end up helping Israel weather an existential crisis, which Eisenkot himself fears will lead to the final collapse of the Jewish settler-colony as it teeters on the brink of a "point of no return" unless he forms a "national emergency" government.
Since the Zionist movement's inception and the later establishment of Israel, Zionist leaders have sought to divide and conquer the Palestinian people, thereby weakening their resistance to European Jewish settler-colonialism.
Those Zionists who mistook themselves for Marxists (in fact, they had always been no more than master-race socialists) insisted on separating the Palestinian peasantry from the Palestinian effendis, the landowning class who oppressed them.
The main wing of the Zionist Organization, meanwhile, fomented fissures between Palestinian Christians and Muslims, especially following the British occupation of Palestine, which began in late 1917. Efforts to co-opt the leaders of the Palestinian Druze community followed, aiming to separate them from Palestinian Sunni Muslims.
In the same period, during the 1920s, the Zionists also exploited the jealousies of the Palestinian elite, allying with some Jerusalem families against other Jerusalem families.
They, along with the British and a segment of the Palestinian elite, went as far as creating a collaborator Palestinian militia force known as the "peace bands" that killed Palestinian revolutionaries during the Great Palestinian Uprising of 1936-39.
It was after Israel's establishment that Zionist efforts to further subdivide Palestinians gathered pace. The 1948 expulsion of the Palestinians created four Palestinian communities overnight.
These were the Palestinians whom Israel failed to expel from the territory the Zionists conquered and who remained inside Israel's makeshift boundaries, and the refugees living in the remaining parts of Palestine and outside Palestine altogether.
The other two were the Palestinians of what became the West Bank and those of what became the Gaza Strip, the former ruled by Jordan and the latter by Egypt.
Inside Israel, the Palestinians were divided into ethno-religious categories formalised by the Jewish supremacist leaders of the country. The Druze became a separate ethnic category and the Bedouin are also treated as a separate population category, while Muslims and Christians have remained unified despite ongoing attempts to this day to separate them.
More subdivisions would follow Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967. The newly occupied Palestinians were subjected to the same occupation law, except for those in East Jerusalem, which Israel illegally annexed and whose population was subjected to separate regulations.
Despite these subdivisions, the Palestinian resistance movement arose in the 1960s and 1970s, unified in struggle against the Zionist usurpers and sought the liberation of all of Palestine's people and land from European settler-colonialism.
This consensus did not last, however, as the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) began to waver on the indivisibility of the Palestinian people and territory. In the mid-1970s, it began to speak of liberating the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem Palestinians as a first phase before the liberation of all Palestinians.
This prioritisation of the 1967 occupied territories and populations over those in the diaspora or in Israel led to the so-called declaration of independence that the PLO announced in Algiers in 1988, which, with its accompanying political programme, only encompassed the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
This was consecrated later in the 1993 Oslo Accords, where Israel agreed merely to negotiate about the status of the 1967 territories and their people.
A whole coterie of West Bank and Gaza elites and intellectuals rushed to separate the interests of the Palestinian people. They acquiesced to Israel's "right to exist" as a racist Jewish supremacist state in exchange for the independence of the West Bank (and East Jerusalem and Gaza).
In so doing, they forsook the refugees' right of return and accepted the apartheid structure of Israel and its dozens of racist laws under which Palestinian citizens of Israel languish.
This was unprecedented, as no segment of the Palestinian people had before 1988-93 sought to gain its rights from Israel by selling out the rights of the other segments.
Since Oslo, the consensus within the PLO and later the Palestinian Authority (PA), in the Arab world and in the "international" community has been that the one-third of the Palestinians who live in the 1967 occupied territories are the only ones whose rights need to be redressed.
Israel insisted meanwhile that Palestinians and other Arabs must not only recognise its alleged "right to exist", which no state in the world has, but also recognise its "right to exist as a Jewish state", something which US presidents from George W Bush to Barack Obama and Donald Trump insisted they do.
The gamble of the PLO and PA and their Palestinian elite and intellectual backers has backfired, leading to the ongoing Palestinian genocide in Gaza and the formal collaboration of the PA, as the current version of the 1930s "peace bands", in repressing the Palestinians.
It has also lost all Palestinians their rights in the discourse of the so-called "two-state solution" regnant in the West and the Arab world.
Israel itself, meanwhile, has begun to come apart. Mizrahi and Ashkenazi populations, religious and secular communities, the Jewish colonial settlers of the 1967 Palestinian territories and the Jewish colonial settlers of the 1948 territories, the right-wing genocidal Jewish supremacists and the left-wing genocidal Jewish supremacists are all at each other's throats.
The left-wing genocidals understand that there is a need to unify the country's Jewish citizens through an electoral win. Their strategy, before Israel completely collapses, is the establishment of what former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant called a "Jewish, Zionist, national unity government", one that excludes the Palestinian Arab citizens of the country.
Gallant, it will be recalled, is the major Israeli genocidaire who called Palestinians "human animals" and the only Israeli, alongside Netanyahu, currently wanted for his crimes by the International Criminal Court.
The right-wing genocidals believe they can unify Jewish citizens by smashing the left-wing genocidals through the juridical transformation of the country.
In the Israeli elections of 27 October, the right-wing genocidals won 27 seats for the Likud party, while the left-wing genocidals, represented by Yashar, lost with no more than 21 seats.
The ongoing popular support of Jewish citizens who gave Likud its electoral win is being touted as a Netanyahu loss in the face of the win of other Jewish political parties in the country, let alone of "Arab" parties. This is a most inaccurate representation of the elections.
The majority of Jewish voters voted for the right-wing genocidals, giving the Netanyahu-led coalition 53 seats in the Israeli parliament, while Eisenkot's "opposition" bloc of left-wing genocidals was only able to garner 48 seats with a minority of Jewish voters. This leaves the Palestinian citizens of Israel, whose parties won a total of 19 seats.
The experience of the indigenous Palestinian citizens in Jewish supremacist Israel has been horrific since 1948. They lived under martial law and racist pass laws for almost two decades and still have to submit to dozens of racist laws that privilege Jewish colonists over them.
They are also subjected to the government's theft of their land, which is transferred to Jewish colonists, to constant police surveillance, to deprivation of social services and control over their underfunded education system, and to all-out repression and the occasional massacres.
These include the Kafr Qasim massacre of 1956, the Land Day massacre of 1976 and the Second Intifada massacre of 2000, to name some of the major atrocities to which they continue to be subjected.
In previous decades, Palestinian citizens' participation in Israeli elections was celebrated by Zionists in the West to whitewash the Jewish supremacist state's image as an inclusive "democracy". The justification that Palestinians gave was the fact that they are taxpayers who are denied resources and government services.
They hoped that representation would push the government to provide more resources, decrease repression, safeguard whatever meagre lands they still own and which escaped Israeli confiscation, and improve their economic lot. After they achieved only meagre improvements over the decades, this rationale no longer holds.
Overall, the dire situation of Palestinian citizens of Israel has deteriorated, despite an increase in the number of middle-class Palestinians and their acquisition of education, partly thanks to funding by the US-based non-governmental organisation the New Israel Fund (NIF).
Established in 1979, NIF is an organisation that insists Israel should remain a "Jewish" state but which hopes to whitewash anti-Palestinian discrimination by reducing the stark differences in every index of life between the privileged Jewish colonists and the indigenous Palestinians. It is mostly funded by non-Israeli Jewish liberals.
Still, discrimination and inequality remain staggering, let alone the differential in rights between Palestinians and the Jewish colonists.
With its refusal to police criminal elements in the Palestinian community, if it has not actually encouraged them, Israel has drowned Palestinian communities in the country in gang-related crimes, not unlike the FBI strategy in African-American communities since the 1960s.
While Knesset representation has alleviated certain budgetary shortfalls for Palestinian citizens in towns and villages in the past, it has not made a dent in Israel's commitment to Jewish supremacy, legally or institutionally.
Such participation in elections also continues to whitewash Israel's foundational racism, making many question if it is worthwhile.
The elections are a litmus test for the "Arab" political parties, whose participation can only rescue Israel by supporting an alternative genocidal and colonising government to Netanyahu's.
This ignores the fact that the situation of the Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem, let alone in the diaspora, will not change one iota, and neither will the situation of the Palestinian citizens of Israel. It is only the Israeli genocidal parties that will benefit.
Indeed, both Netanyahu and Eisenkot have nothing but contempt for Palestinian citizens and their parties and have openly rejected partnering with them in any future government.
Still, all the Arab political parties officially recommended Eisenkot to form a government, which Israeli President Isaac Herzog formally asked him to do on 8 November.
How is backing Eisenkot, an active perpetrator and ongoing supporter of the genocide, a vote against a genocidal government?
Eisenkot's role in genocide and his Jewish supremacy are not unknown to the Palestinian party leaders. The leader of the National Democratic Assembly, Sami Abu Shehadeh, is clear that his party's support for Eisenkot does not mean that they have overcome their differences.
"Nobody thinks he is a good candidate. We are in special historical circumstances, and we have a decision in the party, for which the people elected us, namely getting rid of the government of genocide. We do not have easy choices," he said.
This is an odd explanation. How is backing Eisenkot, an active perpetrator and ongoing supporter of the genocide, a vote against a genocidal government?
As for Yousef Jabareen, the leader of the Joint List, an alliance of several parties led by Palestinian citizens, he has spoken bitterly against the Netanyahu government's ongoing racist campaign to delegitimise the votes of Palestinian citizens.
He has implored the Eisenkot camp to speak against the racist campaign. Eisenkot, for his part, has insisted that his government would be a "Zionist" government, wherein "Zionist" is a synonym for Jewish supremacist and racist, and more accurately for a government free of Arabs, or in German, "Araberrein".
He has since appeared to moderate his position, suggesting that he might agree to head a minority government relying on what the AFP news agency called "outside votes from Israeli-Arab parties" while seeking to form a stable government with majority support.
What "outside votes" means is relying on the parliamentary support of "Arab" political parties, which would not officially join his ruling Jewish coalition and would not pollute its Jews-only constituents.
The Palestinian parties recommended Benny Gantz, a former Israeli general, to be prime minister in 2020, as the departing Palestinian parliamentarian Ayman Odeh has bragged, except that Gantz spurned them and joined a Netanyahu national unity government.
Gantz became defence minister and launched the 2021 attack on Gaza, killing more than 250 Palestinians. When the Palestinian parties recommended Gantz, however, Israel was not imploding as it is now.
Unlike the rest of the Palestinian party leaders, let alone the Palestinian Islamists purged and persecuted by Israel, the Islamist Mansour Abbas, leader of the United Arab List, is the extremist Palestinian normaliser with Israel who constantly concedes Palestinian rights.
On 10 November, Israeli media reported that he was willing to recognise Hamas as a terrorist organisation in exchange for a "real partnership" with Eisenkot's bloc.
Abbas denied the following day having made such a statement. He had, however, told his faction on 10 November that his party had "repeatedly accepted the dismantlement of Hamas" and wanted "to be part of the coalition and the next government".
The problem all along has been that such Palestinian participation in elections and support for Zionist parties has never succeeded in weakening the racist system under which Palestinians in Israel suffer.
Given this stark fact, what is the horizon of such participation in the minds of these party leaders? What is it that they think they can achieve besides helping Israel stabilise?
If the Palestinian parties succeed in helping Israel avert the ongoing crisis, the rest of the Palestinians will blame them for selling out their rights, not unlike how the majority of Palestinians continue to heap scorn on the collaborator Palestinian Authority.
Palestinian citizens of Israel have endured the longest Zionist and Israeli racist rule and oppression, like their compatriots who were expelled in 1948 and whom successive Israeli governments have never allowed to return.
This is a decisive moment for Palestinian citizens of Israel and their political parties to stand up to their racist oppressors and to refuse to help them stabilise the settler-colony.
With the dismal record of the results of their electoral participation, it is high time that Palestinians in Israel think of political alternatives that would substantively improve their lives rather than ones that maintain their oppression and the oppression of the rest of the Palestinian people.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
