RAMALLAH: Benjamin Netanyahu’s new Israeli government pledged on Wednesday to legalize dozens of illegally built settlements and annex the occupied West Bank.
The coalition agreement with the ultranationalist far-right, published a day before the government is sworn into office, also included language endorsing discrimination against people on religious grounds, contentious judicial reforms, and generous stipends for ultra-Orthodox men who study instead of work.
The new government has vowed to expand and vastly increase government funding for settlements in the West Bank city of Hebron, where a tiny ultranationalist Jewish community lives in heavily fortified neighborhoods amid tens of thousands of Palestinians.
“What worries me the most is that these agreements change the democratic structure of … the state of Israel,” said Tomer Naor, chief legal officer of the Movement for Quality Government in Israel, a watchdog group. “One day we’ll all wake up and Netanyahu won’t be prime minister, but some of these changes will be irreversible.”
The US has already warned the incoming government against actions that undermine hopes for an independent Palestinian state.
Palestinian experts told Arab News that the composition and policy of the new Israeli government was “an existential threat“ to them as a people and to their dreams of a free homeland.
“The new right-wing Israeli government must realize that without complying with the resolutions of international legitimacy, nothing will be achieved and there will not be any settlement left on the lands of the independent state of Palestine,” said Palestinian presidential spokesman Nabil Abu Rudeineh.
Without an independent Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital the region would have no security or stability, he said, and he urged the US administration to turn its words into actions.
Lt. Gen. Jibril Rajoub, secretary of the Fatah Central Committee, told Arab News: “The laws enacted and recently passed by extremists in the Knesset to facilitate the work of the new extremist Israeli government are a clone of the Nuremberg race laws that were enacted in 1935 by the Germans to persecute the Jews and today are enacted by the Israeli extremists to persecute the Palestinians,”
Ismail Haniyeh, head of the political bureau of Hamas, said the priority of the Palestinian people was to counter the policies of the new Israeli government in resistance and unity.
“The settlements will be confronted by escalating the resistance, expanding its area, and applying pressure by all means available to uproot the settlers and the occupying entity from all the land of Palestine,” he said.
Ahmed Deek, an adviser to the Palestinian Minister of Foreign Affairs, told Arab News: “We call on the US administration to put pressure on the Israeli government not to implement these agreements related to the Palestinians. This government is racing against time to annex the lands of the West Bank and to perpetuate the occupation and the apartheid regime.”
Deek said the Palestinian Authority was coordinating with Jordan and other Arab countries to confront the policies of the new Israeli government.
