Israel plans to ‘manage conflict’ with Palestinians rather than resolve it, interior minister says
The Israeli government will not discuss the establishment of a Palestinian state under Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, or Yair Lapid when he takes over as part of a rotation arrangement, Israeli Interior Minister Ayelet Shaked has said.
In an exclusive interview with The National, she said there was a consensus among the right-wing, leftist and centrist parties sitting together in one governing coalition not to address any issue that might cause an internal rift, including resolving the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
“The current situation is the best for everyone,” Ms Shaked said during a visit to Abu Dhabi on Monday.
Ms Shaked, one of Israel’s most influential politicians and a linchpin in the current government, wants to manage the conflict with the Palestinians, not resolve it.
“It’s better to keep it that way,” she said. “We do believe in economic peace to improve Palestinian lives and to do mutual industrial zones, but not a state with an army, definitely.”
The coalition government, the first to include an Arab party, was formed in June and ended Benjamin Netanyahu’s 12year tenure as prime minister.
Under the coalition deal, Mr Bennett will serve as prime minister for two years, before he is replaced by Mr Lapid.
Ms Shaked, 45, is a key ally of Mr Bennett, who leads the ultranationalist Yamina party that champions settlements in the occupied West Bank.
She refused to call the settlements illegal, instead describing them as “territory under dispute”.
She said campaigners behind the Boycott, Divestments and Sanctions movement were hypocrites.
“They are anti-Semitic as they are against the existence of Israel. BDS is a new form of antiSemitism,” said Ms Shaked, who served as justice minister between 2015 and 2019.
The movement calls on Israel to withdraw from the territories it has occupied since the 1967 war, to dismantle the wall that separates pre-1967 Israel from parts of the occupied West Bank and to permit Palestinian refugees to return to their homes.
Ms Shaked was open about her fierce opposition to the concept of a two-state solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. She said Israel learnt lessons from its past conflicts.
“We have known first-hand that from every territory we withdraw, a terror organisation will spring up,” she said.
“It happened in South Lebanon, where Hezbollah is ruling and is funded by Iran and having thousands of missiles pinpointed at Israel.
“When we withdrew from Gaza, people were saying it would be another Monaco – but we know what happened there, Hamas took over the city and turned it into a terror state.
“We will not repeat this experiment again.”
On Sunday, Israeli Health Minister Nitzan Horowitz became the second senior official from the country to meet Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas since the new government took office.
Defence Minister Benny Gantz met Mr Abbas at his West Bank headquarters in August in the first high-level face-to-face talks in more than a decade.
But for Ms Shaked, the Palestinian leader is not a partner for a genuine peace deal.
“Mahmoud Abbas hasn’t held elections because he’s afraid to lose to Hamas. If there’s an election, Hamas will take over,” she said.
She described the accords with the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan that normalised relations with Israel as a “role model” for others. She expects more Arab and Muslim countries to follow suit.
“Everyone has seen the benefits of the peace [between the
UAE and Israel], mainly at the economic, tourism and technology levels,” she said.
Ms Shaked, a daughter of an Iraqi father born in Iran, said she was alarmed by the sharp increase in the violence within Arab-Israeli communities in the country.
Official data from Israel shows many of the record number of murders are concentrated in cities with large Arab populations.
“This is one of the topics I have discussed during my visit here in Abu Dhabi,” she said.
“There was a Cabinet meeting before my visit and we have decided to give this issue first and foremost priority and the resources needed to curb the surge in crime in Israeli cities that have large Arab populations. Abu Dhabi is one of the safest cities in the world and I’m sure we can learn from one another.”
Ms Shaked said easily available weapons were a key factor in the increasing violence in which 96 Arab Israelis have died this year.
About 400,000 illegal weapons are believed to be in the hands of gangs, she said.
“There’s a serious problem of criminalisation in the Israeli cities with large Arab populations,” she said. “It’s an Israeli Arabs against Israeli Arabs phenomenon. There are gangs, drug dealers and illegal weapons, including those purchased as toys from online stores like Amazon and then improvised into real weapons.
“Gangs are also stealing weapons from the military.”
In a Cabinet meeting on Sunday, the Israeli government decided to seek the help of domestic intelligence service Shin Bet to fight the surge.
“We are putting a lot of effort in the army, investing in the Mossad and we have great resources for enemies outside our borders, but apparently we have not made our best in order to strengthen our police to fight these gangs,” she said.
The Cabinet has decided to allocate 2.5 billion Israeli shekels ($770 million) to efforts to tackle crime, she said.
The surge in violence has sparked a social media campaign in recent weeks, with activists accusing the government of neglecting and disregarding Israel’s Arab communities for decades.
Arab Israelis make up about 20 per cent of the country’s population of 9 million.
Ms Shaked rejected the accusation that Arabs in Israel have become second-class citizens.
She courted controversy in 2019 when she released a provocative election campaign video in which she appeared in a mock advertisement for a perfume called Fascism.
“To me, it smells like democracy,” she said in the video.
She laughed when asked about how a right-wing Israeli minister could cover herself in “fascism”.
“That was a joke – a complete joke,” she said.
“There was a debate about restructuring the judiciary and some people accused me of supporting fascism.”
Abu Dhabi is one of the safest cities in the world and I’m sure we can learn from one another
AYELET SHAKED
Israeli Interior Minister