TIME NETANYAHU QUIT, SAY ARAB ISRAELIS
▶ But Israel split on prime minister’s future after police recommend that he is charged with corruption
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s future was the main subject of Israeli debate yesterday after police recommended he be indicted on corruption charges.
With the prime minister’s fate now in the hands of Attorney-General Avichai Mandelblit, Jewish Israelis were deeply and bitterly divided on whether Mr Netanyahu should step down or not.
While the prime minister and his right-wing supporters said that the police had connived and contrived the charges against him, left-wingers and centrists say the police recommendations are so grave he should not continue in office.
Among Israel’s Arab minority, which is threatened by discriminatory policies they say have only worsened under Mr Netanyahu, news was being followed closely but there was no such argument over what should happen with the premier.
“He should have resigned a long time ago,” said Hilal Kitan, a translator who was voicing a near-consensus among the customers at the Napoli cafe on the main street of Baqa Al Gharbiyyeh, an Arab city in northern Israel.
The cafe is a blend of Israeli and Palestinian influences, with patrons reading Hebrew daily newspapers and peppering their Arabic with Hebrew slang. Customers sit against the backdrop of an engraving of Al Haram Al Sharif, Islam’s third holiest shrine in Jerusalem and a poster of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails.
Police called for indicting Mr Netanyahu for bribery, fraud and breach of trust in two cases. In one, he and his wife are said to have accepted illicit gifts, including hundreds of thousands of shekels worth of cigars and champagne, and in another they said he made an illegal deal with a newspaper publisher to weaken its competitor in exchange for getting more favourable coverage.
But Arab citizens feel he has committed other transgressions besides corruption.
“He doesn’t treat us as equal citizens and as human beings,” said Kitan, 32, who, like other customers referenced a March 2015 election day statement by Mr Netanyahu urging his supporters to vote because Arabs were flowing “in droves” to the ballot station.
“He should resign because of all the [corruption] cases and because of the divide he makes between Jews and Arabs, between left and right. He is shredding the country.
“Israel is deteriorating, it’s becoming less humane,” Kitan said, noting plans by the Netanyahu government to expel 30,000 Eritrean and Sudanese asylum seekers. “He who is racist, is racist in every direction.”
The Arab minority, which makes up a fifth of Israel’s population, is comprised of those Palestinians and their descendants who were able to stay in the country during the mass displacement that accompanied Israel’s creation in 1948.
It faces discrimination in land use, planning, budgets for infrastructure and education and is under-represented in employment in the government.
Arabs make up the poorest sector of Israel’s population. The Netanyahu government says it is reducing the gaps, but Arab Israelis say they persist.
Under Mr Netanyahu, the sense of being treated as outsiders and second-class citizens has increased with right-wing legislative initiatives such as the Israel as Nation State of the Jewish People Bill, which would strip Arabic of its status as an official language and, according to critics, give priority to the Jewish aspects of Israeli statehood over the democratic ones.
“Netanyahu has done a lot of damage that will take a long time to fix,” said Ziyad Masarwa, 45, a lawyer.
“He brain-washed people that they are under threat from north and south. When did he speak of peace?”
Mr Masarwa believes the police, not Mr Netanyahu. “They wouldn’t take such a huge step unless they had a basis for it.”
Abdullah Ghara, a computer science teacher who was sipping espresso, said the nationality bill was “another brick in the wall”. He said: “It might well be that Netanyahu wants us to live well – but not here.”
His friend, retired teacher Abed Al Haj, said that because of discrimination in planning, he is being heavily fined for building without a permit. He said it is impossible for him to build legally since the authorities are holding up approval of a master plan.
“It wouldn’t bother me at all if he ends up in jail,” Mr Al Haj said. “Even if he’s innocent of all the charges, he is really bad for us. I prefer that he not be prime minister.”
The ability of Benjamin Netanyahu to survive scandal has earned him the sobriquet “magician” among the ranks of his supporters. As The National reported, Mr Netanyahu was as combative as ever on Tuesday, after Israeli police announced that they had recommended formal corruption charges be brought against the prime minister. “I do everything with only one thing in mind, the good of the country”, he declared in a 12-minute live address on television.
The recommendation of indictment is the product of a painstaking investigation into two cases – one involving alleged receipt of bribes from a Hollywood mogul and an Australian billionaire, and the other centred on backroom dealings with a newspaper publisher reportedly to obtain favourable coverage – that took almost a year to complete.
It is now up to Israel’s attorney general, Avichai Mandelblit, to decide whether to indict Mr Netanyahu. Since Mr Mandelblit owes his career to the prime minister, it far from certain that the process, which can take months, will culminate in charges being entered against Mr Netanyahu, who can be counted upon to use this time to engineer a deadly campaign of mass distraction. As his own former defence minister said last year, Mr Netanyahu will “set the country and the region alight” just to save his skin.
As always, the Palestinians will be used as a convenient alibi. The peace process, already dying, is now at the risk of being irremediably mutilated at the altar of Mr Netanyahu’s doomed political career. The United States has ceased to be an honest mediator, throwing its weight behind the extreme right wing of Israeli public opinion that the prime minister both incites and embodies. Never a believer in peace, Mr Netanyahu threatens to become, in his wounded state, its mortal enemy. The magician’s reign may be nearing its end – but his maledictions will continue to haunt the Middle East.