Save the Last Moderate Palestinian Mohicans Who Believe in Peace
The actions of Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich have intensified tensions and undermined peace efforts between Palestinians and Israelis
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu seems to have lost control over his two favorite ministers. He happily unleashed Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, allowing them to go rogue and incinerate the occupied West Bank. He thought that by supporting these two bullies, he would succeed where he failed when he first became prime minister in the mid-’90s of the last century.
His goal then was to destroy the Oslo vision of peace between Palestinians and Israelis. He said it himself in his famous video while talking to a family living in a Jewish settlement in the West Bank early in the beginning of the 21st century. This vision has enrooted itself in Netanyahu’s mind. It also has entered the phase of forceful cancellation of every piece of understanding or agreement the PLO and Israel reached in 1993 under US auspices.
On several occasions, I could agree with some of my Israeli interlocutors who insisted Netanyahu was a pragmatic leader who would zigzag through troubled rainwater without getting wet. But not anymore. The insane extreme right-wing line his government has taken through the troika of him, Ben Gvir, and Smotrich left no room for suspicion that Netanyahu would one day wake to the reality that any government he forms would become a liability and no longer an asset to the Western world on which Netanyahu relies in promoting his apocalyptic vision of no peace and expanded wars in the Middle East.’
In choosing Ben Gvir and Smotrich as his closest allies in the cabinet, Netanyahu found in them the fig leaf under which he covered up all the wrongdoings he for years wanted but didn’t dare to do. To avoid responsibility for what they do, he claims he cannot stop them because their resignation would bring down his coalition. Netanyahu reminds me of the story of a young man who murders his parents. The judge sentences him to death and asks if he has any last words before his execution. The young man says, “Yes, Your Honor, I request a pardon.” “Pardon?” queries the judge, “On what grounds?” The man replies: “Because I am an orphan.”
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Clear evidence of how addicted Ben Gvir is to war has emerged in the views exchanged at the political-security meeting last Thursday when Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said, “I told the Americans that we are not the ones who want war in the north. It is acceptable if we reach an agreement that keeps them beyond our border.” Ben Gvir immediately jumped and said, “How is it possible without war? How do we end the event in an orderly manner? Haven’t we learned a lesson from the 20 years of agreements? We make an agreement, and within a year or two, the Palestinians rape our wives and kill our children.” Cabinet member Ron Dermer intervened, saying: “If we win the war, we will still need an agreement. Don’t you think so, Minister Ben Gvir?” Ben Gvir replied: “We will win. And no one will remain with whom we need to sign an agreement. And it’s good that way.” He went on to say that the agreement with Hezbollah “will bring back October 7 and, therefore, we don’t do agreements with Nazis.”
Smotrich joined Ben Gvir’s warmongering dance against Lebanon. He also continued his campaign against the Palestinian Authority (PA), whose financial crisis has only worsened as Smotrich’s Finance Ministry has withheld its tax revenues for over a year. Smotrich lately showed an inclination to undo his decision to withhold the tax revenues in return for a set of conditions, none of which is legal or acceptable to the Palestinians and perhaps not to the international community, as well. He wanted the government to legalize five Jewish settlements in the West Bank that had been declared illegal by previous Israeli governments, build thousands of additional housing units in existing Jewish settlements, and punish the PA for its international campaign against Israel, including South Africa’s genocide case at the International Court of Justice and the campaign to win recognition of the State of Palestine by several countries. Smotrich even wants Israel to build a new settlement for every country that recognizes the State of Palestine.
All of this has been taking place under the nose of the US administration, which has used every means possible to pressure Smotrich to pay back the tax revenues to the PA before the latter collapses. The possibility of a PA collapse was indeed a matter of concern for a whole cluster of countries that boiled with anger at the idea of PA territories reverting to being fully reoccupied by Israel, leading to a new reality in which peacemaking between Palestinians and Israelis would be killed off, once and for all.
The PA’s financial crisis deepened after October 7, when Smotrich decided to deduct the equivalent of what the PA government used to pay monthly to the Gaza Strip. This was in addition to what his ministry deducted earlier, for more than a year—the equivalent of the monthly stipends the PA paid the families of Palestinian prisoners and those killed by Israeli forces while resisting the occupation.
By early this year, international donors’ funding to the PA dropped from 30% of the $6 billion annual budget to around 1%. Moreover, PA tax revenues have always varied between $150 million and $160 million per month, and they haven’t reached the PA Finance Ministry since October last year. As such, the total amount of money Israel is holding back from the PA is a little over $1 billion. The subsequent deficit has curtailed the PA’s ability to pay total salaries to the public sector and cover the cost of fundamentally vital public services in education, health, social welfare, and security. In other words, if this crisis continues, the PA’s ability to absorb all these losses will gradually diminish to zero.
A total collapse of the PA is never in the interest of Israelis, except for a very limited bunch of extreme right-wing zealots. It will serve forces of extremism on both the Palestinian and Israeli sides, whose main objective was and continues to be derailing the peacemaking effort and driving the two peoples toward an open-ended cycle of violence, blood, and tears. Moreover, the PA collapse meets the grand goal of Smotrich, who, a few months before October 7, said the PA was a liability to Israel while Hamas was its asset.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and his team in the PA could be the last of the moderate Mohicans. They need help, not execution.
