Palestinian parties must not help Eisenkot rescue Israel from collapse
13 November 2026
Eisenkot sat in Netanyahu's war cabinet and promises a
'Zionist' government. The parties of Palestinian citizens of Israel have
nothing to gain by handing him power.
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.
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.
From Nakba to Oslo
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.
A backfired gamble
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.
Meagre improvements
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.
Litmus test
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.
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.
Decisive moment
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.
