A New Israeli Government Won’t Stop the Settlements

Diana Buttu

I think there are several ways of looking at politics inside Israel. In some ways, one can say that it’s all the same, and, in part, it is. But we also need to look at who is going to be around Netanyahu and who is going to be prime minister. Over the past three years, people like Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir have pushed some of the worst policies toward Palestinians. I’m not under any illusion that a new prime minister would stop the settlements. But I do think that the extreme harm and this path of evil they have created could change, even if only slightly.

In particular, I’m looking at people like Itamar Ben-Gvir, who has normalized torture, the arming of Israelis, and the killing of Palestinians. Recently, he posted this concentration-camp-like video on his social media account [the video has since been deleted from Ben-Gvir’s account on X]. People like Ben-Gvir, Smotrich, Netanyahu, and Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu, who said Israel “must find ways for Gazans that are more painful than death,” are fascists. They must go. We have to do what is necessary to prevent them from continuing to have the immunity to carry out these crimes.

Diana Buttu

Yes, I do. I can only speak for myself, but I know that Israelis are always going to find someone to represent me. So why not choose my own representative? That doesn’t mean I believe in the Israeli system or in Israeli democracy. I don’t. The system is racist and designed to try to get Palestinians out.

But if I have the opportunity to vote, I will. I want to be represented. Our struggle as Palestinians living here is to survive and remain on our land. We are the survivors and descendants of those who survived the Nakba. When you see that 75 percent of the population was ethnically cleansed, and that so many more remain under Israeli military rule, you understand that our struggle is simply to remain in our country and on our land.

Diana Buttu

I was born and raised in Canada because my parents left Palestine. They left because they could no longer cope with living under a racist system.

Other members of my family also left, looking for a better education and a better life. Many of them never came back. That is exactly what I don’t want to happen to the next generation.

Today our students have more opportunities to study in Jordan, the West Bank, and elsewhere, in their own language, with degrees that are recognized. I want my children to be able to get an education in their own language and live in Palestine. That is what I believe our representatives should be doing: increasing our [Arabic for “steadfastness”]: our ability to remain in our country, on our land, with our identity, rather than constantly thinking about leaving. I believe people will only stay when they have someone representing their interests.sumud

Diana Buttu

Because there are different classes of citizens within the country. Any Jewish person from anywhere in the world can immigrate to Israel. What does that tell you? It tells you that Israel is first and foremost a Jewish state. If it was truly a democracy, my aunt — who was born and raised in Palestine, married there, and had her first child there — should have had the same right to return as any Jewish person. But in 1948, she became a refugee. She could never return and eventually died in a refugee camp in Jordan. I’m a citizen. My father is a citizen. Why couldn’t she return then? That’s where the contradiction becomes clear. They try to reconcile Israel being both a democratic and a Jewish state, but they know that the two cannot have equal priority. At some point, one has to come first.

Israelis usually say that there are democratic elements, but they recognize that the system itself is not democratic. The fact that I can vote doesn’t change that. It simply means I get to choose a representative. It doesn’t change the fact that the state privileges Jewish citizens over everyone else. My right to vote does not make me fully equal. If I were fully equal, I would be able to purchase land anywhere in the country. I wouldn’t be excluded from places because I’m considered undesirable or not part of the community. That’s what democracy would mean: full equality. Dropping a ballot into a ballot box doesn’t undo the racist apartheid nature of the state.

Diana Buttu

First, I don’t know if the elections will actually happen. The last elections were in January 2006, and parliament stopped meeting in March 2007. Since then, President Abu Mazen [i.e., Mahmoud Abbas], who can hardly be called that at this point, has been ruling by presidential decree, even though his term expired a long time ago. If the elections happen, I hope that his ability to rule by decree will be challenged. Presidential rule without checks and balances is effectively a dictatorship.

Elections could give new life to the idea of leadership and representation. And when I say new life to leadership, I mean a very limited framework. I’m only talking about the small percentage of land and the small percentage of people [that are under the administration of the Palestinian Authority (PA)].

I’m well aware that you can’t have real democracy under occupation. But at the same time, I think it’s also important for us to once again be able to choose our own leaders.

Diana Buttu

There are different levels that we’re talking about here. So first, again, it’s easy to say there’s nothing left. I’m well aware that the Palestinian Authority’s territory has always been very limited in size. But the issue today is also about representation.

Abbas was elected in 2005 for four years. He’s been in office now for twenty-one years. If we have elections, he’s going to be ninety-one. I do think it’s important for us to be able to choose a next generation that isn’t in their nineties. So let’s look at the alternatives. What if we don’t have elections? Do we just wait for him to die? I think this election is going to be about the people and about what the future looks like.

Is it going to be a future in which the Israelis choose our leaders for us? One in which Abu Mazen chooses who the next person is? Or is it going to be us who choose? I don’t think there’s anything the PA can do on the ground. We know they’re not going to be able to send an army to protect us from violent settlers. They don’t have the army or the territorial jurisdiction, and we know they would be gunned down. But isn’t it their duty to at least speak out, to try to get international attention and support, while the Israelis are carrying out an active campaign to get rid of the Palestinian Authority?

Look at these past three years of genocide. Do I think that the Palestinian Authority has done a great job when it comes to this genocide? Absolutely not. I think their one job over the past three years has been to be the voice of the people who are going through genocide.

The other thing, however, is that Israel also doesn’t want any elections to happen. They’re happy with Abu Mazen being in power because he does exactly what they want him to do. He doesn’t push back. He’s viewed as weak, and they can point to him and blame him whenever anything happens.

Diana Buttu

I wrote that in 2017 and it’s only gotten worse. One of the reasons I said the PA had to throw in the towel was because they weren’t doing what they were supposed to do, which is represent Palestinians. Instead, they were going down the path of thinking the only way to represent Palestinians was effectively giving in to whatever the Israelis told them to do. That hasn’t changed and that’s why I say it’s time for a change in leadership.

Now, to be absolutely clear, one of the main problems is that Abu Mazen has now set up an electoral system in which he is effectively the one who chooses who can run and who can’t, because he has changed the electoral laws. There are going to be some political parties who will abide by that and go along with it for pragmatic reasons, because they view his removal as being very important.

Diana Buttu

Yes, but it requires active participation and a lot of thinking. It requires creating a different way of thinking that goes beyond the Palestinian Authority. Until now, nothing has happened, in part because the PA has crushed every attempt to create something new.

Diana Buttu

When I first moved to Palestine, almost twenty-six years ago, I started noticing a pattern of condemnation after condemnation. Back then in 2000, there were around four hundred thousand settlers in the West Bank. We’re now talking about close to eight hundred thousand settlers. You mean to tell me those condemnations did something? No, they did nothing. They could have stopped the number of settlers from doubling over those twenty-five years if they had taken action.

It got to the point, around 2007, where I noticed they were effectively copying and pasting the same condemnations. If you look at a condemnation from 2010 and one from 2018 — they’re practically the same, almost word for word. Amid the genocide, around forty thousand settlement units have been in the planning process over the past two years, from 2023 to 2025.

So all these countries condemning Israel doesn’t have any impact. Israel can handle the condemnations. What it can’t handle is action: cutting off trade relations, boycotting it, imposing sanctions, and not sending weapons.

Diana Buttu

To be clear, under the military court system the death penalty has always been an option. It has been part of the military law since it came into effect in 1967. But very early on, Israel made a policy decision not to seek the death penalty. That has now changed. They have removed that policy and made the death penalty mandatory for people convicted of what they call “nationalistic crimes,” while at the same time they have significantly limited the appeals process.

Diana Buttu

The law targets killings committed as part of what is defined as a “nationalistic” or “terrorist” crime, particularly where the perpetrator denies the existence of the State of Israel. Then there’s the other track, which is the civil law under the Israeli system. This system applies both to Israelis and Palestinians who have an Israeli citizenship. Hence, Israeli settlers are prosecuted under the civil system. Let’s take the example of Israeli settlers killing Palestinians. Even if these acts are considered acts of terror, they would not fall under this law because the settlers are not acting against the [Israeli] state. In fact, they are acting in its name. What the law is really targeting, then, are cases in which the person killed is Israeli. A Palestinian living in the West Bank who tries to resist settler attacks will be punished by death. The law is criminalizing resistance to occupation, which is a right enshrined in international law.

I know there are lawyers who are going to challenge the law, and I wonder how successful those challenges will be.

Diana Buttu

The international legal system takes a very long time, and it’s reluctant to act unless it deems something to be a threat to peace and security. Even though it’s supposed to get involved and act to stop genocide, it doesn’t, because its wheels are too slow. And when it comes to Palestine, I’ve noticed that the world waits for a critical breaking point, and even then, they’re not willing to act. On top of that, we’re dealing with a crazy man in the White House, and the whole world seems to be caught up with him. All of this creates a recipe for continued genocide.

The other thing is European guilt over the Holocaust. Don’t get me wrong, Europe should feel guilty about it. But this guilt shouldn’t come at the expense of the Palestinians. We have report after report: How many more reports do we need about genocide? How many more scholars? How many more UN accounts? How much more does Israel need to do before the world recognizes that this is genocide?

Diana Buttu

International law is very different from domestic law. Under domestic law, the law applies to everybody within a territory, whether you’re in Canada, Germany, or the United States. There’s a parliament that passes the laws, there are enforcement mechanisms, and you can be thrown in prison if you violate them.

The international system works very differently. It’s about relations between states. There is no parliament and no general enforcement mechanism. The main enforcement mechanism that exists is when there is a threat to international peace and security. The closest thing to a parliament is the system of treaties, where countries sign on and give their consent. But the Genocide Convention is considered one of those treaties that applies to all countries. It’s not simply a matter of whether a country chooses to consent — all countries are bound by it. Israel, in any case, has also consented to the Genocide Convention. What does that mean? It means that countries around the world have an obligation to make sure that genocide does not occur. And they have various ways of doing that: they can cut off trade, boycott, impose sanctions, or even seek to exclude Israel from the UN. The most basic thing is to cut off arms supplies.

However, countries are unwilling to go down that path, even though it’s very clear what Israel is doing. Instead, they’re waiting for a judicial determination. In other words, they’re waiting for the ICJ. The problem is that this final case is going to take years. And by then, it’s going to be too late. By then, the world will say, “All right, too bad. But it already happened. Let’s move on.”