– by Yahav Zohar – 2/4/2023

After weeks of widespread protests in opposition to the planned “Judicial Reform”, on March 27^th Netanyahu backed down and deferred the legislation, upsetting many members of his coalition. It soon became clear that to keep far right leader Itamar Ben Gvir in his government, Netanyahu had that same night promised him to found a “national guard” which would come under Ben Gvir’s personal control as minister of national security.

Some fear that this force, personally loyal to the far-right leader, will be used to violently repress future protests in a way which the police has refused. When the next session of the parliament convenes and the government attempts again to pass some version of this legislation, warned opposition members, protestors will march again only to find that this time they are faced with a new and more violent force. The National Guard, say its opponents, like the planned judicial reform, is an attack on Israeli democracy. A former chief of police even compared this planned force to the Iranian national guard and to “European” storm troopers, forces designed specifically to recruit loyalists and crush dissent.

Strangely, opposition leaders and journalist ignored the connection with an existing Israeli force, the so-called Border Guard or Border Police (Mishmar HaGvul) which does exactly this kind of policing of Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, though some did mention incidentally that something called the National Guard had already been formed last June, as a unit within the Border Police.

On the face of it, that announcement last year should have drawn at least some of the attention this one did from those interested in preserving Israeli democracy. The idea behind the National Guard is to bring some of the techniques and practices used to oppress Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem into Israel proper.

That version of a National Guard met with wall-to-wall approval or silence from the same journalists and politicians. In fact, the decision was made when those now in opposition were in power, under Prime Minister Naftali Bennet and a Minister of Public Security from the labor party. The National Guard was explained as a response to the events of May 2021, known to Palestinians as the Unity Intifada, when Palestinian citizens of Israel took to the streets at the same time as those in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, and the Border Police was called in to restore order. Next time, police and politicians said, we should have a Border-Police-like force at the ready to repress such uprisings inside Israel.

The vast majority of those same pro-democracy protestors never turned up to protest the military government of Palestinians in the West Bank, nor the killing of Israeli citizen Palestinian protestors by the police. They never seemed to mind that Israel, which behaves as a democracy towards its Jewish citizens, is at the same time a full-on dictatorship for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, and a limited democracy for its Palestinian citizens within.

The failure to see or stop this has allowed the growth of new political forces in the settlements of the West Bank, and the rise of a new Israeli far right which would like to see Israel ruling the entire country in the blatantly Jewish Supremacist way it does the West Bank. Still, most of the opposition and protestors fail to make this connection, or to see that the maintenance of a huge secret police and military government apparatus in the West Bank is seeping into Israel proper and threatening the liberal bubble they are attempting to maintain in Tel Aviv. In fact, protests have included speeches and statements by many of the heads of the Israeli Military and General Security Service, the very same people maintaining the oppression of Palestinians.

The military government of the West Bank, where Jewish settlers attack Palestinians with impunity and with the protection of the Israeli military and border police, has bred leaders like Ben Gvir, preaching a state where only Jews have any political rights, and where Jewish religion is intertwined with state power.

The centrist and labor government which founded the National Guard and at the same time maintained the military government and turned a blind eye to rising settler violence can be excused for not knowing how soon control of the police would fall to an extremist settler leader like Ben Gvir, but an honest look at their policies should have led them to consider that eventual outcome.

For now, there are signs that the restructuring of the National Guard under Ben Gvir’s personal command (or the creation of an entirely new and separate entity of the same name) will take a long time, or in fact be effectively stalled by a police command which finds Ben Gvir personally distasteful for his extensive criminal record, and dangerous in his disregard for command structure and police procedure. The National Guard will continue to be part of the Border Police, under the command of the chief of police, and will be used primarily against Palestinian citizens, so the Jewish opposition can feel safe, for now. But the longer they allow forces like this to be trained and used in the oppression of Palestinians, the closer the day that their fears come true and some of the same forces are turned against them.