While some Palestinians see the new government as no different from previous ones, others are worried.
West Bank
The Israeli parliament has sworn in Benjamin Netanyahu as the new prime minister, inaugurating the country’s most far-right, religiously conservative government in history, leaving Palestinians worried about what comes next.
The year 2022 was already the deadliest for Palestinians in the occupied West Bank since 2006, as Israel conducted near-daily military raids, and the Gaza Strip faced three days of Israeli bombardment in August.
Those actions were undertaken by a “centrist” Israeli government – leading many Palestinians to question whether there has been any real difference between the different governments’ policies towards them in the past few years.
Yet, the inclusion of far-right figures in government who were previously considered too extreme even for Israeli politics has raised fears among some, and the expectation that a new round of violence lies ahead. And the new government’s top priority – an expansion of settlements in the West Bank – and a pronouncement that “the Jewish people have an exclusive right on all the land” between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea have served only to amplify that.
Al Jazeera spoke to Palestinians in the West Bank and the blockaded Gaza Strip to get their views.
Reham Odeh, political analyst, Gaza
“If we look at the government’s members, we see extremists and settlers among them who constantly call for the storming of Al-Aqsa Mosque, including Itamar Ben-Gvir, the national security minister, and therefore there is more of an expectation of a return to scenes of violence in Jerusalem and the West Bank,” said Odeh.
The political analyst believes that will particularly be the case if the Netanyahu government moves forward with its plans to expand settlements and potentially annex Palestinian land.
“[That] will stop any chance of a future solution, or Palestinian endeavours to achieve the dream of a Palestinian state, including the two-state solution.”
On Gaza, and despite what Odeh calls Netanyahu’s “bloody policy” towards the territory in the past, the political analyst does not expect a new war in the short term, with the new prime minister instead focusing on the policies he has already emphasised, namely the expansion of settlements, strengthening normalisation ties with Arab countries and managing the Iran file.
