Israel election: Netanyahu claims victory despite impending corruption trial

Itzik Shmuli, a member of the Labor party, said the charges were the ‘most serious indictment against an elected official in the history of the state’. If convicted, Netanyahu will be forced to resign his position as head of state.

The PM, who has held his potion since 2009 having previously been Prime Minister between 1996 and 1999, has been a sketchy figure with human rights groups for many years. He has long relied on the populist vote, leaning hard on Israeli nationalism and Zionist sentiment and tightening regulations on and expanding into the West Bank during his tenure. In fact, less than a week before the most recent election, he announced that his government would go ahead with a highly controversial plan to build more Israeli settlements east of Jerusalem.

Under this plan Netanyahu will reopen the long dormant project to build 3500 homes for Jewish settlers in one of the most sensitive parts of the West Bank. The plan was drafted in 1995 but has been repeatedly frozen by successive Israeli governments due to widespread international condemnation. The Palestinian government argues that the plan would virtually split the West Bank into two sections wherein one would be surrounded by Israeli land, cutting Palestinian citizens off from their homeland. Moreover, upwards of 2000 Bedouin people could be displaced.

As his power seemed to dwindle from election to election throughout the year, Netanyahu’s nationalist promises have become increasingly severe – in April last year, he said he would annex all current settlements, and in September he promised to claim sovereignty over one third of the entire West Bank.

It seems that rallying behind hard-line nationalist sentiments has paid off for him, however. A poll conducted in October last year by the Israel Democracy Institute, one month before the indictment was announced, found that 65% of Israelis thought Netanyahu should resign as head of the Likud party if indicted. But indicted he was, and head of the party, and the country, he remains.

Like Brexit, like Trump, and like the turmoil in Venezuela, Netanyahu’s victory is yet another sign that the globalist national order is slowly but surely being supplanted by nationalism fervour. Liberalism and border sovereignty seem lower and lower down the list of concerns for the Israeli government, and with the support of superpowers like the US it’s likely this trend will continue.

Responding to the election results, Husam Zomlot, the Palestinian envoy to the UK, said Israeli voters had ‘rewarded hate, corruption and the promise to annex the occupied territories’.