The results of the latest Israeli election represent a pyrrhic victory for the Apartheid regime's hardline fascists, whilst the new Israeli regime may be destructive for Palestinians in the short term, in the long run the spiders web will become all the more fragile.

The fifth Israeli election in three years represents a major own goal for the Zionist regime, voting in the once fringe ‘Religious Zionism’ alliance to become the second most influential group in the Israeli Knesset, behind the Likud Party. The longest serving Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, is back to power, with talk of his ongoing corruption trial fading into the background, as if the potential for him to go to jail was ancient history.

The reaction to the victory of the extremist ‘Religious Zionism’ alliance, led by Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, has been of horror from politically engaged Western Liberals and Liberal Zionists. The Board of Deputies of British Jews, a major pro-"Israel" Jewish organisation in the UK, has openly condemned Bezalel Smotrich for pushing a hate-promoting ideology, as Itamar Ben-Gvir’s Jewish Power Party has been labelled “racist and reprehensible” by the American "Israel" Lobby group AIPAC. There is a certain line that, for Liberal Zionists, cannot be crossed and Religious Zionism does just that, it is openly Islamophobic, racist and seeks to implement some of the most evidently barbaric policies that the Zionist Regime has ever enforced.

This is a major moment, from which the Liberal Zionists are now being forced to look in the mirror and ask themselves what they are actually supporting. Even the most adamantly pro-"Israel" organisations are being made to feel uncomfortable. This is because there is nowhere to hide anymore, there is no way to possibly argue that the settler colonial regime is a Liberal beacon of democracy any longer, and the fairytale that helps Liberal Zionists get to sleep at night is fading away. "Israel" is already labeled as an Apartheid regime by the top domestic and international human rights organisations; with Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, "Israel’s" B’Tselem, and leading Palestinian rights groups like Al-Haq, all labelling it as such. A leading expert at the United Nations has too called "Israel" an Apartheid regime, whilst the International Criminal Court (ICC) eyes investigating war crimes in the occupied territories.

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Whilst the most trusted international bodies dealing with issues of human rights are in agreement on the nature of "Israel’s" criminal conduct, the Israeli Jewish voting public have just elected a unified list, Religious Zionism, which advocates the following: Overhauling the Israeli legal system, amending the Jewish “Law of Return”, giving Israeli soldiers full immunity to commit any war crime they choose against Palestinians, expelling and stripping the citizenships from Palestinian citizens of "Israel" that display “disloyalty” to the Jewish State, introducing the death penalty for Palestinians who kill Jews, annexing the West Bank, opposing the Palestinian Authority, changing the status-quo in Al-Aqsa mosque and more. Although, for Palestinians, none of these types of policy positions come as a major shock and some are even being slowly or quietly implemented anyway, they are still extreme, especially for a Western onlooker. 

"Israel" is a settler colonial regime, predicated on the need for Jewish nationalistic supremacy over Palestinians in Palestine. It could not exist without ethnic cleansing and oppression, all of its major leaders have been racist against Arabs and even its non-White Jewish citizens in most cases too. Orientalism, colonialism, fascism, and expulsion have always gone hand in hand with the Zionist regime, except "Israel" had managed to contain its image and present a fairytale version of itself for the purposes of legitimacy, this is now impossible. The advent of smartphones, meaning every crime can be filmed at all times, and the pivot towards ultra-nationalism from the Israeli public, has meant that the liberal utopian image, that "Tel Aviv" once maintained in the West, is gone and it's never coming back.

In terms of "Israel’s" international standing, the new Netanyahu regime will undoubtedly become more isolated, this is because of the indefensibility of the political figures who have risen to prominence at this point. Unlike Benjamin Netanyahu, Religious Zionism’s brand of oppression is not given the cover of rhetoric that is tailored to Western Liberals. It was clear that from the offset, the US Biden administration had favored Yair Lapid and Benny Gantz to have won the Israeli election and there is a good possibility that the offensive against Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), back in August, could have been coordinated with Washington, to bolster the standing of the former Lapid regime. Netanyahu has made many enemies in the Democratic Party himself, the breakup of the love affair between the Democrats and Benjamin Netanyahu began in 2015 and continued during the years of the Trump administration. Yet, by no means will US “unconditional support” for "Israel" cease, in fact there will likely be an attempt to solidify a normalization agreement between Tel Aviv and Riyadh still.

One area where the coming to power of Religious Zionism will have its most profound effect is on the West Bank. The dogmatic Israeli settler activists, of Religious Zionism, despise the Palestinian Authority (PA), which they view as being an impediment to their conquering of the West Bank. At this time, the PA is already in crisis; it faces both an economic downfall and a loss of control over the Palestinian people in a security sense. The PA exists today for one purpose, in the eyes of "Tel Aviv", security coordination. Security coordination is a fancy way of saying that the PA’s security and intelligence forces are being used in order to arrest, kill and preempt resistance attacks against the Israeli occupation. This is why the previous Israeli regimes would work to keep the PA alive and to help it justify its anti-democratic tendencies. 

The PA, if greatly isolated under the new Israeli regime, will be faced with two choices; end security coordination and support the Palestinian armed resistance or face a complete collapse. If the PA is no longer in the picture, the Israeli military will experience a huge gap in intelligence information in the West Bank and will be forced to deploy into the major Palestinian city centers. This would lead to an enormous uptick in violence and would put both Israeli occupation forces and their illegal settlers in great danger. There is also the possibility that if continued agitation occurs at the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, as well as Christian Holy Sites in al-Quds, the Israelis will face a mass Palestinian uprising and will be confronted militarily by the resistance in Gaza. The Palestinian citizens in the occupied lands in 1948 also have the potential for revolt, if more of their rights are stripped away from them also.

All of the above depends upon just how irrational the behavior of the Religious Zionism alliance is and how much they can manage to influence the policies that are to be implemented under PM Netanyahu. For the Palestinian resistance, an emotional and irrational Israeli regime is one that can be more readily taken advantage of and can be dealt with greater strategic defeats. In the short term the suffering could be immense, if the worst case scenario proves to be correct with this new regime, but in the long run, this is a bullet to the foot for the Zionist project.