Israeli politicians reacted to sanctions by states including the United Kingdom, France, and Canada on the country’s illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank with self-righteous anger. But what is the latest example of Israel’s international isolation brought on by its treatment of the Palestinian people has not been influential in swaying the electorate in the run-up to October’s elections, analysts tell Al Jazeera. Responding to the UK Foreign Minister Ed Miliband’s accusation that Israelis were ethnically cleansing the occupied West Bank, Israel’s Gideon Saar accused his counterpart of spreading “outrageous lies” and attempting to interfere in the election through foreign pressure.
Israeli President Isaac Herzog also condemned the measures, branding them a “gross interference in the democratic elections” of Israel. But, in reality, the majority of Jewish Israelis have supported their country’s genocidal war in Gaza and the occupation of the West Bank. A poll from August, published as the death toll for Palestinians killed in the West Bank had already reached 76 this year, showed that more than half of Jewish Israelis supported retaining the illegal settlements as part of any future agreement on a Palestinian state, while nearly 40 percent supported annexing the territory in defiance of international law.
But it will not be issues like the settlement-related sanctions that will lose him votes, analysts said. Public backing for the “government and opposition blocs are pretty hardened, and nobody is going to switch from one side to the other over sanctions arising from [the settlements],” Michael Koplow, chief policy officer at the Israeli Policy Forum, said. He added that the sanctions were unlikely to weigh as heavily with the electorate as “this government’s record and the related feelings people have about Netanyahu”.
First, he said, is the normalisation of the settlements. In Israeli public discourse, the occupied West Bank is increasingly referred to by the biblical name “Judea and Samaria” – a shift he said was becoming institutionalised. Yair Lapid, a former prime minister and one of Netanyahu’s leading opponents, has, instead, focused his ire on the countries condemning Israel.
Netanyahu has also yet to comment on the sanctions publicly, despite his Likud party having championed settlement expansion for decades. Instead, the focus has been on other elements of an eventful electoral cycle, including the emergence of new challengers to Netanyahu on the right.
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