Israel votes, and the occupation takes no recess
The vote dominates the news, but what changes the ground happens far from the ballot boxes: demolitions, detentions, strikes in Lebanon and 255 buildings condemned in Gaza. Europe has found the sentence — it has not yet found the instrument.
This week’s Israeli news has a predictable centre of gravity: the vote that, according to The Hindu, took the country to the polls with Benjamin Netanyahu falling in the surveys and a new party emerging as favourite; the next day the same paper reported that the prime minister was already assembling a “broad national government”. The result is not yet settled in the material available. But the question that matters to the rest of the world does not depend on it: what did the Israeli machine do while the country voted?
The answer, looking at what was recorded in the last 72 hours, is: everything it was already doing. And that is where the political fact sits, not in the count.
What happened while the voting went on
In the West Bank, an Israeli was shot dead near the Halamish settlement and Israeli soldiers killed a Palestinian driver, according to Reuters, France24, the New York Times, the Hindustan Times and Mehr News. Netanyahu ordered the demolition of the gunman’s house, the Times of India reports. On the same day, Israeli forces detained 27 Palestinians in a raid on a village, according to Wafa cited by the Middle East Eye, and settlers set fire to a Palestinian vehicle and tried to take a child, according to the same outlet. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, cited by the Middle East Eye, records that woman-headed households in the West Bank face a higher risk of displacement.
House demolition is the oldest instrument in that repertoire, and the least dependent on who governs. It needs no budget approval, does not pass through a coalition and does not appear in electoral debate. It is carried out by administrative order, one house at a time, while the country discusses something else.
What the Israeli election decides is who signs the papers. The signing continues either way.
The Israeli president pardoned the former soldier Elor Azaria, convicted of killing a wounded Palestinian in 2016 in the West Bank, reported by the New York Times, Al Jazeera, the Middle East Eye and the Times of India. A presidential pardon says less about the case than about the state’s measure: what it treats as excess and what it treats as service. And there is what Le Monde summed up in a sentence worth more as a symptom than as analysis: “Netanyahu literally sabotaged Israeli diplomacy”.
Europe talks cost, and the cost stays in the drawer
The New York Times describes a cooling in relations between the United Kingdom and Israel driven by the West Bank settlements, and Reuters records that the relationship between the European Union and Israel was the subject of a conversation between a European commissioner and an Israeli minister. Two signals point the same way: Europe’s vocabulary has changed.
The vocabulary changed, not the trade. The European Union keeps one of its most generous association agreements with Israel, and while it stands every criticism is a declaration of intent. That is the asymmetry the past few hours expose: Europe has found the sentence, it has not yet found the instrument.
The front that left the news and not the map
In Lebanon, Israeli strikes hit the Nabatieh region, including an ambulance crew, according to the Middle East Eye, and localities in the Tyre area, according to Mehr News. Al Jazeera recorded, separately, strikes on paramedics in southern Lebanon, and the Middle East Eye a destroyed house in the same period. Three independent outlets describing the same kind of target: medical personnel.
Striking ambulances and paramedics changes what is left afterwards and leaves the military balance where it was. A destroyed rescue crew is a capacity that does not come back when the next house falls, and that is what makes the campaign in southern Lebanon less a military episode and more an operation of subtracting the future.
Gaza: 255 buildings and a school year
Gaza’s authorities announced a plan to demolish 255 buildings damaged by the war, according to the Middle East Eye, at the same moment the school year restarts in schools that were hit, reported by G1 and Al Jazeera. The Gaza Ministry of Health, cited by Mehr News, reports a cumulative total of 73,913 dead since the start of the war, a figure from the local authority with no independent verification.
There is a difference between rebuilding and demolishing, and it fits in one line: rebuilding admits that something will exist again. Demolishing makes the opposite official, turning the ruin into an administrative decision. Schools running in damaged buildings and 255 condemned addresses at the same time describe the current state: surviving on the minimum, and with the certainty that the minimum will not be repaired.
What remains for the reader
Israel will close the count, form some government and present the world with a new coalition map. None of those steps needs to touch a single line of what happened in Halamish, in Nabatieh or in the 255 plans signed in Gaza.
That is why the question “who won the election” sits badly with the question this piece tries to answer. The occupation stayed outside the dispute. What was in dispute was who signs the next papers, and the papers, as the last 72 hours show, keep being signed.