The train is going off the tracks. Israeli politics is no longer an issue of left versus right or coalition versus opposition. The continued dependency and reliance—by both political blocs—on anti-Zionist parties who openly seek to undermine the existence of the State of Israel as a Jewish state was demented from the start and has now been revealed as pure insanity. It is a threat to the Zionist and Jewish character of the state.
Everyone is guilty: Those who wish to rely on anti-Zionist Knesset members—some of whom support terrorism—to keep the government afloat, and those who wish to use them to bring the government down. Some of these MKs, we should recall, went to Acre a year ago to stand by the rioters who torched buildings and murdered and lynched Jews. One of them (Ahmed Tibi) even served as an adviser to the mass murderer Yasser Arafat.
The problem, let me stress, is not reliance on Arab MKs, but on MKs who identify with our most bitter enemies. The fact that we have become used to this dependence, which increases its legitimacy, is a sign of our own poverty.
Only a year-and-a-half ago, no one would have imagined such an absurd situation. Most of us would have classified it on the spectrum between wild imagination and a nightmare. One could fill entire books with Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and his predecessor Benjamin Netanyahu’s promises that they would never rely on anti-Zionist parties. But both broke their vows. Netanyahu did it when he openly courted Mansour Abbas and his colleagues in the Ra’am Party, which is reliant on the Israeli branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, and Bennett did it when he drove down the path paved by Netanyahu and broke through the gate.
This shift says more about us than about the anti-Zionist parties. The Zionist camp is now prepared to compromise on its basic values and couple the Zionist locomotive with anti-Zionist carriages that undermine the existence of Israel as the state of the Jewish people. It’s happening on the Temple Mount, in the Negev and in the prioritization of budgets for various projects and the agenda of the government. On the margins, it also influences Israel’s foreign and defense policy. And this is just the beginning.
The longer dependence on these parties and their MKs continues, regardless of the political purpose—to establish a government, keep that government afloat or bring that government down—their anti-Zionist appetite will only grow and the trend will gain momentum.
We require a new consensus that prioritizes the Jewish-Zionist collective over party factionalism and the desire for victory over the opposite political camp. Whoever seeks to put power above everything, or oppose the ruling coalition above everything—even at the price of dependence on anti-Zionist elements—will sooner or later bring the Zionist dream to an end.
The fact that those who would prefer the State of Israel did not exist are in a position of strength and hold the balance of power is a disaster. The only way to deal with this reality is to smash current political paradigms and alliances so that a new government arises in the Land of Israel whose agenda is Zionist and is not threatened by the enemies of Zionism.
Nadav Shragai is an author and journalist.
This article was originally published by Israel Hayom.