BENJAMIN NETANYAHU scrabbled around in a racist dustbin to win the votes necessary to achieve a barely believable victory in Israel’s general election.

He spent the last week of the election campaign putting aside any veneer of respectability to appeal to the prejudices of the electorate and casting himself as sole guarantor of Jewish security.

Netanyahu’s first move was a shameless pitch to the inhabitants of Israel’s illegal West Bank settlements, retracting the two-state-solution speech, complete with rhetoric about beating swords into ploughshares, that he made at Bar Ilan University in 2009.

His justification was that Israel’s “withdrawal” from Gaza had handed the territory over to Islamist extremists.
His election campaign stance was that he would concede no land to the Palestine Authority because this too would be occupied by extremists who would attack Israel.

Asked if this meant ruling out establishment of a Palestinian state, he replied: “Indeed,” adding that the opposition Zionist Union coalition, headed by Labour leader Isaac Herzog, was weak and would submit to withdrawal demands.

Netanyahu visited the huge Har Homa illegal settlement that sits between Jerusalem and Bethlehem on the day before the election where he went further.

He told his audience: “We will preserve Jerusalem’s unity in all its parts. We will continue to build and fortify Jerusalem so that its division won’t be possible and it will stay united forever.”

While this accords with customary zionist slogans about a unified Jerusalem being Israel’s eternal capital, the prime minister came clean for the first time in boasting openly that Har Homa had been built specifically to divide Bethlehem and rest of the West Bank from occupied Jerusalem.

Palestinians and their supporters have maintained consistently that this was the case, but Israeli leaders, backed by their collaborators in the US and European Union, have denied this simple truth.

Netanyahu’s Likud party has always needed a broad-ranging coalition, given Israel’s proportional representation system, and has succeeded in constructing a mishmash of contradictory groups to preserve his Knesset majority.

Self-styled militant secularists have rubbed shoulders with religious fundamentalists, anti-corruption campaigners with bent-as-a-nine-bob-note fixers — all have managed to extract a payoff from the Likud don.

A number have realised that there are votes to be gained from anti-Arab racism, justifying discrimination against Israel’s 20 per cent Palestinian Arab minority.

Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman went so far as proposing decapitation for Israeli Arabs perceived as disloyal to the state.

“Those who are against us, there’s nothing to be done. We need to pick up an axe and cut off his head. Otherwise we won’t survive here,” he said.

Disloyalty for him includes raising a black flag of mourning in the northern Israel village of Umm el-Fahm to commemorate the Nakba (catastrophe) when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were driven from their land and the zionist state was established.

Ahmed Tibi of the Ta’al party, a candidate for the Joint List of Arab parties and the binational Communist Party-led Hadash alliance, accused Lieberman of forming a Jewish version of Isis.

Not that this abashed the Yisrael Beitenu party leader in any way. He used another TV debate to berate Joint List representative Ayman Odeh, telling him: “Why did you come to this studio, why not to Gaza or Ramallah? Why are you even here? You are not wanted here. You are a Palestinian citizen.”

Odeh kept his dignity, retorting: “I am very welcome in my homeland. I am part of the nature, the surroundings, the landscape.”

His rejoinder emphasised without explicit reference Israel’s racist nature as an immigrant from the former Soviet republic of Moldova felt able to tell a man whose family has lived in Haifa for generations to leave.

Odeh served for five years on Haifa city council where he fought successfully against eradication of the Arab heritage in terms of street names and other emblems.

In line with his Communist Party position, Odeh insists on defence of minority rights, democracy and joint action by Jews and Arabs.

“If the democratic camp weakens, fascism will begin to take victims and the first will be the Arabs,” he warned after the election in which the Joint List came third, taking 13 seats in the 120-member Knesset.

While the Joint List resisted the provocation of Lieberman and other openly racist politicians, Netanyahu stole their clothes.

As voters went to the polling booths he posted an online video telling them that “Arabs are streaming to the polls in huge quantities” and that left-wing organisations were busing them in.

Netanyahu gained his reward, seeing turnout in the illegal West Bank settlements touch 80 per cent and taking votes based on fear and racism from his allies to bring Likud 30 seats rather than the forecast 24.

However, since the election, he has backtracked for the benefit of his international backers, insisting on Thursday that he hadn’t turned his back on a two-state solution.

“I don’t want a one-state solution. I want a sustainable, peaceful two-state solution, but, for that, circumstances have to change,” he claimed.

No-one should underestimate the capacity for duplicitous leaders in Washington, Brussels and London to pretend that his campaign declarations either didn’t happen or don’t matter because they were made in the heat of the electoral moment.

Campaigners for justice know the truth and have a major task now of exposing the ugly reality behind zionism’s pretence to a two-state fig leaf and demanding action to win Palestinian national rights.