Sanctions against settlements do not change voter sentiment in Israel — Al Jazeera
Sanctions by the United Kingdom, France and Canada targeting Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank are unlikely to affect voter sentiment in Israel ahead of the October elections. Al Jazeera English reports, citing Israeli analysts.
Israeli politician Gideon Sa’ar rejected accusations of ethnic cleansing in the West Bank made by Ed Miliband, the head of the British foreign affairs department. Sa’ar called the accusations “outrageous lies” and said that foreign pressure was an attempt to interfere in the elections. Israeli President Isaac Herzog also condemned the measures, calling them a blatant interference in the country’s democratic elections.
Support for settlements
A poll published in August showed that more than half of Jewish Israelis support keeping settlements as part of any future agreement on a Palestinian state. Nearly 40% of respondents supported annexing the territory in violation of international law. At the time the poll was published, the number of Palestinians killed in the West Bank since the beginning of the year had reached 76.
More current news is available on the UA.News Telegram channel Telegram.
Israeli political analyst Ori Goldberg said that the illegal status of settlements is not decisive for many voters. Sociologist Yehuda Shenhav-Shahrabani linked the weak domestic political effect of the sanctions to the normalization of settlements in public discourse and the perception of external pressure through the existing narrative about antisemitism.
Electoral priorities
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, according to the report, risks losing power: a number of polls predict that a coalition of parties opposing him could win a parliamentary majority. At the same time, experts believe that settlement-related sanctions will not become a decisive factor for voters. According to Shenhav-Shahrabani, security was the main criterion determining citizens’ choices in polls.
Former Prime Minister Yair Lapid, one of Netanyahu’s main opponents, criticized boycotts and sanctions against Israel, calling such a policy misguided and dangerous. Public opinion researcher Dahlia Scheindlin noted that the sanctions had no noticeable direct effect on polling results concerning Netanyahu. According to her, the prime minister’s critics react to them more negatively, while his supporters see them as another manifestation of the world’s hostility toward Israel.
