Long-serving Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu faces a potentially formidable challenge to his hard-line rule — not from Israel's civilian politicians but instead from its revered security establishment.
An extraordinary array of former top commanders are criticizing Netanyahu in increasingly urgent terms, accusing him of mishandling the Palestinian issue and allying with extremists bent on dismantling Israel's democracy.
On Tuesday, a group representing more than 200 retired leaders in Israel's military, police, Mossad spy service and Shin Bet security agency presented a plan to help end the half-century occupation of the Palestinians through unilateral steps, including disavowing claims to over 90 percent of the West Bank and freezing Jewish settlement construction in such areas. [...]
Following years of failed peace efforts and occasional violence, Israel pulled troops and settlers out of the Gaza Strip in 2005. But in the West Bank, hundreds of thousands of settlers receive an array of subsidies and privileges in what is in effect an Israeli colony. The Palestinian majority there does not have Israeli citizenship and lives under a mix of limited autonomy and Israeli military rule.
The view that this is corrosive is becoming overwhelming across the country's established classes: Beyond the security figures, leaders in academia, the legal system, the media, business and the arts also seem increasingly agitated by the prospect of permanent attachment to millions of restive, politically disenfranchised Palestinians.
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