The ideological battle
But Netanyahu's personal war is accompanied by another ideological war. Four years ago, Netanyahu chose ideological allies who recognized the historic opportunity he offered them. They support him in the battle for survival... and he endorses their ideological projects.
On the one hand, there are the “Haredi” religious parties, which requested that their sons be exempted from military service, that they be granted all the privileges that soldiers receive, that their educational institutions be recognized and managed in a manner of self-government without the interference of the Ministry of Education, and that the financing of their parties be made an integral part of the general budget. On the other hand, there are the religious Zionist parties, which adopt the principle of the “Complete Land of Israel,” to eliminate the “Oslo Accords” and their consequences, overthrow and dismantle the Palestinian Authority, impose Israeli sovereignty, and prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state. Although Netanyahu himself had in the past supported the two-state solution (on the condition that the Palestinian state was demilitarized), and when he himself assumed the presidency of the government in the first term (1996-1999) he implemented part of the “Oslo Accords” (withdrawal from Hebron and 13 percent of the West Bank), he followed his allies and approved their many and well-studied plans.
“Decision Plan”
However, the most important and dangerous of these projects is the “Decision Plan,” which was drawn up by a team of right-wing ideological experts and signed by Bezalel Smotrich in 2017, and since the first day of the formation of the current government, he has been implementing it in a systematic and diligent manner.
Smotrich requested the Ministries of Finance and Defense; In order to carry out his plan. But Netanyahu refused to grant him the Ministry of Defense, and convinced him to accept the position of Minister of Finance and appointed him as a second minister in the Ministry of Defense, responsible for settlements and settlements. He granted him almost absolute freedom to expand and strengthen settlement in the West Bank by building 120 new settlements, 140 settlement outposts, and settlement farms, for which he allocated one million dunums of Palestinian land. He did not hide his support for the deportation plans for Palestinians from the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, drawn up by Smotrich and his partner Itamar Ben Gvir.
Anyone who follows the facts on the ground will find that the Netanyahu government has made a historic turning point in tearing up the Palestinian geographical extension of the West Bank, paving the way for a similar project against the Arab citizens of Israel, and Judaizing the Galilee and the Negev. In addition to the plan to overthrow the ruling system led by Smotrich's party, through the head of the Parliamentary Constitution Committee, Simha Rotman - with the aim of weakening the judicial system and giving it a political character, and striking freedom of the media and academic institutions - Netanyahu is making a fundamental change that destroys the pillars of the liberal political life on which Israel was founded and has lived for 75 years.
In this battle, Netanyahu and his companions acted like a D9 bulldozer, trampling everything that got in its way. He fights the army and the various security services, promises the people that they will live on bayonets forever, and conducts one war after another to ensure that Israel remains in a state of emergency to serve his interests. Therefore, his survival turned into a nightmare for many Israelis, who made it their goal to get rid of him in these elections. Indeed, polls indicate that the majority of citizens, including large sectors on the right, want to replace him. What remains is for his opponents to know how to manage such an operation.
Mismanagement of the Opposition However, what appears in the performance of the opposition is that it does not improve management as required. They have not yet agreed on a single leader to fall under. Polls indicate that the majority of Netanyahu's opponents want Gadi Eisenkot as prime minister, but his allies Naftali Bennett, Avigdor Lieberman and Yair Lapid do not accept him. Eisenkot proposed to them a logical solution: whoever wins the highest number of seats in the elections, we will assign him, on behalf of all of us, to form the government, but they do not agree and prefer to share the presidency of the government. This is while all right-wing party leaders agree that Netanyahu is the leader.
Controlling antiquities...a model for imposing sovereignty
One of the most prominent activities carried out by the extreme right-wing settler government on the eve of the Israeli elections is controlling ancient monuments, erasing their Arab features, and falsifying them in order to perpetuate the Jewish narrative about the “historic Land of Israel.” In a report published by the investigative journalists in Haaretz newspaper, Noa Spiegel and Nir Hasson (Wednesday, September 2, 2026), the so-called “unit in the civil administration” has intensified in recent months the seizure of lands in the West Bank, including lands in “Area B,” under the pretext of “establishing facts” on the ground before the elections. The two journalists confirm that the government is afraid of falling, so it decided to impose facts on the ground in front of the next government, and chose the issue of antiquities as one of several other tools for that. According to the report, “Until recently, the Antiquities Unit (a staff officer) was a small unit in the Civil Administration concerned with supervising archaeological sites and conducting what it calls rescue excavations” - excavations aimed at ensuring that there are no important archaeological finds in the area designated for development. In 2019, the unit’s budget amounted to approximately 14 million shekels (one dollar equals 3 dollars) and it had ten employees. But since then, settlers' interest in the antiquities has increased. At the same time, they realized that through archaeological sites they could seize territory, demonstrate their presence, and drive away the Palestinian population. This vision led to radical changes in the unit. Budgets began to flow generously, and it was transformed from being merely a department that responded to inquiries such as complaints about damage to archaeological sites and requests from contractors or the Civil Administration to conduct “rescue excavations,” to being an initiative and executive arm of the Ministry of Heritage in the West Bank. Today, the budget of the Department of Antiquities is approximately 124 million shekels, an 800 percent increase in seven years, and the number of its employees has increased to about 60 employees. About a month ago, the Ministry of Heritage announced on Channel 14 that it had transferred 113 million shekels for development work and improving access to 70 archaeological sites in the West Bank. An informed source indicates that this budget has not been spent yet, and is allocated for five years. However, according to the budget preparation website, in July two amounts were transferred to the Coordinator of Government Operations in the Territories for this purpose, one of which was 35.5 million shekels and the second was 64 million shekels. Work is currently underway in ten sites out of a total of seventy. Some of the projects promoted by the Ministry of Heritage are not related to antiquities, such as building a Roman amphitheater. According to the same source, the Ministry of Heritage unit is an executive arm of the Ministry and the regional councils.
In the middle of last month, the number of aspirants for the position of tenth Secretary-General of the United Nations had reached seven candidates to succeed Portuguese António Guterres, whose term expires at the end of this year. The Security Council had begun holding periodic meetings with the aim of “sifting” the seven names, before referring those selected to the General Assembly, which has the final decision to choose who will assume leadership of the international organization in the most difficult stages it has gone through since its founding after World War II. However, the members of the Security Council had hardly finished the deliberations of their first consultative session on the candidates for the position of the highest international position, when the General Secretariat received an eighth nomination request submitted by the Kingdom of Tonga in favor of the Ecuadorian diplomat and politician - of Lebanese origins - Yvonne Abdel Baqi.
Yvonne Abdel Baqi announced her candidacy for the position: “I am humbled and honored to officially submit my candidacy for the position of Secretary-General of the United Nations, which will be decided by the Organization’s General Assembly at the request of the Kingdom of Tonga. I extend my thanks to His Majesty King Tupou VI, the Crown Prince, the Prime Minister, and the Minister of Foreign Affairs for their confidence in my vision and program for the renewal of the United Nations.” Abdel Baqi continued in her tweet on the “X” platform: “I have witnessed the devastation of wars, and I am the only candidate who carries the heritage of Latin America and the Middle East, and the only one who played a fundamental role in reaching a peace agreement between two member states of the United Nations, and I am ready to renew the founding promise of the organization’s charter, and to save future generations from the scourge of wars in a world where crises continue.”
Obvious questions
Perhaps the first question that comes to mind about this nomination is: Why did the Kingdom of Tonga submit it and not Ecuador? The country in which Abdel Baqi was born, holds citizenship, and where she held several political and diplomatic positions?
The answer is that Ecuador, due to its failure to pay its scheduled contributions to the United Nations for a long period, lost the right to vote, as well as the right to run for a position in the organs of the organization. Indeed, there is another candidate from Ecuador for the position of Secretary-General, Maria Fernanda Espinosa, who applied to run for Antigua and Barbuda. The island state in the Caribbean Sea.
On the other hand, Abdel Baqi had announced last December that Lebanon would officially submit her candidacy for the position of Secretary-General of the United Nations, and that she had strong support from the administration of US President Donald Trump, who published pictures of her with him in the Oval Office. But weeks passed, and the Lebanese government did not announce its adoption of this nomination, without knowing the reasons.
Who is Abdul Baqi?
Yvonne (Laila) Khwais Abdel Baqi was born in 1951 in Guayaquil, the economic capital and largest city of Ecuador. The largest Lebanese community in the country lives in Guayaquil. Its population exceeds half a million, most of whom immigrated in the middle of the last century. Moreover, people of Lebanese descent have served as mayor of its municipality for decades.
As for Yvonne’s parents, they come from two Unitarian Druze families in Mount Lebanon: her father, Fouad, is from the Khwais family from the town of Batatar (Aley District), and her mother, Inaam, is from the Abu Shakra family, from the Hilalia town in the southern Matn District (Baabda).
In terms of family matters, too, when Yvonne was seventeen years old, she married the Lebanese engineer and businessman Sami Muhammad Abdel Baqi, and she moved to live in Lebanon, where she resided during the first years of the civil war. However, she moved to France in 1982, where she joined the University of Paris-Sorbonne to study arts, then to the United States, where she graduated from Harvard University with a degree in administration and public policy.
her official positions
Abdel Baqi assumed her first official position in Ecuador as Consul General of Ecuador to Lebanon, then in the American city of Boston. In 1995, the President of Ecuador summoned her and asked her to join the team charged with negotiating with Peru in order to reach a peace agreement that would end the long conflict between the two countries over the borders. Indeed, that agreement was signed in the Brazilian capital, Brasilia, in 1998. In that year, Jamil Moawad, who in turn is of Lebanese descent, assumed the presidency of Ecuador. He was the one who decided to appoint Abdel Baqi as his country’s ambassador to the United States, and thus she became the first woman to hold such a position. While in Washington, Abdel Baqi played a key role in concluding a number of agreements between the two countries, the most prominent of which was the preferential treatment agreement for Ecuadorian agricultural exports to the United States.
In parallel, Abdel Baqi was able to build strong personal relationships with a number of prominent figures in the US administration, such as former President Joe Biden and his family, current President Donald Trump, and a number of influential members of Congress from both the Republican and Democratic parties. It also established close relations with senior military officials, with whom it negotiated to establish a joint base in the Ecuadorian province of Manta to supervise work to combat drug trafficking in Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia. After spending six years as her country's ambassador to Washington, current President Daniel Noboa chose her to be ambassador to France. She previously held her country's embassy in Qatar from 2017 to 2020. Washington is a “major station.”
Yvonne Abdel Baqi considers her visit to Washington as her country's ambassador to be the main stop in her political and diplomatic career, and she boasts that the close relations she built with the first administration of Donald Trump, and then with the administration of Joe Biden, revitalized commercial and military cooperation between the United States and Ecuador, and enabled the latter to obtain aid and financial resources from the International Monetary Fund, the American Development Bank, and the World Bank.
Running for the presidency...then entering the ministry
In 2002, Abdel Baqi decided to run for the presidency as the first woman to run for this position, even though she said: “I knew that my chances of winning were non-existent, but the experience was very rich. It allowed me to get to know the real Ecuador during my electoral tours in all the regions.”
After that, she was assigned the portfolio of the Ministry of Foreign Trade under President Lucio Gutierrez from 2003 to 2005, and then headed the Andean Parliament, which includes the parliaments of the countries sharing this mountain range, from 2007 to 2009.
During her tenure at the Ministry of Foreign Trade, Abdel Baqi got to know the current US President, Donald Trump, when Ecuador hosted the Miss World contest, and Trump owned the company that organized that contest.
At that time, she responded to the criticism she was subjected to because of the high costs of that competition, by saying that it was “an investment in promoting her country’s image abroad.” During that period, Abdel Baqi was also subjected to severe criticism from indigenous groups because of the terms of the “free trade agreement” that she negotiated and concluded with Washington. On the other hand, before assuming the Ministry of Foreign Trade, Abdel Baqi played a key role in dealing with the damage to the famous Galapagos Islands reserve following the pollution that affected it due to the spill of large quantities of oil on its coasts. She obtained help from her friend Donald Trump to establish a center to maintain and care for the reserve.
Geographic rotation of position
Today, there is agreement among the member states of the international organization on an unwritten custom that requires geographical rotation of the position of Secretary-General, and the Latin American and Caribbean Basin region is the one to which this position returns after the end of the term of the current Secretary-General.
Also, there is a strong trend in international circles to assign this position to a woman for the first time since the founding of the organization, which explains the fact that the number of female candidates exceeds the number of male candidates.
However, informed diplomatic circles at the United Nations say that Yvonne Abdel Baqi’s chances in the race for the position of Secretary-General are very slim, especially since there are other candidates who have a more distinguished career, enjoy strong political support from the governments of their countries, and have previously held high positions.
The seven candidates that Abdel Baqi is running against are: former Foreign Minister of Guyana Caroline Rodriguez Birkett, current Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency Rafael Grossi (from Argentina), former President of Chile Michelle Bachelet, former Foreign Minister of Ecuador Maria Fernanda Espinosa, Ugandan Olara Otunnu, former Assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations, former President of Senegal Macky Sall, and former Vice President of Costa Rica Rebeca Greenspan. Also, it is not unlikely that other nominations will appear in the coming days. The Council’s system does not specify a deadline for submitting nominations, but rather leaves that to consensus among member states.
No officially approved conditions
On the other hand, until now, despite the passage of 70 years since the founding of the United Nations, there is no approved set of conditions for running for the position of Secretary-General. However, based on custom and previous experiences, member states agreed to the following conditions:
- The candidate must have international diplomatic experience and leadership skills.
- He must obtain the approval of the Security Council, which is the only one authorized to refer his nomination to the General Assembly.
- To obtain the majority of the votes of member countries, present and voting, in the General Assembly.
- He must be able to act impartially. - He must not be a citizen of any of the five permanent members of the Council.
The latest leaks from diplomatic circles in the international organization indicate that Rebecca Greenspan, the former Vice President of Costa Rica, is currently at the top of the list of contenders for the position after the first consultative rounds within the Security Council, but the race is still open among the eight candidates.
Also, veteran diplomats in the organization hesitate to make predictions, given the deep division that prevails in relations between the five permanent members of the Council, that is, the United States, the Russian Federation, China, Britain, and France, which is reminiscent of the most tense periods of the Cold War.
Here we point out that the provisions of the internal regulations of the Security Council stipulate that the names of the candidates competing for the position of Secretary-General are referred by the Council to the General Assembly to choose one of them, and that the objection of any permanent member to a candidate permanently destroys his chances, even if he obtains the support of the majority of members.
Here, one of the European diplomats, who accompanied the election of three Secretary-Generals of the organization, stops at the insistence of the Director-General of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Rafael Grossi, to run, at a time when it is widely believed that the position will go to a woman this time, despite the strong objection expressed by China and Russia to his management of the IAEA in more than one sensitive file, such as the war in Ukraine, nuclear cooperation between Britain and Australia, and dealing with the pollution that resulted from the Fukushima reactor accident in Japan, and the nuclear program. Iranian.
According to this diplomat, Grossi is the candidate preferred by the US administration, but it is keen to avoid revealing its cards behind supporting him. Moreover, it is strongly supported by the current right-wing Argentine government, which Washington considers the main pillar of its regional policy.
Moreover, many observers claim that his performance at the international agency was characterized by complete bias towards American and Western positions, which repeatedly called for severe criticism from Russia.
