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By Josué Leifer
Mr. Leifer is editor of Jewish Currents and writes about Israel and Israeli politics.
Late Tuesday night in Jerusalem, Itamar Ben-Gvir, leader of the far-right Jewish Power Party, stood triumphantly before a noisy and ecstatic crowd. His supporters chanted, “Look who he is, the next prime minister!”while the beat of the trance echoed in the background. Ben-Gvir, in fact, had been elected prime minister, but he was instrumental in Benjamin Netanyahu’s return to power.
Mr. Ben-Gvir smiled at his followers and began his speech. When he promised to treat those who are disloyal to Israel harshly, they erupted chanting “Death to the terrorists,” a sanitized edition of the slogan repeated at right-wing rallies. : “Death to the Arabs”. Ben-Gvir also expressed his gratitude to Dov Lior, a rabbi who gave a theological justification for the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995 through a far-right Israeli.
With the devout Zionist party, led by Bezalel Smotrich, the Jewish force won the third-largest percentage of seats in the Knesset, giving Netanyahu enough to form a governing coalition. Jewish Power carried out a populist crusade that resonated among young Israeli Jews; Almost as many active-duty infantrymen voted for M’s party list. Ben-Gvir and M. Smotrich than for M’s main rival. Netanyahu, the centrist Yair Lapid. M. Ben-Gvir is now a kingmaker in political Israel; He needs to be king. “Folks, I’m only 46,” he told Ers on Tuesday night. “I’m not prime minister yet. “
Mr. Ben-Gvir has an intelligent explanation of why he is confident. In 1995, when he infamously threatened Mr. Rabin on television just weeks before his assassination, Mr. Ben-Gvir gave many the impression of being a harmful extremist. Today, their prospects are in line with much of the Israeli mainstream. They are even less unusual among young Israelis, who overwhelmingly identify with the right.
Israel’s turn to the right is long overdue. Mr. Rabin’s assassination also killed Israel as Mr. Rabin intended to represent. The Israel that many Americans, and especially American Jews, do not fondly forget for its irreverent secularism and vaguely social-democratic ethos, no longer exists. It was more of a myth than a reality, but the facts that enabled the myth have disappeared: a conservative interpretation of Judaism is increasingly dominating the public sphere. The last left-wing parties are heading to the grave. The concept that Jews and Arabs deserve to have equal rights is supported only by a minority of Israeli Jews.
Since at least Mr. Netanyahu’s momentary rule in 2009, absolute racism opposed to Palestinians has a common feature in Israeli discourse, while Mr. Netanyahu has successively normalized politicians regarded as the maximum belligerent bureaucracy of ethnonationalism: in 2010, it was Avigdor Lieberman, who called for leaving spaces where Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel were in the majority; in 2013, it was Naftali Bennett who called for the annexation of parts of the West Bank (and later replaced Mr. Netanyahu as prime minister). In February 2019, when Mr. Netanyahu gave his approval to the Jewish Power Party for the first time, it was not an aberration but the culmination of a steady march. It was also a popularity of Mr. Netanyahu’s component, that the difference between his right-wing component of the Likud and the far right was now a matter of degree.
The genuine reasons for this replacement defy traditional explanations. Yes, the violence of the Second Intifada in the early 2000s disappointed many Israeli Jews about the option of peace with the Palestinians. But the decade and a part that followed, during which Mr. Netanyahu has been prime minister, largely insulating most Israelis from the consequences of his government’s indefinite and ongoing occupation of the West Bank and siege of the Gaza Strip. of Israeli discourse.
The past five years have seen far fewer Israeli civilian and military casualties than in the 1990s and early 2000s, yet the Israeli Jewish public is also far less willing to suffer casualties. After last spring’s 21-day war, sparked by an Israeli raid on the Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem and responded with rocket fire from Gaza, and inter-ethnic violence in the so-called combined villages, Ben-Gvir said he channeled Israelis’ preference for an undeniable and swift solution to what some call the “Palestinian problem” through a willingness to solve it by force. His party’s platform promises “the status quo of sovereignty over all parts of Eretz Israel liberated in the Six-Day War and the settlement of Israel’s enemies in the Arab countries surrounding our small land. ” Array
Demographics are not destiny, however, in Israel it may allow a permanent majority for the devout right-wing coalition that has solidified over the decade and more of M’s rule. Bemoaning the election results, Israel’s secular liberals lament that they increasingly place themselves as a minority in their own country: more than a fraction of Israeli Jews lately identify as traditional, devout or haredi (ultra-Orthodox), and demographers expect those politically conservative populations to grow as a percentage of Israel’s population. two-thirds of Israeli Jews between the ages of 18 and 34 identify as right-wing, but also, according to a 2016 Pew poll, 49 percent of Israeli Jews aged 18 to 49 agree that “Arabs should be expelled or transferred from Israel,” versus 44 percent who disagree.
While Ben-Gvir would arguably have been the most powerful voice of the emerging right, he is far from the only one: the next Netanyahu led government will be the highest right-wing and orthodox in the country’s history. He will come with figures like Mr. Smotrich, the leader of devout Zionism and a self-proclaimed “proud homophobe” as well as anti-L. G. B. T. Q. The glue that will hold this combined coalition is a form of Jewish theocratic supremacy that, on the ground, will basically result in increased repression of Palestinians and other non-Jewish minorities.
Netanyahu once served as a brake on more ambitious overtures from his right-wing coalition members, but is now more indebted than ever to them for bringing him back to power and potentially helping him evade corruption charges, thanks in part to the paralysis of the courts.
However, even if he wins his corruption trial, he will rule Israel’s right wing forever. Netanyahu is 73. The 17-year era of his leadership saw the virtual elimination of the secular and moderate right from the Likud, which morphed into a populist party under its charismatic leader. But it also means that the party’s long-term is doubtful without him. When Mr. Netanyahu inevitably leaves public life, he will leave a vacuum on the right than Mr. Netanyahu. Ben-Gvir is about to fill.
Part of what he has done to Mr. Ben-Gvir is that, while he did not hide the devout elements of his programme, he campaigned to constitute a cross-section of Israeli Jewish society. His party includes figures who regularly rank in separate parties: many members of the Jewish government are hardline Orthodox settlers from the West Bank, others are secular hawks. There are Sephardic traditionalists, who identify with M. Ben-Gvir as the son of Iraqi Kurdish immigrants, and young Ashkenazi Haredim who are disillusioned with traditional Orthodox holidays.
In his election night speech, Ben-Gvir said his party’s good fortune was due to its ability to “constitute everyone: secular and religious, ultra-Orthodox and traditional, Sephardim and Ashkenazim. “land of Israel and veneration of the armed forces. In the past, far-right leaders despised the Israeli mainstream and sought to distance themselves from it; M. Ben-Gvir, on the other hand, needs to constitute it.
Joshua Leifer is editor of Jewish Currents and a member of Dissent’s editorial board.
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