Israel’s New Kingmaker Is a Dangerous Extremist and He’s Here to Stay
Late Tuesday night in Jerusalem, Itamar Ben-Gvir, the leader of the far-right Jewish Power Party, stood onstage triumphant before a raucous, ecstatic crowd. His supporters chanted, “Look who it is, the next prime minister!” as trance beats blared in the background. Mr. Ben-Gvir, in fact, had not been elected prime minister, but he will have played an instrumental role in returning Benjamin Netanyahu to power.
Mr. Ben-Gvir beamed down at his supporters and began his speech. When he pledged to deal harshly with those disloyal to Israel, they broke out in chants of “Death to terrorists,” a sanitized version of the slogan that is often a fixture at right-wing rallies: “Death to Arabs.” Mr. Ben-Gvir also expressed his thanks to Dov Lior, a rabbi who gave theological justification for the 1995 assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by a far-right Israeli.
Together with the Religious Zionism party, led by Bezalel Smotrich, Jewish Power won the third-largest share of seats in the Knesset, providing Mr. Netanyahu with enough support to form a governing coalition. Jewish Power waged a populist campaign that resonated especially among young Jewish Israelis; nearly as many active-duty troops voted for Mr. Ben-Gvir and Mr. Smotrich’s party list as did for Mr. Netanyahu’s chief rival, the centrist Yair Lapid. Mr. Ben-Gvir is now a kingmaker in Israeli politics; he wants to be king. “Friends, I’m only 46 years old,” he told his supporters on Tuesday night. “I’m not prime minister — yet.”
Mr. Ben-Gvir has good reasons to feel confident. In 1995, when he infamously threatened Mr. Rabin on television just weeks before Mr. Rabin’s killing, Mr. Ben-Gvir appeared to many a dangerous extremist. Today his views fit within much of the Israeli mainstream. They are even more common among younger Israelis, who overwhelmingly identify with the right.
Israel’s shift rightward has been long in the making. Mr. Rabin’s assassination also killed the Israel that Mr. Rabin was imagined to represent. The Israel that many Americans — and especially American Jews — fondly remember for its irreverent secularism and vaguely social-democratic ethos no longer exists. It was always more myth than reality, but the facts that enabled the myth are gone: A conservative interpretation of Judaism increasingly dominates the public sphere. The last left-wing parties are headed to the grave. The idea that Jews and Arabs should have equal rights is supported by only a minority of Jewish Israelis.
Since at least Mr. Netanyahu’s second term in 2009, outright anti-Palestinian racism has become a routine feature of Israeli discourse, as Mr. Netanyahu successively normalized politicians seen to represent the most belligerent forms of ethnonationalism: In 2010 it was Avigdor Lieberman, who called for transferring out of areas where Palestinian-Arab citizens of Israel were the majority; in 2013, it was Naftali Bennett, who called for annexing parts of the West Bank (and later replaced Mr. Netanyahu as prime minister). In February 2019, when Mr. Netanyahu first gave his stamp of approval to the Jewish Power party, it was not an aberration but the culmination of a steady march. It was also a recognition, on Mr. Netanyahu’s part, that the difference between his mainstream-right Likud party and the extreme right was now a matter of degree.
The real reasons for this shift defy the conventional explanations. Yes, the violence of the second intifada in the early 2000s disillusioned many Jewish Israelis about the possibility of peace with the Palestinians. But the subsequent decade and a half, during most of which Mr. Netanyahu was prime minister, largely insulated most Israelis from the consequences of their government maintaining an indefinite occupation of the West Bank and siege of the Gaza Strip. Support for a two-state solution practically evaporated, and the issue nearly disappeared from Israeli discourse.
The past five years have seen far fewer Israeli civilian and military casualties than in the 1990s and early 2000s, but the Israeli Jewish public has also become much less willing to stomach losses. In the wake of the 21-day war last spring — sparked by an Israeli raid on the Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem and responded to with rocket fire from Gaza — and the interethnic violence in so-called mixed cities, Mr. Ben-Gvir channeled Israelis’ desire for a quick and easy solution to what some call the“Palestinian problem” by proposing to resolve it by force. His party’s platform promises “the establishment of sovereignty over all parts of Eretz Israel liberated in the Six-Day War and settlement of the enemies of Israel in the Arab countries that surround our small land.”
Demographics are not destiny, but in Israel they could enable a permanent majority for the religious-right coalition that has solidified through the decade-plus of Mr. Netanyahu’s dominance. Mourning the election results, Israel’s secular liberals lament that they increasingly find themselves a minority in their own country: More than half of Jewish Israelis currently identify as traditional, religious or Haredi (ultra-Orthodox), and demographers expect these politically conservative populations to increase as a share of Israel’s population. Not only do roughly two-thirds of Jewish Israelis ages 18 to 34 identify as right wing, but also, according to a 2016 Pew Survey, 49 percent of Jewish Israelis ages 18 to 49 agree that “Arabs should be expelled or transferred from Israel,” compared with 44 percent who disagree.
While Mr. Ben-Gvir has perhaps been the loudest voice in the ascendant right, he is far from unique: The next Netanyahu-led government will be the most right wing and Orthodox in the country’s history. It will include such figures as Mr. Smotrich, the Religious Zionism leader and a self-described “proud homophobe,” as well as stridently anti-L.G.B.T.Q. members of Haredi parties. The glue that will hold this coalition together is a form of theocratic Jewish supremacy that, on the ground, will translate most of all into increased repression of Palestinians and other non-Jewish minorities.
Mr. Netanyahu once served as a brake on the more ambitious proposals from his right-wing coalition partners, but now he is more beholden to them than ever before, for returning him to power and potentially for helping him evade corruption charges, in part through the crippling of the courts.
Yet even if he does beat his corruption trial, he will not lead Israel’s right forever. Mr. Netanyahu is 73 years old. The 17 year era of his leadership have seen the near elimination of secular and moderate right-wingers from Likud, which has mutated into a populist party in thrall to its charismatic leader. But this also means the party’s future is uncertain without him. When Mr. Netanyahu inevitably exits public life, he will leave a vacuum on the right that Mr. Ben-Gvir is poised to fill.
Part of what enabled Mr. Ben-Gvir’s success was that while he did not hide the religious elements of his agenda, he campaigned to represent a range of Jewish Israeli society. His party includes figures from across Israeli demographics that typically find themselves in separate parties: Although many in Jewish Power are hard-line, Orthodox West Bank settlers, others are secular hawks. There are Sephardic traditionalists, who identify with Mr. Ben-Gvir as the son of Iraqi-Kurdish immigrants, and young, Ashkenazi Haredim who are disillusioned with the conventional Orthodox parties.
In his election night speech, Mr. Ben-Gvir averred that his party owed its success to its ability to “represent everyone — secular and religious, ultra-Orthodox and traditional, Sephardim and Ashkenazim.” His rhetoric combines blunt ethnonationalism, worship of the land of Israel and veneration of the armed forces. In the past, the leaders of the extreme right disdained the Israeli mainstream and sought to distance themselves from it. Mr. Ben-Gvir, by contrast, wants to represent it.
Joshua Leifer is a contributing editor at Jewish Currents and a Dissent editorial board member.