Will Israel Fall to the Far Right Without a Whimper? - Israel Election 2022 - Haaretz.com
Israel’s racist, supremacist, homophobic, theocratic, far-right Religious Zionism party, predicted to double its number of Knesset seats and become a key player, if not kingmaker, in a potential Netanyahu governing coalition, is correct about one thing.
Its ideological father, Meir Kahane, didn’t die in the hail of his assassin’s bullets in New York in 1990. The battle cry of the Kach party that glorified his legacy – the same party in which his most prominent contemporary heir, Itamar Ben-Gvir, grew up and served; the same party that was banned from participating in Israel’s elections and then declared a terrorist group in both Israel and the United States – is “Kahane Lives” (a grotesque, supercessionist twist on “Am Yisrael Chai,” the people of Israel lives).
But Kahanism, the Jewish variant of fascism, was until relatively recently shabbily peripheral. True, the theme of Jewish entitlement, if not supremacy, runs in the veins of the messianic settlement movement. True, the murderer of Yitzhak Rabin swam in the same violent, justified-by-Jewish-law sewage.
True, the furious protests against the 2017 trial of Elor Azaria, the soldier who shot dead an incapacitated Palestinian assailant, exposed certain Israelis’ depths of disdain for the rule of law and basic human rights. True, Benjamin Netanyahu has engaged in decades of incessant incitement against anyone he deems insufficiently “disloyal” to Israel – the same language employed by Ben-Gvir.
Yet while its ethos has spread, the Kahanism on which Ben-Gvir founded Otzma Yehudit (“Jewish Power”) was still formally unrepresented in the Knesset, winning only 1.88 percent of the vote in 2019. Since Kahane’s own 26,000-vote tally in 1984, the parliamentary far right had grown but was still a tiny fringe.
That is, until Netanyahu took the Kahanist far right by the hand, bought them new clothes and led them straight into the corridors of power.
In his desperation to vacuum up every last vote on the right, to establish a government pliant enough to interfere with, if not quash, his criminal trial, Netanyahu engineered a political path to bring the far right in from the cold. He has diligently mentored their fortunes, even hosting Ben-Gvir at his home in Caesarea.
Both are acting according to a well-worn playbook: first, detoxify the far-right brand, then normalize it.
Italy’s new far-right prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, has swapped praise for Mussolini’s political skills for talk of being a “Christian patriot,” and is greeted as a “moderate conservative” by her international peers.
Ben-Gvir has tried the same ploy. He no longer openly brags about how he too could have “got” to Rabin. He reluctantly removed a portrait of Baruch Goldstein, the mass murderer who killed 29 Muslims at prayer, for belated appearances’ sake.
Itamar Ben-Gvir, left, and Benjamin Netanyahu. The latter took the Kahanists by the hand, bought them new clothes and led them straight into the corridors of power.Credit: Photos: Ohad Zwigenberg, Tomer Appelbaum, REUTERS/Sinan Abu Mayzer, AP/Sebastian Scheiner, Wikimedia. Artwork: Anastasia Shub
But extremism is irrepressible and the “detoxification” skin-deep. Just as Meloni’s Senate speaker holds on to his collection of Mussolini memorabilia, and Viktor “Good for the Jews” Orbán includes WWII Nazi ally Miklós Horthy on his list of top Hungarian statesmen, Ben-Gvir might not name-check Kahane so often but he is still a true believer.
And the swift ease at which he whips out his gun against any Arab he considers a threat, from protester to security guard to West Bank Palestinian, is a helpful test of his instincts.
Primo Levi wrote that fascism was “very far from being dead. It was only hidden … keeping quiet, to reappear later under a new guise, a little less recognizable, a little more respectable.” That is the modus operandi of the “new” far right internationally, and it is the path the Ben-Gvir camp treads too, even though its crude edges are far less polished than in Italy, Sweden or Germany.
The second step, normalization, was masterminded by Netanyahu, assisted by much of the mainstream media, which has treated Ben-Gvir as a curio, a naughty boy or edgy guest feeding ratings. In between featuring on endless TV and radio news programs where he is never introduced as “extremist” or “far right” (and the one presenter who, this weekend, described him according to a factual accounting of his record was called to a disciplinary hearing), and invited to a program to commemorate the Rabin assassination, Ben-Gvir is even invited to share his favorite recipes on cooking shows. It is a perfect portrait of the domestication of the far right.
For younger voters, this normalized far right is now a natural part of Israel’s political environment, and is part of the reason for a surging vote expected for Ben-Gvir.
That enthusiasm is partly a result of the left’s failure to offer an equally passionate alternative to entrenched occupation and hostility toward Palestinian human rights, rather than the serial infighting, pettiness and apathy it too often presents. For them, we are in a post-occupation era. The language of conflict reduction, of two states – let alone peace – no longer has traction, appearing as an artifact of a far-away era.
Some of those young Ben-Gvir fans, in army uniforms facing stone throwers and gunmen, might once have asked why they were risking their lives protecting settlements at all. But just like Ben-Gvir, the occupation has been normalized. They are soldiers in a war against the Palestinians, and they want to know who has their back. And Ben-Gvir offers that support unconditionally.
Normalizing the far right is an irreparable and unforgivable act. Soon, if the polls are proven correct, we will also witness the fallacy of appeasing, wishing away or talking down the full significance of that change. It will be an impossible contradiction for everyone from Diaspora Jewish communities to Congress to the hasbara industry. We will also see the delight of the accelerationists, on the far right and the far left, who for opposing reasons want the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and Israel’s international relations, consumed by cleansing fire.
“Give us the tools and we will finish the job,” Churchill said in an appeal to Roosevelt for help in fighting Nazism and fascism. When the books are written about how Israel – following too many European democracies, and perhaps the United States too in 2024 – fell into an illiberal abyss, it will be the tools Netanyahu provided to the far right that will be the turning point for their synchronized attempt to finish off what is already a dysfunctional democracy.
There was a shocked ripple when The New York Times recently published a poll showing that voters recognized the growing threat to U.S. democracy but wouldn’t prioritize voting to halt that decline. Here in Israel, voters are running to greet that democratic collapse.
Soon we will see if the Ben-Gvir golem that Netanyahu built will not only overpower its master but the basic foundations of Israeli democracy as well, and how many lives it could shatter in the process.
Esther Solomon is the editor-in-chief of Haaretz English. Twitter: @EstherSolomo