This won’t interest those of you who recoil at terms used in the study/application of "political theory analysis,” like “political genealogy,” and look to the source of political “ideas” to understand politics (“Why are you wasting our time by telling us what this German fellow has to say in that egotistically named book “Mein Kampf,” or what that guy Lenin in Russia had to say? No need to care about political “ideas?”), like to Israeli Settler Yoram Hazony’s. Who has taken American Conservatism (and TAC magazine) by storm, with two major POTUS candidates claimed to represent his “political thought?”
So some here would say we must not look too closely at his ideas (subtext: "we can't let the booboisie know he's peddling a version of fascism”). The same goes for that “democratic Conservative” Willmoore Kendall who laid down so much of the political theory of “Traditional Conservatism.” And its off-spring, Neoconservatism, with large dollops of his friend’s “Straussianism,” and the Schmittian ideas Strauss shared with Carl Schmitt. Just ask the “Godfather” of the New Right, Peter Thiel, who has imbibed each, though "we can't let the booboisie know he's peddling a version of fascism,” nor would/will "Conservatives” allow that with Willmoore Kendall, as Peter Viereck experienced (cue hisses of “he’s a liberal!").
So excluding our booboisie, here is an abbreviated “genealogy” of the “Right-wing Nationalist Camp” in Israel. Who demand that any semblance of “law” be excluded when in the form of even the slightest judicial oversight which might take cognizance of “Human Rights” Just like Willmoore Kendall did in his lifetime. Though Kendall never published a statement such as "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever,” he worked to put those words in effect with his denunciations of the U.S. Supreme Court for its Civil Rights rulings, writing as a “right-wing political theorist” opposed to the Civil (Constitutional) Rights proponents (denouncing them as, and hissing “Liberals!” at them), as a “consensus” hadn’t been formed yet (subtext: and never would if he had anything to say about it).
With that "political theory” finally having its day. Most prominently in Israel, Poland, Italy, India, Philippines, the Republican Party, and Hungary, fed by the mass migration as a result of the U.S. wars Conservatives usually support. With only the latter country standing apart from today’s U.S. war in Europe, though not from our militant Conservatives and their “Conservative Revolution.” As their “counter-revolution” on “Enlightenment liberalism,” as Hazony makes clear is the objective. Just as Goebbels had declared was Nazi Germany’s, and Leo Strauss bemoaned he couldn’t be part of that. And in the way that politics work by “mirroring,” the Democratic Party, though they use different language to appeal to a different constituency, are not far apart, and haven’t been since 9/11 when they got war hysteria almost as bad as Republicans, who have it as a a permanent condition. And have since 1898, as always against some part of the world ever since.
BLUF from below: "There’s considerable truth in this passing remark. If in the not-so-distant past the Israeli right-wing camp contained liberal and even secular elements, today the almost exclusive ideological glue of the right-wing camp is what can be called, in the term coined by the sociologist Nissim Leon, “theo-ethnocratic nationalism.” He’s referring to an antiliberal, antidemocratic nationalism that is championing the struggle over the state’s Jewish identity, in the name of an explicitly halakhic-Orthodox identity. It’s a battle against the groups (liberals, LGBTQ people, Arabs) that are perceived to be interfering with that identity and with the introduction of halakha (Jewish law) in the public arena. The Chametz Law (prohibiting the entry of any leavened products into a hospital during Passover) and the proposal of a “Western Wall bill” (which would have made inappropriate dress or behavior at the historic site punishable by imprisonment) are only the two most prominent examples of this. The ambition, barely concealed, is to transform Israel into a country in which Jewish religious law outranks liberal democracy.
"According to the analysis of Prof. Leon, who teaches at Bar-Ilan University, in years past the principal agent of the theo-ethnocratic approach in Israel was Shas. Ashkenazi Haredim weren’t sufficiently nationalist, Likud was too liberal. Since then, of course, much water has flowed in the river. Add to this religious nationalism an ideological struggle against the judicial system, “which is persecuting the people’s representatives,” along with the Shas innovation of ethno-Mizrahi populism, and the result is the new dominant ideology in the right-wing camp, one that was originally concocted in Haredi-Mizrahi circles. The Ashkenazi Haredim have become increasingly nationalist, whereas Likud, which until recently was a national-liberal party, is gradually transforming into a kind of “Shas B.”
"These trends are staunchly embodied in the person of Likud minister David Amsalem, who was photographed for social media last Passover fulfilling the commandment of “receiving his rabbi” – kissing the hand of former Sephardi chief rabbi Shlomo Amar. It’s difficult to recognize any semblance of liberal democracy in Amsalem’s ideology, whereas it would be no less difficult to find any true difference between that ideology and the Shas agenda, especially Shas of its revolutionary period. His Knesset speech in support of the Chametz Law, and against the ruling of the High Court of Justice on an earlier version of the law, encapsulates this whole new spirit. Thus, he asserted, the opposition was “undermining every Jewish element” in Israeli society, and explained: “You understand why we need the override clause [which would allow the Knesset to overcome Supreme Court rulings with a vote]? You understand why we need to change the makeup of the justices in the Supreme Court? I guarantee you, if there were a Sephardi justice, he would not have interfered [with the original bill]. Why? Because he’s from [a Sephardi] home.... We have tradition in the heart, which is what they [Ashkenazim] don’t [have].”
. . .
"The question of “who?” is related to the question of “what (do we want)?”. The judicial overhaul is driven not only by hostility toward the independent democratic institutions and a desire to grant unlimited power to elected politicians; it’s also fueled by an antidemocratic perception of Judaism.”
Anyone who has read any of the Kendall material I’ve shared should immediately have Kendallianism come to mind in this echoing of his ideological thought here of an “exclusive” political identitarianism, with the 50% plus 1, having unlimited power to coerce the 50% minus 1 whose “duty” it is to “obey.” As our “New Right” believes, with Thiel’s Palantir Corporation keeping a close eye on us to ensure we do, just as Kendall was so supportive of during his lifetime.
The Deep Roots of Israel's Judicial Coup Trace Back to Shas
The coup didn't start with Kohelet but with Shas, which championed the ‘Second Israel.’ Now, the continued existence of a democratic Israel depends on secular society’s forging a true alliance with the Third Israel – those who have spurned that party’s leader, Arye Dery
A 1990 rally of support for Arye Dery. The aim of his Shas party was to forge a Mizrahi identity that would be both class-based and militant, and simultaneously traditionalist and antiliberal.Credit: Rafi Kotz
We’re told that the judicial overhaul had its genesis in places far, far away. Thus, to understand what the government is planning for us, we need to analyze the Hungarians, look at what the Poles are doing and keep abreast of the papers being issued by the Kohelet Policy Forum, which is funded from abroad. That’s all true, of course, if the coup is considered from a legal, constitutional or regime point of view. But listening to the battle cries of the “reform” camp itself, one understands that the judicial element is only a small part of the phenomenon.
What’s the point of changing the balance of governmental powers when in any case, if you’re a second-class citizen, every officeholder works against you? Why worry about the workings of the judiciary when everyone working in it is a privileged Ashkenazi anyway? The overhaul’s proponents are not touting it as a judicial event; they see it as a social, ethnic and class revolution.
To understand this narrative and what it augurs for Israel, there is no need to take wing to Budapest or Warsaw. All that’s needed is a short walk beyond the mountains of darkness, into Israel’s so-called development towns – outlying communities built in the 1950s to house new immigrants mainly from the Middle East and North Africa. Because the regime coup is not only a scion of the constitutional revolution advanced by Viktor Orban in his country, it is also the offspring of the Shas party created by Arye Dery and Rabbi Ovadia Yosef.
Although the legal maneuvers of the regime coup were conceived in the largely Ashkenazi offices of the Kohelet Policy Forum, in Jerusalem, the origins of its social cris de guerre lie in the Mizrahi synagogues of Israel’s geographic periphery. They are its unspoken fountainhead. Not institutional executives but darshanim and gabba’im – deliverers of religious homilies and synagogue administrators; not by position papers but by “Mi shebeirakh” blessings for Benjamin Netanyahu; not in office buildings but in old Mizrahi synagogues bearing the names of such Sephardi sages as “Shabazi” and “Abir Yaakov.” A renewed look at these synagogues, I suggest, can reveal not only the roots of the overhaul, but also its social-sector boundaries.
* * *
Rabbi Yehuda Azrad was a leader of the “Tanzim” – a term adopted from the militant Palestinian splinter group by Dery supporters who protested against the judicial system in the late 1990s. Azrad is also one of those who set up the Sha’agat Arye (Arye’s Roar) yeshiva that operated just outside the Ma’asiyahu prison during Dery’s incarceration in 2000-2003. Since the establishment of the present government, Azrad has granted interviews to a number of right-wing and religious media outlets. In one of them he offers a precise summation of these developments: “The buds of the revolution that is being talked about today, that of [Justice Minister] Yariv Levin, had their first shoots in Sha’agat Arye. The unraveling of confidence in the judicial system began in that great struggle.”
He’s right. A frontal political, ethnic and class campaign against the state prosecution and the courts, which are (supposedly) persecuting the Mizrahi public and also (supposedly) its representatives, so as to preserve the rule of the traditional elites, is not an innovation of the Netanyahu camp or of the pro-government Channel 14. Of course, the similarity is not coincidental: The Netanyahu camp’s chief ideologue, and its most prominent media presence, Dr. Avishay Ben Haim, is involved in an ongoing effort to construct a narrative of the Netanyahu trial as a reprise of the Dery trial. The elites are the same elites, the struggle is the same struggle, the person being persecuted is playing the same role, even if the particular individual is different. (Ashkenazi in this case, but only by chance).
Yet the similarity goes further. In an interview with Rabbi Azrad on Channel 14 this past January, his interviewer, Erel Segal says to him, offhandedly, “In the past you had a problem bringing large parts of the right wing, settlers, to your [political] place… Today, effectively, in the place [formerly held by] Shas voters – you will find all of Likud’s voters, all the voters of Religious Zionism.”
There’s considerable truth in this passing remark. If in the not-so-distant past the Israeli right-wing camp contained liberal and even secular elements, today the almost exclusive ideological glue of the right-wing camp is what can be called, in the term coined by the sociologist Nissim Leon, “theo-ethnocratic nationalism.” He’s referring to an antiliberal, antidemocratic nationalism that is championing the struggle over the state’s Jewish identity, in the name of an explicitly halakhic-Orthodox identity. It’s a battle against the groups (liberals, LGBTQ people, Arabs) that are perceived to be interfering with that identity and with the introduction of halakha (Jewish law) in the public arena. The Chametz Law (prohibiting the entry of any leavened products into a hospital during Passover) and the proposal of a “Western Wall bill” (which would have made inappropriate dress or behavior at the historic site punishable by imprisonment) are only the two most prominent examples of this. The ambition, barely concealed, is to transform Israel into a country in which Jewish religious law outranks liberal democracy.
According to the analysis of Prof. Leon, who teaches at Bar-Ilan University, in years past the principal agent of the theo-ethnocratic approach in Israel was Shas. Ashkenazi Haredim weren’t sufficiently nationalist, Likud was too liberal. Since then, of course, much water has flowed in the river. Add to this religious nationalism an ideological struggle against the judicial system, “which is persecuting the people’s representatives,” along with the Shas innovation of ethno-Mizrahi populism, and the result is the new dominant ideology in the right-wing camp, one that was originally concocted in Haredi-Mizrahi circles. The Ashkenazi Haredim have become increasingly nationalist, whereas Likud, which until recently was a national-liberal party, is gradually transforming into a kind of “Shas B.”
These trends are staunchly embodied in the person of Likud minister David Amsalem, who was photographed for social media last Passover fulfilling the commandment of “receiving his rabbi” – kissing the hand of former Sephardi chief rabbi Shlomo Amar. It’s difficult to recognize any semblance of liberal democracy in Amsalem’s ideology, whereas it would be no less difficult to find any true difference between that ideology and the Shas agenda, especially Shas of its revolutionary period. His Knesset speech in support of the Chametz Law, and against the ruling of the High Court of Justice on an earlier version of the law, encapsulates this whole new spirit. Thus, he asserted, the opposition was “undermining every Jewish element” in Israeli society, and explained: “You understand why we need the override clause [which would allow the Knesset to overcome Supreme Court rulings with a vote]? You understand why we need to change the makeup of the justices in the Supreme Court? I guarantee you, if there were a Sephardi justice, he would not have interfered [with the original bill]. Why? Because he’s from [a Sephardi] home.... We have tradition in the heart, which is what they [Ashkenazim] don’t [have].”
Shas headquarters as election returns came in, March 23, 2021.Credit: Emil SalmanThese trends are staunchly embodied in the person of Likud minister David Amsalem, who was photographed for social media last Passover fulfilling the commandment of “receiving his rabbi” – kissing the hand of former Sephardi chief rabbi Shlomo Amar. It’s difficult to recognize any semblance of liberal democracy in Amsalem’s ideology, whereas it would be no less difficult to find any true difference between that ideology and the Shas agenda, especially Shas of its revolutionary period. His Knesset speech in support of the Chametz Law, and against the ruling of the High Court of Justice on an earlier version of the law, encapsulates this whole new spirit. Thus, he asserted, the opposition was “undermining every Jewish element” in Israeli society, and explained: “You understand why we need the override clause [which would allow the Knesset to overcome Supreme Court rulings with a vote]? You understand why we need to change the makeup of the justices in the Supreme Court? I guarantee you, if there were a Sephardi justice, he would not have interfered [with the original bill]. Why? Because he’s from [a Sephardi] home.... We have tradition in the heart, which is what they [Ashkenazim] don’t [have].”
* * *
Yet the story is less dichotomous than it appears. Israel’s social and political fault lines are made of far subtler distinctions. Because Shas is one of the conceptual fathers of the present ideological moment, it is of interest to examine where its own limitations lie and where it was difficult for the movement to pass on its heritage. Those difficulties, I suggest, will also shed light on the difficulties of the present coalition.
The Shas movement was formed in the 1980s out of the encounter between the Sephardi Haredim and the Sephardim of the (geographical and economic) periphery; its aim was to forge a Mizrahi identity that would be both class-based and militant, and simultaneously traditionalist and antiliberal. Espousing these tendencies, Shas assembled a large traditional-Mizrahi public and tried, with its aid, to promote tshuva – a revolutionary return to religion among individuals – and a strengthening of the country’s religious character. Even in Shas’ more pragmatic periods, the worldview it furthered among its audience was patently theocratic and fundamentalist. The Mizrahi tradition was a vehicle for a religious revolution, and liberal democracy was only a procedure to be coped with.
The Mizrahi synagogues were Shas’ holy vessels and relay stations, connecting it to the “people in the field” through a motley of scriptural sermonizers and what were in effect religious missionaries, who went out to teach Torah and thus “strengthen” their followers. The movement’s rising power in religious politics reinforced the influence of Haredi-style religiosity over more mainstream religion and the synagogues – this largely at the expense of the older, and more moderate, Mizrahi traditionalism. The position of rabbis who became Haredi was strengthened, religious traditions changed and even prayer books were replaced. To secular ears, all this might seem to be on the other side of the moon, but it was a quiet revolution in religious life in the Mizrahi periphery, and it persists to this day.
Concurrent with this revolution, a parallel social revolution unfolded, which created, as Nissim Leon termed it, a “natural barrier” to Shas’ growth: the emergence of the Mizrahi middle class. The movement’s traditional audience consisted mainly of the lower class. But beginning in the 1980s, via their own small businesses, university studies or employment in the civil service, many Mizrahim began to climb the class ladder and to migrate to the neighborhoods of the veteran secular-Ashkenazi class, or to new neighborhoods that were built in the periphery itself. This population is neither the long-standing “First Israel” nor the ”Second Israel” – it is the “Third Israel” of the diversifying middle class.
From a religious viewpoint, the new Mizrahi middle class did not become entirely secular; in many cases, it remains part of the traditional Mizrahi community. Politically, though, it leans more toward the democratic camp than to the Mizrahi lower class. For example, according to a 2022 analysis by social scientists Gal Levy, Maoz Rosenthal and Ishak Saporta, in the election of April 2019, a higher proportion of Israeli-born, traditionalist Mizrahim with an undergraduate degree voted for the (united) Kahol Lavan party than for Likud.
It’s within this large and diverse traditionalist Mizrahi community that the political fault line of Jewish society in Israel runs. For example, according to data collected by Dr. Ariel Finkelstein, whereas in the 2021 election a decisive majority of the secular population voted for the anti-Netanyahu bloc, and the overwhelming majority of the national-religious public voted for the Netanyahu bloc, the traditional public was split: 51 percent of them cast their ballot for the parties that went on to form the Naftali Bennett-Yair Lapid government (37 percent of them voted for the anti-Netanyahu bloc and 14 percent for Yamina, which fluctuated between the blocs), and 48 percent voted for the Netanyahu bloc.
But the “traditional” category is notably diversified. In 2021, about a third (33 percent) of Israel’s Jews defined themselves as “religious traditional,” and 58 percent as “not-so-religious traditional.” Purely for illustrative purposes, the latter category might uphold basic kashrut only, make kiddush on Shabbat eve and attend synagogue only on holidays, or just on Yom Kippur, or maybe not at all. A “religiously traditional” man might put on tefillin (phylacteries), attend Sabbath-eve services quite regularly and even observe Shabbat to a certain extent.
The precise location of the political fault line is somewhere between these traditional definitions – the voters for the Bennett-Lapid government constituted a minority among the religious-traditional population, but a majority among the not-so-religious traditional public. However, for our purposes, it is interesting to look at the voting rate for Shas: Whereas about 10 percent of the religious-traditional population voted for that party, among the not-so-religious traditionalist public the voting rate for Shas was close to nil.
January 2023: Cabinet members in a show of solidarity with the Shas Knesset faction, following the High Court’s ruling that Dery’s appointment as minister was not “reasonable.”Credit: Ohad Zwigenberg
During the period of the previous, short-lived government, there was much talk about the atmosphere in the national-religious synagogues, and how this contributed – through the Yamina MKs, for example – to the fall of the government. But those who wish to see a distribution that more accurately reflects the center of gravity among the Jewish public, should attend a traditional Sephardi synagogue on the eve of the Jewish festivals. It’s there that the political center of Israel’s Jewish society is to be found, and it passes not between those who pray three times a day and those who haven’t been to a synagogue since their bar mitzvah, but between the rabbis and the more pious group of worshippers, on one hand, and the members of the not-so-religious traditional middle class, who show up only occasionally or just on select festivals. The former apparently continue to vote for Likud, Shas or the religious right. The latter previously voted for Likud, alongside various centrist parties, but now seem to be abandoning Likud, at least in the polls, in favor of the democratic camp, notably for Benny Gantz (National Camp). He too probably goes to synagogue, but although principally on the festivals.
These are people for whom Jewish tradition is important but who are put off by religious coercion. Polls show that they believe strongly in “Jewish,” but also in “democratic” – with regard to Israel’s character. They do not necessarily recoil from rabbis, but they don’t think they should be running the country. And they don’t find in the present coalition this particular approach to Judaism, democracy and the state. Hence they are abandoning it.
Probably that should not have come as a surprise to anyone. The Judaism that the coalition is fighting for is not their Judaism, and the coalition’s “Mizrahi struggle” does not correspond with their Mizrahi story. One feature of voting among this traditional “lite” group – and also by the voters in the new neighborhoods inhabited by the Mizrahi middle class in the geographical periphery – is an almost total absence of votes cast for Shas. From the moment Likud became “Shas B,” it should have come as no surprise that this group was fleeing from it.
* * *
The traditional “lite” population and the backbenchers in synagogues on the Jewish festivals – many in both groups from the New Mizrahi middle class, may be in the periphery of the synagogue and of the religious world, but they are the new center of Jewish society. A political camp that is incapable of communicating with these benches, many of whose occupants are quite liberal, will find itself in quite a poor opening position. And this applies also to the democratic camp too.
Thus, the attempts to brand the protest camp as “secular Israel” are a reprise of the mistake the right wing made, albeit from the opposite direction. An overly narrow categorization, instead of abetting the crystallization of a political camp, brings about a contraction of its social boundaries. In recent years, the religious and class diversity among the center-left within Jewish society was relatively narrow, and that of the right was broader, thanks not least to the diverse public that voted for Likud. Today, with the aid of the judicial coup and the protest against it, that trend is being reversed.
Will the reversal persist over time? Large-scale political transformations are based on identity transformations on an equal scale. Construction of an extensive, sustainable democratic camp depends on that camp’s ability to offer an identity alternative. That calls for understandings regarding two basic questions: Who does the democratic camp consist of? And what does it want?
On the right, there are claims that the democratic camp consists of privileged, secular Ashkenazim who want to suppress the “Second Israel.” That answer hasn’t gained much traction, but in the heat of the protest the democratic camp hasn’t actually come up with a convincing answer of its own, either. Here’s the start of one: The democratic camp is the broad Israeli middle class. Diversified and liberal, it is present in no small numbers in both the geographic and socio-economic periphery, and includes no few Mizrahim and traditionally religious, as well as many religious liberals who are against a halakhic state. Synagogue attendees, at least in part, are an integral element of this group. This is the new “Third Israel,” which does not admire Netanyahu and Dery, but also did not necessarily grow up listening to the songs of Kaveret or Yehonatan Geffen. The Arab citizens, as of now, remain only a potential participant in this camp.
The question of “who?” is related to the question of “what (do we want)?”. The judicial overhaul is driven not only by hostility toward the independent democratic institutions and a desire to grant unlimited power to elected politicians; it’s also fueled by an antidemocratic perception of Judaism. The Jewish religion, it’s claimed, is alien to liberal democracy – and also superior to it. Hence, the struggle now being engaged references not only democracy but also Judaism itself. For many secular, traditional and religious liberal Jews, Judaism is a way of life that is supposed to exist from within a position of freedom and not through forceful coercion.
Protecting such a way of life at the present moment requires of us a new Jewish vision, one that is political and resolute and is ready to defend the democracy of which it is a part. Not a struggle of “democratic” vs. “Jewish,” but a struggle for “democratic” that will incorporate all the shades of “Jewish.” That vision will need to add many details and leaders, but in the face of the halakhic-nationalist right, its two principal basic guidelines are already clear: The new vision will need to do battle against religious nationalism – in the territories and within the Green Line. Those are the two points between which the guidelines of the antidemocratic right pass, and now the basic guidelines of the democratic camp must pass between them.
This is not a battle of Secular Israel nor one of First Israel. It is a struggle of democratic Jews who are fighting for life itself. To paraphrase what Netanyahu famously whispered to the kabbalist Rabbi Yitzhak Kadouri, in 1997, about “the left”: It looks as though the right has forgotten that there are Jews like this. We are commanded to remind them.
Ariel David, a researcher of contemporary Mizrahi identity and Mizrahi politics, is a doctoral candidate in the department of political science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
