I have a few quibbles with Talshir here, and her partner, and their situation in Israel, but apart from that, this is very much on point, and necessary to put into “context,” the “IFG.” I referred to previously.
#3 of 4, with something on this topic to follow: The right wing has given the verses a literal interpretation, the scholar argues: If you allow your enemies to live by your side, they will continue to kill you, so it follows that the Palestinians must be killed in war, or expelled. At the very least, as Religious Zionism's Bezalel Smotrich wrote in his 2017 "Decisive Plan," they must be strongly encouraged to emigrate.
This of course is what Netanyahu’s father pursued, until the end of his life, as he declared in interviews almost up until that overdue day arrived.
How Messianic Radicals Came to Control Israel – and Netanyahu
Political scientist Gayil Talshir analyzes how the messianic right is shaping Israel's political leadership and landscape. Now, she says, the left must try to do the same thing
It's been about a month since Israel's right wing converged in Jerusalem and called for the conquest of the Gaza Strip, for the expulsion of its local population and for the renewal of Jewish settlement there. That political show of force – at what was called the "Conference for the Victory of Israel – Settlement Brings Security: Returning to the Gaza Strip and Northern Samaria" – reflected the growing might of the messianic right and made instant headlines. Naturally, the extremist messages voiced by speakers there generated concern in liberal circles. But as the days passed, the headlines changed, and Israelis seemed to move on. But not Gayil Talshir, a political scientist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In her view, we must pause and take a hard look at this benchmark date, January 28, 2024, and what transpired then at Jerusalem's International Convention Center.
Dr. Talshir paid particularly close attention to the speeches, which extolled the idea of crushing the enemy and expelling the Palestinians from Gaza. The idea that "only a [population] transfer will bring peace" – one of the slogans tossed around at the confab – used to be espoused by those at the most extreme fringes: by a few MKs from the now-defunct National Union and the tiny Moledet party of the ultranationalist Rehavam Ze'evi. But among the attendees at the January gathering were no fewer than 10 cabinet ministers from four parties – Likud, Religious Zionism, Otzma Yehudit and United Torah Judaism – in addition to 27 MKs, almost one-quarter of the Israeli parliament.
Talshir points to the central idea behind the event, variations of which continue to reverberate among the settler right: "Then you shall drive out all the inhabitants of the land." To which the Book of Numbers adds, "But if you will not drive out the inhabitants of the land from before you, then shall those that you let remain… harass you in the land wherein you dwell." The right wing has given the verses a literal interpretation, the scholar argues: If you allow your enemies to live by your side, they will continue to kill you, so it follows that the Palestinians must be killed in war, or expelled. At the very least, as Religious Zionism's Bezalel Smotrich wrote in his 2017 "Decisive Plan," they must be strongly encouraged to emigrate.
The so-called victory conference featured a festive march of six "core groups" eagerly waiting to settle in the Gaza Strip, and the highlight was the signing by attendees of a "covenant for victory and for the renewal of settlement in the Gaza District and Northern Samaria."
The religious Zionist public has undergone radicalization. We see this in the disparity of views between Smotrich and his party colleague Itamar Ben-Gvir, on the one hand, and Naftali Bennett and veteran leaders of the National Religious Party, on the other, and it can also be seen in terms of the content of their messages.
Talshir: "Smotrich's takeover of the religious Zionist movement left the moderate religious public with no political home to vote for, but in general, extreme religious messages have entered the mainstream and become popular. Visiting the Temple Mount, for example, which used to be considered an extreme act in most streams of Judaism, has today become a nationalist-symbolic act on the right. The same holds for the illegal settler outposts – referred to today as 'young settlements' – that were built on land privately owned by Palestinians. Today, the 'hilltop youth' are dictating the line to the Netanyahu government."
One of the things that stood out in the gathering, and which you highlight in an article in the Telem political science magazine, is the ideal of self-sacrifice.
"Yes. Self-sacrifice was portrayed at the event as a supreme value, because it is seen as being done for the sake of the redemption of the Jewish people. (TP-like the Japanese fascists who tortured my father and his fellow POWs, and so many others)If until now we thought that our distinctiveness [as Israelis] lay in being a life-affirming nation, I wasn't sure at the convention that this was the case. In practice, there was an almost opposite feeling."
This is background to understanding Smotrich's comment about 10 days ago – that the return of the hostages "is not the most important thing" – and perhaps also the decision by the council head of the West Bank settlement of Kiryat Arba, Eliyahu Libman, not to mention his abducted son at the conference in January. Libman only explained that according to the Jewish sources, "even those who cannot be killed must be expelled and disinherited; there are no innocents." According to Talshir, "What has contributed to the radicalization of religious Zionism are the Garin Torani groups [young religious people who move as groups into often secular, urban areas], the pre-military academies and the hesder yeshivas [combining religious study with abbreviated military service]. Now we see the results of this radicalization in the state budget, the takeover of governmental apparatuses and the government's decisions in wartime.” (TP-and the thrust of right-wing efforts to “radicalize” as “Conservative Revolutionaries,” young Americans.)
The conference that called for the resettlement of Gaza, last month. "If until now we thought that our distinctiveness [as Israelis] lay in being a life-affirming nation, I wasn't sure at the convention that this was the case," Talshir says.Credit: Olivier Fitoussi
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Talshir, 55, obtained her PhD at Oxford University. Among other topics, her research in the past decade draws a line connecting the crisis democracies are undergoing worldwide with developments in Israeli politics. In a recent study she described Israeli conservatism as revolutionary. Among academics she's seen as calling into question the conventional wisdom to the effect that the right and the left in Israel are divided over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. As she sees it, the last 10 years or so have been marked by a different struggle over the country's character: Jewish or Israeli, liberal or conservative.
She lives on Kibbutz Ma'aleh Hahamisha, west of Jerusalem, with her son and her partner, journalist Danny Zaken, who is currently concluding his term as acting head of Army Radio. Whereas Talshir is highly critical of Benjamin Netanyahu, Zaken is the co-presenter of a program on Army Radio with the prime minister's confidant Yaakov Bardugo, and he also tried to restore Bardugo to a senior position at the station.
"You have to look at his deeds, not at the militant discourse," Talshir says of Zaken. "In terms of his actions, the main thing Danny did at the station was to change the system of appointments, so that people from the periphery and those with low socioeconomic status would be able to become journalists in Israel. Besides that, he worked to diversify attitudes and perspectives there, and that's a good way of improving public broadcasting."
Netanyahu took a right-wing, national-oriented, liberal party and pulled it hard to the edge. Before Netanyahu, all the leaders of the right thought that neo-Kahanists like Ben-Gvir and Smotrich were wacky fringes.
Gayil Talshir
Talshir has devoted the past five years to examining the ideological returns and structural changes reaped during the Netanyahu era. Some of the trends she discerns might surprise liberal readers. In the article in Telem last month, she describes how the settler right, which is generally seen as supporting Netanyahu and helps guarantee his political survival, also effectively denigrates him. The denigration and the support coexist, ostensibly with no contradiction. The right hasn't forgotten, for example, that the premier signed off on the 1997 Hebron Agreement (involving withdrawal of Israeli forces from 80 percent of that predominantly Palestinian city); indeed, his name wasn't mentioned even once at the so-called victory conference in Jerusalem. Apparently the name of anyone who relinquishes territory is excised from the history of those who have settled the Land of Israel, Talshir says. The only right-wing prime minister mentioned in the gathering was Yitzhak Shamir. Neither Menachem Begin, who withdrew from Sinai, nor Ariel Sharon, who pulled Israel out of the Gaza Strip, got a mention.
The purpose of the gathering, Talshir continues, was to send a message to Netanyahu. "Recruiting one-third of Likud's Knesset faction to support such issues is a powerful move intended to influence the prime minister's policy, by controlling Likud's organized membership-recruitment efforts, on the eve of the critical decisions he faces."
Did the powerful move succeed?
"Look, Likud's two biggest vote recruiters, Yossi Dagan and Haim Katz, stood on the podium and it was as if they were saying to Netanyahu, 'You have been warned.' And the warning got through. How do we know? It's not by chance that immediately after the event in Jerusalem he made a pilgrimage to the pre-army program in [the settlement of] Eli and declared there that Israel will not compromise on anything less than 'total victory' [in the war in Gaza]. We should also recall that the head of that program, Rabbi Eli Sadan, was quoted in the religious-right wing paper Srugim as saying that this is 'a marvelous period' and that 'there will no longer be Gazans in Gaza.'
Tourism Minister Haim Katz speaks at the Gaza resettlement conference.Credit: Olivier Fitoussi
"We know that Netanyahu understood the warning also on the basis of the interviews Bibists gave to the media on the day after the confab," Talshir adds. "[Likud] Ministers Miki Zohar and Yoav Kisch, who showed up in the television studios, didn't say that they are against Jewish settlement in Gaza, only that now is not the time [for it]."
In other words, just be patient.
"Yes. They are in favor, but only down the line. But let's clarify again: The gathering called for the annihilation of the enemy in Gaza, the expulsion of the Palestinians and the settlement of Jews in their stead. If the prime minister espoused a proper conception of Israeli security, he and his emissaries would have immediately denounced this idea from every available platform."
Those who control Netanyahu at the moment are people who have cracked the genetic code of how to control the political system in Israel.
Gayil Talshir
I imagine it's a challenge, especially when about half of your coalition show up there.
"To understand how it came about that so many were there, we need to go back. Over the years, Netanyahu grasped that the party system revolves around two axes, central and secondary. The central axis is right-left, the secondary one is characterized by issues relating to religion vs. state. The parties that operate along the latter axis [the ultra-Orthodox parties, or Shinui in the past] can align themselves with the right or the left. What Netanyahu figured out was how to bring them deeply into the right. How? He effectively rolled the Zionist revolution backward and rendered the Israeli right conservative-believing-nationalist. Religion is the unifying key there."
It wasn't just a conceptual shift. Netanyahu actually introduced extremist religious and messianic elements into the heart of Likud.
"Symbolically, this is either a profound achievement, or his eternal disgrace. He took a right-wing, national-oriented, liberal party and pulled it hard to the edge. Before Netanyahu, all the leaders of the right thought that neo-Kahanists like Ben-Gvir and Smotrich were wacky fringes outside the legitimate [political] map. In the Netanyahu era they are in Likud."
Let's talk a little about these MKs.
"Take Avichai Buaron, who was until recently a Likud MK. Do you know what Buaron's lifework is? An organization called Mayanei Hayeshua, whose goal is to encourage traditionalist Jews from the periphery to become Hardalim [ultra-Orthodox nationalists] – to make them messianic. According to the organization, Mizrahim [Jews from Arab and Islamic countries] lack a sufficiently strong conception of religion, so they must undergo religionization, attend schools belonging to the Hardali system. In this way they'll end up in the clutches of the extreme right."
Economy Minister Nir Barkat lifts former Likud MK Avichai Buaron. The latter's lifework is an organization that encourages traditionalist Jews from the periphery to become messianic ultra-Orthodox nationalists, Talshir says.Credit: Olivier Fitoussi
What about other serving Likud MKs?
"There are the Temple Mount loyalists. Moshe Feiglin left Likud, but there are three MKs there who identify with him: Dan Illouz, Amit Halevi and Ariel Kallner. These are people who visit the Temple Mount regularly, and they are in the heart of Likud, not in an obscure party of [Religious Zionism extremist] Avi Maoz. Shlomo Karhi, the minister of communications, also Hardali, was educated under Rabbi Meir Mazuz, the most extreme rabbi in Shas."
For example, Mazuz is against women serving in the Israel Defense forces, has made scathing remarks against LGBTQ people, says that Baruch Goldstein – who perpetrated the massacre of Muslim worshippers at the Tomb of the Patriarchs 30 years ago – actually helped to avert danger there, and accuses Knesset Speaker Amir Ohana (Likud) of causing the Mount Meron disaster that killed 45 in 2021 because he is "tainted with the disease [of homosexuality]."
That is the person who educated Karhi.
Whoever succeeds in creating a real home for the civic movements, transforming them into elements of influence in the party system, will create a true alternative to the right.
Gayil Talshir
How do these people get into the party? Have Likud membership recruiters also become extreme?
"Likud's system of primaries is based on deals. If you want to know what's happening in Likud, you need to look at those who recruit people in an organized way, not at those who support the party as individuals and not as an organized group, who constitute the moderate majority. The power is now tilting in favor of those who are organized. In large measure, Yossi Dagan, the head of the Samaria Regional Council, dictates the agenda in Likud at present, because he is the biggest recruiter of Likud supporters among the settlers."
How many people are we talking about?
"Dagan has an organized force of around 9,000 settlers in Likud. Many of them only became members of the party in order to help its slate – and then vote for Smotrich. But it makes no difference: You won't find an MK who would refuse to make a deal of some sort with them, and the price of the deal is a settler agenda on the extreme right within Likud."
Education Minister Yoav Kisch and Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi at the Knesset this month. Talshir notes that the latter minister "was educated under Rabbi Meir Mazuz, the most extreme rabbi in Shas."Credit: Oren Ben Hakoon
But there is also the Likud recruiter Haim Katz, who represents the big workers committees of the Israel Aerospace Industries and the Israel Aviation Authority, and most of them are neither religious nor settlers.
"Haim Katz has recruited between 12,000 and 20,000 Likud members, which sounds like more than the party's number of settlers. But Katz was at the Gaza convention in Jerusalem, too. He's hooking up with Dagan, and the two of them decide who the prime minister will be, who the senior ministers will be and what the ruling party's agenda will be. And they do it without a majority, simply by controlling the power mechanisms within Likud."
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Talshir is very familiar with the ideologies that drive the Israeli right, but even she was surprised to discover a rather surprising group of signs displayed at the January gathering, bearing quotes from the founders of Mapai, the forerunner of Labor. Some messianic settlers, it turns out, want to see themselves as those who are continuing in the path of the so-called practical Zionists of old. Thus it happened that the likes of David Ben-Gurion, Yigal Allon, Rachel Yanait Ben-Zvi and Yitzhak Tabenkin were secondary stars at the victory convention. Sometimes the history of ideas and ideologies passes through a long and winding road that's full of surprises.
Ben-Gurion's dictum – "Our future depends not on what the goyim [gentiles] will say, but on what the Jews will do" – was quoted at the event. There was also a sign citing Tabenkin, who once said: "Settlement is identical to security policy." Allon apparently said, in 1956, "Gaza is Israeli no less than Jaffa." And for her part, Yanait Ben-Zvi, the wife of Israel's second president, Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, was quoted as saying, "There is an unwritten law in the Land of Israel, that all the settlements were established by a few dedicated visionaries."
Referring to this in her Telem article, Talshir wrote, "The settlers' use of pioneering Zionism is instrumental. The secular pioneers are only the 'messiah's donkey' [i.e., those who do the dirty work in advance of the arrival of the messiah], while the sacred mission is 'to raise the Zionist enterprise to another level,' to the vision of the Torah. The first speaker at the convention, Rabbi Uzi Sharbaf – a convicted terrorist from the Jewish Underground [in the early 1980s], who was sentenced to life imprisonment and had his punishment commuted, and was one of the co-organizers of the event along with [veteran settler activist] Daniella Weiss – said as much explicitly. By which he meant: The secular population has done its part – the secular population can go."
Does the settler right also see Netanyahu as the messiah's donkey? We spoke earlier about how speakers at the gathering didn't even mention Netanyahu by name, because he handed over territory. Why doesn't the messianic right give its support to Likud's Nir Barkat, for example, who supports the settlement project?
"Because Barkat won't bring them victory. People in the settler right are riding Netanyahu's back in order to set an agenda. In addition, Netanyahu customarily works with those he views as wielding authority among communities that are likely to vote for him. That's why he gives rabbis a bigger role than they actually have on the ground, and in effect doubles the resonance of certain messages. As such, he becomes an asset to the rabbis of the religious Zionist movement. They see him as Mashiah ben Yosef [the messiah, son of Joseph], who will herald redemption but will not be the one who delivers redemption itself, who is Mashiah ben David."
The left has perceived Netanyahu as some sort of demonic genius who controls the psychology of the people, but the situation you describe conjures the image of a weak person, a marionette of the fundamentalists.
"He's both of those things. Those who control Netanyahu at the moment are people who have cracked the genetic code of how to control the political system in Israel. They offer him great respect and the role of leader of the people, and receive in return dramatic control of the deeper structures of society: the education system, the media, the judiciary, the economy and of course the occupied territories."
Netanyahu and members of Likud on the night of the 2022 election. "He took a right-wing, national-oriented, liberal party and pulled it hard to the edge."Credit: Emil Salman
Netanyahu thinks he can control the extremists, and in the end they control him?
"He thought there was a separation between his toxic [election] campaigns and the person he is. He believed that he could incite and divide in the campaigns, and then be Mr. Economics and Mr. Security after assuming power. But the truth is that it's impossible to ride the tiger of populism (TP-fascism, actually) and tame it. What happened was that the tiger is taming Netanyahu. Last week, [journalist] Roni Kuban interviewed [the television personality and journalist] Yinon Magal, and asked him to respond to the claim that he and his colleagues are Netanyahu's mouthpieces. Magal said that the situation is exactly the opposite, that they are the ones allowing Netanyahu to remain in power, because they have an agenda. His answer was, 'We are the ones who are making Netanyahu conform to our agenda.' And he's right. Notice that at the critical junctions, the messianic right works to make Netanyahu conform. The demonstrations in favor of the 'judicial reform' weren't aimed against the left and the protest movement, they were intended for Netanyahu's ears. And the situation is the same now."
Do you think this process will end with a merger between Netanyahu and the extremist forces? In the municipal election in Tel Aviv this week, Likud ran on a slate with Ben-Gvir's Otzma Yehudit.
"Netanyahu works by means of trial balloons. So now he's floated a trial balloon of active partnership between Likud and Otzma Yehudit. Originally, he wanted Ben-Gvir to garner the votes of people who generally don't turn out to vote. If he sees that hooking up in a technical bloc with Ben-Gvir leaves him with the biggest party in Israel, he won't balk at doing that in a national election either."
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Academically, Talshir sees herself first of all as a "politologist," a researcher of politics, and only afterward as a liberal thinker. "As a politologist, I would not want to see Likud crash on the day after Netanyahu, but for the party to be rebuilt by a liberal right, which would confront a liberal left – and then you'd have a healthy democratic political system. The people who need to act against the extremists in Likud are the liberal right-wingers – they need to understand who has taken control of their party."
Are there other forces who could stand up to the extremists in Likud?
"There are a number of right-wing, national-liberal candidates who could succeed Netanyahu – Nir Barkat, Yoav Gallant, Gideon Sa'ar, Gilad Erdan, Haim Bibas – but because they are afraid that someone else will wrest the party's leadership, they aren't joining forces against Netanyahu and the extremists. Their leadership is lax, and they will pay a price for that. Likud will crash. If they were to cooperate [with each other] and threaten to replace Netanyahu unless he agrees to a national unity government and an agreed-upon date for an election in the summer, they could oust Ben-Gvir and Smotrich, bring in Yesh Atid and forge a unity government that would end the war and forge a geostrategic arrangement with the United States and Saudi Arabia."
In other words, despite all the extremism, there is still a chance for a shift and even for peace with Saudi Arabia.
"Our window of opportunity for a geostrategic arrangement with the United States, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the Palestinian Authority is open until June. After that, [President Joe] Biden will find it difficult to push through diplomatic policy moves before the November election. Accordingly, [National Unity war cabinet ministers Benny] Gantz and [Gadi] Eisenkot need to present an ultimatum to Netanyahu. The Israeli pubic, including the national-liberal right, will stand by them. Netanyahu must be forced to make decisions; one cannot wait for him to make the right choice for the good of the country."
And as a politologist, a word about the left. Yair Golan announced this week that he will run for head of the Labor Party. What are the options for the liberal left – existing parties or a new one?
"You can't be a party of one person. There needs to be someone who will rebuild, on the ruins of the Labor Party, and open its ranks to new leaders, new members and civil society organizations. Before October 7, the hundreds of thousands who took to the streets created movements such as Women Building Alternatives and Brothers in Arms. Whoever succeeds in creating a real home for these deeply rooted movements, and transforming them into elements of influence within the party system, will create a true alternative to the right. It can't be done by safeguarding places on slates for Gantz and Eisenkot's parties, only by [creating] a party that is based on participatory democracy and on liberal and social values. The left must learn from the right that there is no need to be a party with 30 Knesset seats in order to rule. Moral and ideological influence can be forged in the power centers by other means as well – as is the case with the settlers."
![The conference that called for the resettlement of Gaza, last month. "If until now we thought that our distinctiveness [as Israelis] lay in being a life-affirming nation, I wasn't sure at the convention that this was the case," Talshir says.](https://img.haarets.co.il/bs/0000018d-fba5-def2-a98d-ffb788b90000/75/16/f924413340389b61bb32c44dfe16/73487.jpg?precrop=2400,1603,x0,y0&height=1282&width=1920 "The conference that called for the resettlement of Gaza, last month. \"If until now we thought that our distinctiveness [as Israelis] lay in being a life-affirming nation, I wasn't sure at the convention that this was the case,\" Talshir says., Credit: Olivier Fitoussi")
