Why This Leading Israeli Right-wing Figure Is ‘Praying for the Government’s Fall’
This should have been the finest hour of Assaf Sagiv, one of Israel’s leading conservative thinkers. After all, a right-wing government could implement what he’s been preaching for years. But he’s frightened, and he’s not alone. Even the theoreticians of the right-wing Kohelet Policy Forum are terrified, he says
Assaf Sagiv. “More than I am a right-winger, I am a conservative and an Israeli patriot, and when I discern collective madness spreading in the house, I have to cry out. And if that leads me onto a collision course with the milieu in which I was active for many years, so be it.”Credit: Olivier Fitoussi
Baron Munchausen was onto something. One of the famous tall tales that’s attributed to the fictional, 18th-century nobleman recounts a journey the baron made in the snow-covered forests of Russia on a horse-drawn sled. Suddenly he spotted a huge wolf hurtling toward the sled and about to catch up with it. Fortunately, the predator ignored him; instead the wolf leaped over the baron and ate its way into the horse, gradually taking its place in the harness. Relieved, Munchausen started to whip the wolf energetically and directed it to his destination, completing the journey safely.
“The conservative right in Israel reminds me of the hero of that story,” says Assaf Sagiv, one of Israel’s leading conservative thinkers. “It’s behaving as though it has succeeded in harnessing a wolf – namely, the extreme right – to its sled and has it confidently under control. But contrary to Munchausen’s flight of fancy, the political fantasy of Israeli conservatism will end very badly: Neither the rider nor the sled will reach the destination – only the wolf will get what it wants.”
Dr. Sagiv, 50, has been a prominent, highly influential figure in the conservative elite in Israel since it began to emerge in the 1990s. He’s a veteran of the Shalem Center, the Jerusalem-based think tank that became an accredited academic institution (Shalem College) in 2013. Sagiv was editor-in-chief of the center’s Azure, the leading periodical of the right until it was shut down in 2012. Afterward he became chief editor of Shalem’s prestigious book publishing unit. He was there personally to witness the recent evolution of the intellectual right: from Shalem via the Kohelet Policy Forum and the Tikvah Fund, down to the more populist, nationalist, antiliberal circles.
Sagiv’s place at the heart of the conservative elite was stable and assured – and then something changed. In the course of a personal reckoning, lengthy and complex, he realized that he could no longer go on as usual. Last year he resigned as head of the academic center’s publishing house and embarked on a new path.
“I found myself in a difficult situation both nationally and personally,” Sagiv says, explaining why he decided to grant his first in-depth interview to the media. He finds what is happening today in Israel shocking, precisely because he was and remains a conservative in his outlook. It’s conservatism, and not left-wing values, that underlies his critique.
“I am a right-winger who hopes for the fall of a right-wing government – not only hopes, but is also praying, for all our sakes,” he says. “Does that make me a leftist? No, and even though there is nothing shameful in that, no one will decide for me where to place me on the political spectrum. [G.K.] Chesterton, an English author and essayist whom I like very much, wrote that he believes in liberalism even though he has ceased to believe in liberals. I no longer believe in Likudniks, but part of me will always believe in Likud, or in a certain idea of Likud that today looks completely divorced from reality.”
Asked whether he has turned his back on conservatism, Sagiv insists that he hasn’t changed – it’s his former colleagues who have abandoned conservatism. Or perhaps there never really was such a thing. “In the eyes of the leaders of the conservative movement, I am an ideological defector, a right-winger who sold his soul to the left,” he says. “They have learned nothing from history. When they come to their senses, it will be too late, as usual. They will call for soul-searching and they’ll organize dialogue circles amid the smoldering ruins of the Jewish state.”
His own soul-searching, both personal and public, leaves him frustrated and angry. “I devoted my best years – definitely not alone – to forging an intelligent conservative discourse here, reasoned and clear-eyed. And in the past few years, I have been watching sadly the utter destruction of that project. No one would be happier than I if the right were to spawn an elite worthy of the name, but they embarked on a different route. In fact, they are completely off the rails. (TP-he misses that they “remain on those rails,” of Conservatism, leading to its logical culmination as “National Conservatism.” Or more correctly; Fascism.)
“The ‘conservative camp’ is being dragged in the wake of compulsive kindlers of ignorance like [Likud MKs] Dudi Amsalem and Galit Distal Atbaryan, ideological fanatics like [Religious Zionism MKs] Simcha Rothman and Bezalel Smotrich, Bolshevik commissars like [Justice Minister] Yariv Levin and [Communications Minister] Shlomo Karhi; and in the wake of the leader of the band, [Prime Minister] Benjamin Netanyahu, who was once a genuine conservative but for personal and political reasons hooked up with the basest and most dangerous form of populism. And what is truly giving me sleepless nights is that none of them – neither the politicians nor the ideologues, and certainly not the think tanks that advise them – is truly at the helm, none of them is in control of the events.”
Aerial view of a February 20 demonstration in Jerusalem protesting the regime-change plan. Sagiv describes himself as “a right-winger who hopes for the fall of a right-wing government.”Credit: Amir Terkel
Great Satan and Little Satan
Assaf Sagiv was born in Haifa in 1972. His father, he relates, was a “Beginist [referring to Menachem Begin] from a Revisionist [Zionist] family: an ardent Likud supporter and a dyed-in-the-wool fan of Betar Jerusalem [soccer team] – not a small thing when you live in ‘Red Haifa.’ Dad, may his memory be a blessing, didn’t only implant a right-wing viewpoint, but also ‘right-wingness’ as an identity. People who didn’t grow up in a Likud home will not easily grasp how solid that identity is, the degree to which it continues to define, in certain senses, who and what I am even after I despaired of the party that was my political home.”
Sagiv joined the Shalem Center in 1995, shortly after its establishment. “I got there totally by chance,” he recalls. “A friend asked me whether I would like to accompany him on a visit to a new institute in the capital. When I learned that it was an institution whose orientation I could identify with, my curiosity was piqued. The place was still in its infancy, operating out of a small apartment on Eliash Street [in downtown Jerusalem]. I got there and met the founders – Yoram Hazony, Dan Polisar, Ofir Haivry and Josh Weinstein – and I stayed for 26 years.”
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Sagiv describes Shalem as the progenitor of Israeli conservatism. “It can be said without exaggeration that the Shalem Center brought about a tectonic shift in Israeli discourse. Until the mid-1990s, the term ‘conservatism’ was not part of the local lexicon. And then came the publications of the Shalem Center, notably Azure, and its books, and through them the Israeli reading public was introduced to a rich intellectual tradition.” (TP-no, it was introduced to a political ideology of its founders, heavily influenced by fascist theory/ideology.)
Israeli conservatism is now out to leave a mark on the country’s ministries, the Knesset and the public space. The problem, according to Sagiv, starts with the fact that “it is not a local growth, it’s a copy-paste of American conservatism. But what is far more serious is that the American version is a singular species that was engineered by the founders of the conservative movement for the sake of a coalition between groups that didn’t agree on even the most basic questions.
“On the one hand, there were religious intellectuals, mainly Catholic, who espoused an almost reactionary worldview. (TP-“fascist,” actually, in the mode of Francoism, the Italian and German forms having fell into disrepute, of Buckley, Kendall, Bozell, Priscilla Buckley, and assorted others.) On the other hand, you had libertarians, who advocated free enterprise and extreme individualism, and who weren’t very fond of religion. At the start of the 1960s, an intellectual named Frank Meyer, a former communist, concocted a new mixture: a combination of traditionalist elements and libertarian elements, known as ‘fusionism.’ The experiment succeeded and became the official credo of the conservative mainstream in America. He brought together pious Christians, moderate libertarians and loathers of taxes of all creeds.
“That is also the ideological model that was imported by the agents of Israeli conservatism,” Sagiv continues. “And just like in America, fusionism is marketed to the general public as something natural, self-evident: an ostensibly harmonious combination of traditional communitarianism and market economy, between pious Judeo-Christian puritanism and rampant capitalism.”
Who benefits politically from these goods being imported to Israel?
Sagiv: “The driving force behind the move is religious Zionism. The Shalem Center wanted to create an all-Israeli conservatism, whereas the conservative movement in its present format is completely identified with religious Zionism. You have to ask yourself: Why them of all people? What underlies the successful match that has been made between the national-religious public in Israel and American conservatism?
“The successors to Gush Emunim [the post-1973 war, Orthodox, pro-settlement movement] were drawn to conservatism because the messianic ideology did not produce the hoped-for fruits. It did not take root in people’s hearts and it did not prevent the chain of disasters that descended on them: the eviction from Yamit [in Sinai], the Oslo Accords, the expulsion from Gush Katif [the Gaza Strip settlements]. Those events had a traumatic effect on religious Zionism. The movement developed an acute allergy to the establishment – not to the State of Israel as an idea, but to the mechanisms of government and to the elites that operate through them – and it found itself isolated. The broad Israeli public, even the Likudist right, shunned it.”
How was American conservatism useful to them?
“It provided religious Zionism with exactly what it needed: a theoretical toolbox that enabled it to operate in the public arena and speak to the heart of secular, right-wing circles. In contrast to messianic theology, conservatism’s ideological platform anchored the legitimacy of the religious right with rational arguments. The tremendous anger that the settlers and their supporters held toward the legal, security and administrative establishments prepared the ground for the absorption of the conceptual world of American conservatism and libertarianism. In the name of a fusionist vision of a minimalist state, an orderly working plan was devised: shackling the judicial branch, limiting the power of the bureaucracy, a drastic cut in public expenses, placing cronies in key establishment positions.” TP-Heritage’s Project 2025)
Netanyahu with Rothman and Levin at the Knesset. “The ‘conservative camp’ is being dragged in the wake of compulsive kindlers of ignorance and ideological fanatics," Sagiv says.Credit: Emil Salman
But, in the final analysis, beyond all the hot air, the ideology that’s being marketed as “conservative” is no more than a façade, Sagiv says. “Michael Oakeshott, a philosopher and political theorist who was one of the greatest thinkers of the 20th century, wrote a marvelous article in favor of the conservative tendency in politics. He defined it not only as an opposition to change, but also as a calculated avoidance of unnecessary conflict. The role of a conservative government, according to Oakeshott, is ‘not to inflame passion and give it new objects to feed upon, but to inject into the activities of already too passionate men an ingredient of moderation.’ It would be hard to say that the conservative movement in Israel is acting in the spirit of that recommendation. It is far removed from moderation; its discourse is militant and belligerent.” (TP-as the “Movement” was founded as in the US, by Buckley, Kendall, Burnham, et al. Ignoramuses like Kirk weren’t capable of seeing it for what Kendall, and the “Bs,” the many Buckleys involved, and in-law, Bozell, and Burnham, were really intent upon; a Right-wing Revolution” of regime change in the US. And that never changed, even while they succeeded and seemed to become the “Establishment.”)
Worse, the great project of the Kohelet Policy Forum to reshape the face of society and regime in Israel, together with the efforts of the Tikvah Fund to produce an elite of conservative intellectuals and jurists, are based on “a great bluff that Israeli conservatism tells itself.” The leaders of the movement, who are from the religious Zionist movement, see themselves as people who are driving the right-wing engine and believe that they are about to realize their dream of replacing the progressive elite at the head of the state and the society.
“But the problem is that they aren’t really driving the engine, and it’s unlikely they ever will. The largest ranks of the right wing identifies with nationalist populism, which is not conservative even in the most superficial sense of the term. It’s a radical force that is far closer to Maximilien Robespierre than to Edmund Burke.” (TP-true, but US Conservatism began as that, as any reading of Willmoore Kendall reveals!)
Isn’t it all of one piece?
“The conservative right and the populist right are seemingly working against a common enemy, but they are in fact pulling in different directions. The pseudo-conservatives speak openly about a change of elites, but the populists have no interest in that kind of governmental upheaval. They have no intention of serving any oligarchy, conservative or otherwise. They see themselves as fighting the people’s battle against the elites, and this civil war is the be-all and end-all for them. The conservatives want to govern; the populists want to pursue the struggle. And they suspect, not without justice, that the elitist intellectuals of religious Zionism are hitching a ride on their back. The internal rift in the right-wing camp is unavoidable.” (TP-no, their “interests” actually coincide; just read Hazony!)
The boundary line that Sagiv is suggesting between conservative and populist right wings might appear blurred to outside observers. Not to Sagiv, though. He is scornful of the invitation of “Bibi-ist propagandists” like Gadi Taub and Erez Tadmor to conferences of the conservative movement. “It’s a total farce: Who invites pyromaniacs to a firemen’s ball?” (TP-Conservatives! See DJT!)
The effort to project a united front crashed when the “government of change” was formed, in 2021. Leading Israeli conservatives, among them Yoav Sorek, the editor of the conservative journal Hashiloach, and Ronen Shoval, the academic dean of the Tikvah Fund, expressed cautious support for the development. After all, the favorites of the conservative movement at the time, Naftali Bennett and Ayelet Shaked, played leading roles in that political constellation.
“The counter-response of the Bibi-ists wasn’t long in coming. The self-styled elite was buried under heavy volleys of fire and brimstone. It was a storm of rage that made it clear that the populist right needs only one type of intellectual: yes-people who position themselves unreservedly behind the leader. I look at this distorted spectacle and I don’t know whether to laugh or to cry. You know, the writing was on the wall. All you had to do was to observe the collision course of the conservative movement in America. What happened there in the past decade is exactly what we can expect to happen here, too.”
In the past decade – it’s hard to forget – the Republican Party underwent a hostile takeover. After decades in which Republicans voted for conservatives to represent them, a populist named Donald Trump took over the party. “American conservatism gives us a peephole into the future, and it doesn’t bode well. The Republican Party is a political, moral and cultural disaster zone.” (TP-and its ideological lodestar is “National Conservatism!”)
Donald Trump. Sagiv says that "the intellectual right in the United States is undergoing a process of frightening radicalization."Credit: Rebecca Blackwell/AP
How did Trump’s takeover affect conservative ideology?
“The intellectual right in the United States is undergoing a process of frightening radicalization. It’s no longer making do with attacking the left’s progressive liberalism; it’s also dissociating itself from the classic liberalism of the founding fathers, and is speaking openly about eliminating the separation between church and state, about changing America’s constitutional character and turning it into a Christian nation that doesn’t hesitate to use its power in order to impose a rigid moral code on its citizens.
“The new conservatives,” he continues, “who include both nationalists and pious Catholics, have replaced the United States with Hungary as an exemplary model. Their hero is Viktor Orban. Fusionism in America is dying, and it will fade away here as well. The model that my friends and I brought to Israel is flawed merchandise, put together sloppily and destined to go up in flames.” (TP-and ideologically, laid the foundation for the present “New Right” of “Repressive Majoritarianism,” as Kendall propounded in laying its foundational ideas.)
Flight 93
When the shell of the ostensibly rational arguments of the pseudo-conservatives is removed, Sagiv maintains, the paranoid core of their worldview is revealed. “They believe wholeheartedly that they are up against some sort of monstrous ideological deviation – progressive trolling, a PC dictatorship, postmodernism, ‘cultural Marxism,’ whatever – that is liable to push the country, the Jewish people, Western culture, the whole of humanity, into spiritual and material perdition. Because of the apocalyptic panic that is gripping them, they supposedly have no choice other than to opt for the ‘lesser evil,’ meaning that they will make common cause with the extreme right, which is perhaps not a comfortable ally, but whose instincts are at least healthy.”
This same pathological pattern of thought, which pushed the Israeli right into the arms of the followers of the late ultranationalist Rabbi Meir Kahane, also softened the resistance of American conservatives to the Trump administration. Sagiv mentions a 2016 article by the conservative writer Michael Anton, in an attempt to persuade his associates to stand behind the problematic Republican candidate.
“Anton effectively likened the Democratic Party to the Al-Qaida terrorists who hijacked United Airlines flight 93 on September 11, 2001, and warned that if the Republicans did not follow the example of the passengers who stormed the cockpit – in other words, if they didn’t unite behind Trump’s candidacy – Hillary Clinton and her lackeys would inflict a catastrophe on America. This is how they justify the self-disgrace. The catastrophe that the left will generate is so horrific that preventing it justifies even the price of crashing the plane.
“And the farther the pseudo-conservatives distance themselves from the center and approach the lunatic fringes, the more eager they are to inflate the dimensions of the threat that forced them to endanger the lives of the other passengers on the flight. ‘We hooked up with [Itamar] Ben-Gvir? We had no choice – the left was plotting to sell the Jewish state to the Islamic Movement. We formed a coalition with Avi Maoz? It’s not pleasant, but we need to protect Israel’s children from LGBTQ brainwashing.’ The conservatives never suffer from a shortage of ‘Flight 93’ arguments.”
Is that also one of the justifications for the regime coup?
“The Israeli right is now positioning itself behind a program that is no less than a constitutional coup, a plan that it wants to implement hastily, ardently and even vengefully. Yariv Levin and Simcha Rothman genuinely see themselves as defenders of democracy and even as liberals in the classic, minimalist sense of the term. When they talk about a separation of powers, they are drawing on Montesquieu. However, Montesquieu believed that the spirit of moderation is a necessary condition for a proper regime and warned us against democracy’s tendency to fall into the snare of extremism. Moreover, he feared demagogues who would corrupt the people in order to conceal their corruption or lend it a normative appearance.
“And this is what we can expect if the proposed reform is implemented: the dismantlement of the state’s institutions, splitting the spoils between party bosses who are battling one another for power and resources, loss of public security, looting of the public coffers and deterioration into general lawlessness.” (TP-Project 2025! As endorsed and promoted by The American Conservative magazine and the Quincy Institute, as a “Foreign Policy for the Middle Class,” which it is anything but!)
Dr. Gadi Taub, screenwriter Roy Iddan and Journalist Shai Golden at the Israeli Conservatism Conference last year.Credit: Emil Salman
According to Sagiv, this is not how genuine conservatives comport themselves. “Conservatism is a cooling ethos,” he says. “And in general – not always – it’s a movement that also prefers compromise over disputes. Religious Zionism was once a conciliatory, bridging force: the ‘connecting hyphen,’ as Yosef Burg, the longtime leader of the old National Religious Party, put it. Today, conservatism, like Baron Munchausen, is riding in a sled harnessed to a populist, rampaging wolf, and its leaders are only firing up [the wolf] and throwing it bloody slices of meat. It’s the complete opposite of conservatism. That is what conservatism is supposed to prevent.”
Is it still possible to put a stop to this process?
“One day we will miss the Kohelet Forum and the Tikvah Fund, we will remember them fondly – when we see what is about to replace them. The next incarnation is already around the corner. The left is wrong to think that Kohelet and Tikvah are celebrating the present crisis. It’s a façade. They are terrified. They smell the smoke and they know that they overdid it. But our conservatives have fallen into a trap: If they call for a slowdown of the ‘reform,’ or even for a dialogue, the populist right, which in any case doesn’t trust them, will mark them as traitors. It will push them to the margins.
“The choice they face is not a simple one: to sound a relatively liberal voice, which will be swallowed up in the general chorus of roars, or to collaborate with the more dominant forces of the right wing, and ultimately shed their own principles.”
Collective madness
It’s not only Israeli conservatism that has parallels in the United States – so does Sagiv himself. Even though the majority of Republicans adopted Trump as their leader, conservatives like Bill Kristol and George Conway chose to criticize the president for not being a conservative – and they paid steep professional and social prices. Many of their friends disappeared as if they had never existed. Sagiv appears to be comfortable with his choice. Recently he was appointed editor-in-chief of Levin Press, until now primarily a publisher of art books, through which he will try to pursue his work.
It’s clear when talking to him that he doesn’t enjoy being in the position of a right-winger who’s attacking other right-wingers. It’s at odds with the political DNA that was implanted in him from childhood. Internal critiques are not natural to the right, especially not to Likud.
“Our instinctive tendency is to close ranks, unite against the left and back the elected leader,” he says. “But more than I am a right-winger, I am a conservative and an Israeli patriot, and when I discern collective madness spreading in the house, I have to cry out. And if that leads to a severance of ties with the mother base, if it leads me onto a collision course with the milieu in which I was active for many years, so be it.”
Sagiv misses the coalition government of Bennett and Yair Lapid. “It proved to me and to others that Israeli politicians on both sides of the fence are capable of making the general good their top priority. It was the most conservative government in Israel’s history – not because of the political identity of its components, but because of the basic motivation for its establishment: the understanding that the true danger is not Bibi but Bibi-ism, the wild, unrestrained populism that is threatening to destroy the national home.”
However, the greatest achievement of the previous government, Sagiv maintains, was its creation of a true Jewish-Arab partnership. “The southern branch of the Islamic Movement, of which the United Arab List is the parliamentary representative, advocates moderation as a religious and moral principle. The late Sheikh Abdullah Nimr Darwish called on his supporters to integrate into the political arena and to struggle for the rights of the Arab majority, because he was more of a conservative than a radical. He believed that Islam would achieve its goals peacefully, not by means of a violent logic of all or nothing. [UAL leader MK Mansour] Abbas is following in his footsteps.”
According to Sagiv, what enabled the UAL to join the government was precisely the fact that the previous coalition had rested in part on the voices of traditional Jews from the right. Abbas’ party would probably have found it difficult to hook up with a government of the progressive left. What he did perhaps portends a redeployment of the political arena on the basis of new lines of division: “No longer right vs. left, but conservatives versus radicals, and especially versus the unrestrained right that is now in power.”
Sagiv believes in the strength of a broad camp, from the moderate right to the Zionist left, whose conservatism “will not be fake. It will prefer a politics of consensus over ideological factionalism and will wish to act cautiously, without rocking the boat. And it will preserve rigorously liberal democracy and its institutions – not necessarily because it identifies withe liberal ideology, but because that is the only platform that makes possible the coexistence of religious and secular, right and left, Jews and Arabs.”