The troubling rise of the Israeli far-right

Something troubling has happened in Israel. The previous government, before it collapsed earlier this month, had been remarkable for its glorious diversity, both political and ethnic. Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid shared a rotating prime ministership, presiding over a coalition of parties spanning the entire political spectrum. It was the first administration to include Arab parties; when I met him last year, Issawi Frej, the country’s first Arab minister, told me that he firmly rejected Amnesty’s ‘apartheid Israel’ slur, and envisioned a role for himself in building on the Abraham Accords. Now here was a country that it felt good to defend. The Jewish diaspora loved all this, hailing Israel at its best.

The return of Benjamin Netanyahu two weeks ago swept this tolerant, pragmatic mosaic away. In its place now stands a right-wing majority; slender by the standards of many countries, but pretty conclusive for the Israeli proportional representation system, which has been gridlocked for years. Netanyahu relied on stimulating a high voter turnout, followed by coalition-building and horse-trading to achieve his majority. Above all, he relied on support from the far-right Religious Zionism alliance, which rocketed from 225,000 votes in March last year to 516,000 votes this month, taking it from ninth-largest to third-largest party.

As Netanyahu draws up his cabinet, he will have no choice but to offer plum positions to its rabble-rousing leaders, Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich. Both these characters are highly divisive, to say the least. Ben-Gvir believes that non-Jews should not have voting rights in Israel and has described Israeli Arabs as ‘enemies of the state’; Smotrich, a self-confessed ‘proud homophobe’, has advocated the separation of Arab and Jewish women in maternity facilities.

There can be no defending that. But diaspora Jewry, which doesn’t have to deal with the reality of life in Israel – and often knows relatively little about it – reacted with almost comical pearl-clutching, finger-wagging horror. For years, liberal Jews who have never known terror themselves have grown increasingly queasy at Israel’s unapologetic insistence on security. Now the country had gone too far. And they were triggered. The pre-eminent New York Times journalist Thomas Friedman wrote a hand-wringing op-ed entitled The Israel We Knew Is Gone. A London Jewish freesheet ran a front page screaming ‘our worst fears’ above a photograph of the two deplorables raising their fists (a subsequent meme ran: ‘Breaking news, Israeli election to be re-run because someone in northwest London didn’t like the result’).

But as disturbing as it is to have two firebrands with such repellent views sitting at the heart of government, Israel is far from the only mature democracy to have fallen victim to incursions by the far-right. In October, the Sweden Democrats – the biggest party in the world with Nazi roots, which maintains a nativist agenda – joined that country’s governing bloc, giving it influence over policy. Germany’s anti-Islam Alternative Für Deutschland has veered between being the country’s fifth- and third-largest party. Italy is led by Giorgia Meloni, also described by many as far-right. Rassemblement National, formerly National Front, is France’s largest parliamentary opposition group in the National Assembly, with a strong presence in the European parliament. The list goes on. Far-right populism is on the march in many parts of the world. Did anybody advance the argument that ‘The Sweden We Knew Is Gone’?

Nonetheless, something troubling has happened in Israel. How could the country apparently have swung so dramatically from tolerance to bigotry? The first point is that, in reality, the country hasn’t swung anywhere. The broad electoral division between right and left remains unchanged; it wasn’t so much that the right suddenly gobbled up more votes, but that the left failed to organise itself. Two parties, Meretz and Balad, didn’t even cross the electoral threshold, wasting 300,000 votes and opening the door to a right-wing victory.

The second point to make is that the electoral success of the far-right was not due to its homophobia. On the whole, Israel is remarkable for its liberal attitude towards the gay community, particularly given the rest of the Middle East. Amir Ohana, the first openly gay government minister, was from the right-wing Likud party. Voters did not feel strongly enough about homophobia to abandon the far-right at the ballot box, it is true; but anti-gay prejudice did not animate the vote.

The truth is that Israelis are scared. And fear feeds populism. Although you wouldn’t know it from the international news, there have been almost 5,000 terrorist incidents against Israelis this year, ranging from rock-hurlings to car-rammings, stabbings and shootings (not including numerous attacks that were thwarted – but reported locally). Twenty-six people have been killed and hundreds injured. To make matters worse, in recent years a disturbing crime-wave has been sweeping the Israeli-Arab community. In rural areas, Bedouin gangs terrorise farmers, while in urban centres, gun-running and drug-smuggling has reached epidemic proportions. Women in Be’er Sheva are afraid to walk the streets at night. How would the British electorate react to such an onslaught?

Added to this was the internecine rioting that ripped through mixed Arab-Jewish parts of Israel during the Gaza conflict last year. Fighting between Israel and Hamas was a known quantity, but violence from Israeli Arabs had been slumbering since the Second Intifada. Post-election analysis of the mixed towns at the centre of the unrest last year reveals that their Arab residents voted for the extremist Balad party – which endorses terror and opposes the existence of Israel as a Jewish state – while their Jewish neighbours voted for its radical mirror-image. A picture emerges of a nation polarising itself through fear. The success of the Israeli far-right arrived because its populist champion, Ben-Gvir, the senior figure in the partnership, surfed that zeitgeist. He campaigned more effectively and convincingly on the security issue than any other politician and was rewarded with the votes of a kingmaker.

There were other factors, too. Ben-Gvir presented as a ‘fresh’ figure, coming across as if he authentically understood the concerns of the people. In addition to hammering security concerns head-on, he was the beneficiary of a ‘protest vote’ on social issues such as the cost-of-living crisis in a country tired by political instability.

He specialised in politics-by-stunt, staging a confrontation with an Arab politician trying to visit a Hamas member on hunger strike in an Israeli hospital; heckling a security minister at the scene of a terror attack; and barging into a press conference of the Islamic Movement’s Shura Council to upbraid them for the deaths of Israeli soldiers. Like Trump, he mastered the art of bewitching the headlines. And like many European far-right figures, he sanitised himself as the elections approached, asking his supporters to chant ‘death to terrorists’ rather than ‘death to Arabs’ and publicly – if cynically – disavowing the worst excesses of extremism of his youth. On that count, he even managed to attract a cohort of young, secular voters from Tel Aviv who would otherwise appear diametrically opposed to his values and politics, as well as others outside the national religious demographic like those from left-leaning kibbutzim, or of Middle Eastern or North African descent. Smotrich, meanwhile, hoovered up support from the religious, right-wing voters that had felt betrayed by Naftali Bennett’s coalition with Arab parties.

Much ugliness, to be sure. But as Ze’ev Jabotinsky, one of Israel’s founding fathers, wrote: ‘We are a people as all other peoples; we do not have any intentions to be better than the rest. As one of the first conditions for equality we demand the right to have our own villains, exactly as other people have them.’

That doesn’t make it right, of course. It doesn’t make it any less troubling. But it does mean that a certain part of the Israeli electorate has more to worry about than keeping liberal foreigners happy.