Three years ago, when the elections for the 21st Knesset (Israeli Parliament) were held, no one expected any major surprises. In the end, Benjamin ‘Bibi’ Netanyahu fell agonisingly short of majority. Three years since Bibi’s crown began to lose its shine, on 1 November, Netanyahu will attempt to win an election and form a coalition of at least 61 of the 120 seats in Israel’s Parliament.
Elections in November 2022 will also be the first since 2009 in which Bibi will run as the leader of the opposition rather than prime minister. Netanyahu is Israel’s longest-serving prime minister and, by far, the most polarising political figure in the country today.
He is hoping that a Right-wing front that is more united than in the previous four elections, as well as the anti-incumbency factor, plays a significant role in his victory. The head of the opposition also hopes that the turnout among Israeli Arabs will be particularly low, which will further increase his chances. Although Arabs make up about a fifth of Israel’s population, polls show that Arab parties have a slim chance of gaining more than 10 per cent of the Knesset seats.
So what are the elections about? It is easier to answer what they are not about. The controversy over whether to arm Ukraine against Russia does not interest the voters, and the cost of living and housing prices make only minor headlines. The Palestinian issue bores the voters in Israel even more – both Jews and even many Arabs.
Prime Minister Yair Lapid’s support for a two-state solution during his September UN General Assembly address elicited a mild yawn in Israel, with people annoyed at being bothered with it again. This was in stark contrast to the more major headlines in the international media. Even Iran, Israel’s nemesis, which improves its nuclear capabilities constantly, does not succeed in igniting the imagination of the Israeli voter.
Both political camps are urging the world to put a “credible military threat on the table” to prevent the Ayatollahs from getting a nuclear weapon. Alas, the Israeli public recognises this as hollow rhetoric. No one will go to war with Iran for Israel or the Gulf’s moderate Sunni states.
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Two groups in Israeli society
So, what is the thing that gets the people interested in the polls? The superficial answer is that there is a debate in Israel about whether Netanyahu can serve as prime minister while on trial for bribery.
But the legal debate surrounding Netanyahu is only the tip of the iceberg of the real debate. Two Israeli thinkers – Avishay Ben Haim, a prominent TV journalist and self-styled intellectual and Israeli historian Gadi Taub – who broke through academic walls and became celebrities claim that the deeper question in Israel is who belongs to the elite and who wants to be part of it but is denied access. Their theories differ and even collide at key points, but they both agree on one thing: Those who oppose Netanyahu are trying to preserve the old hegemony. Those who support him seek to enter the Israeli elite.
Haim divides Israeli society into two groups. The “First Israel” is the privileged secular European-oriented group that hates Netanyahu, while members of “Second Israel” – Mizrahi (Eastern) Jews whose religious parents immigrated to Israel from Islamic countries and live in the periphery – adore Bibi. For Ben Haim, the Netanyahu era is not a period of corruption in Israeli politics and the public service, but a democratisation and “mandalisation” instead of Israeli politics. The “First Israel” in his opinion, are simply mourning their lost dominance in the halls of power and influence.
Similar political conclusions follow from Taub’s “Somewheres” and “Anywheres” (in Hebrew “Mobiles” and “Statics”) theory which he has borrowed from the Britisher journalist, David Goodhart. The current elite is cosmopolitan, post-Zionist and ready to turn Israel into a progressive stronghold, deracinated and devoid of any Jewish tradition. Both thinkers claim that their goal is not to help the politician Netanyahu but to change the power relations in Israeli society. In practice, both express complete distrust in Israel’s aggressive justice system and have enthusiastically contributed to Bibi’s narrative since the start of the investigations against him.
However, decades of electoral victories by the Israeli Right have proven woefully inadequate thus far, and the Israeli elite remains very secular, even if they can no longer openly attack religion through state bureaucracy as they did in the first years after Israel’s founding.
If we look at the Israeli hi-tech sector as a test case for the desire to replace Israel’s elites, we can see what a Herculean task this is. The Israeli Defense Forces Intelligence Units are frequently associated with grooming the country’s future tech wizards. ‘8200’ is the largest and most famous among them.
In recent years, demographic data has been published on admittance to unit ‘8200’. The wealthy cities of central Israel – which traditionally vote for Center and Left parties, are represented in this unit three times more than their share of the population. The Israeli periphery, which includes the large Mizrahi population on which Netanyahu bases his political decisions, is underrepresented in elite technological units. While many belonging to this demographic have moved up to become middle class and gained social capital, they are still underrepresented in academia, and professional elites.
Other groups responsible for the technological revolution of the 1990s and the impressive expansion of the hi-tech industry were the immigrants from Russia and Ukraine. Israeli economist Shlomo Maoz rightly claims that the emerging Israeli high-tech industry was greatly boosted by highly educated Russian immigrants, together with skilled IDF veterans.
One million immigrants from the former Soviet Union – 12 per cent of Israel’s population – used to be in Netanyahu’s political camp, but he lost most of them due to his political alliance with the religious parties.
If we look at the political camp led by Netanyahu, it will be difficult to see who will replace the Israeli elite, if the Right-wing front comes to power. A quarter of the front are Ultra-Orthodox Jews, whose legislators are ready to overthrow any government that forces their schools to learn English, Math, and Science. The Ultra-Orthodox schools do not prepare the students for the job market, or for productive interactions with Israelis outside their close-knit communities, let alone for academia and the technological industries.
In practice, most representatives of the Right-wing front in the Israeli elites come from the Religious-Zionist sector, the sector of former PM Naftali Bennett, the man who dethroned Netanyahu. His family immigrated from California, and after high school he served as a commander in Sayeret Matkal, the same commando unit Netanyahu served in. After his service, he became co-founder and CEO of Cyota, which led to a $145 million exit. Many young men in his sector would view him as a paradigmatic new elite.
If we zoom into Right-wing book and journal publishers, Right-wing research and policy institutes, and philanthropy, we will find that the community relies intensively not only on the ideas and money of American Conservatism and Neoconservatism, but much of the local brainpower are Jewish immigrants from North America.
Surprisingly, these upcoming Right-wing thinkers who challenge the hegemony of the old elites, receive hostility bordering on hatred from Ben Haim and Taub. They have an irrevocable sin – “Dermatological Original Sin”, as Evolutionary Psychologist and social critic, professor, Gad Saad, calls it – they are mostly of European origin. Ben Haim and the Netanyahu camp leaders who echo his theory, now voice a newfound venomous resentment of Religious Zionists, which they brand as having “White Privilege” and as sycophants of the old elites. This may have the sole redeeming value of rallying tribal support around Bibi, but it is otherwise a shot aimed squarely at the head of the Right-wing’s only significant pool of qualified intellectual elites.
Ironically, at the bottom line, the forces that seek to bring Bibi back to power – doing so in the name of the sacred calling of replacing the elites – are not at all interested in the existence of any elites in Israel. They have a shallow grasp of the importance of intellectual and technological elites in a country like Israel. Those political thinkers who support Bibi promote an Israel where tribalism, mediocrity, inefficiency, and anti-intellectual suspicion of everything perceived as intellectual are tolerated and cultivated in the name of identity politics and hatred of the Left.
Lev Aran is a former coordinator of the Israel-India Parliamentary Friendship League and an Israel-based freelance columnist and journalist. Yeshaya Rosenman is a freelance journalist and student of Indian Studies and Islamic Studies at Hebrew University. Views are personal.
(Edited by Tarannum Khan)