From behind the thick stone walls of Jerusalem’s Mercaz HaRav seminary, late one November night in 1947, rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook watched the birth of his nation and sorrowed. Far away in New York’s Flushing Meadow, the United Nations General Assembly had voted to partition Mandatory Palestine into new Jewish and Arab States. In Tel Aviv, jubilant Jews celebrated on the streets. The cleric did not join them. “They divided my land,” Kook would later write. “Where is each clod of dirt, each piece of the Lord’s land?”
Last week, the political heirs of Kook’s vision—of Israel as a messianic project to enable Jewish victory over their historic enemies, the Amalek, and the establishment of the Third Temple in Jerusalem—stormed to power in a general election that could reshape the country.
Elected prime minister at the head of a coalition dominated by the religious Right-wing, the return of the scandal-tainted Benjamin Netanyahu has sparked fears among liberal Israelis that the country has lost a fateful battle for its soul. Though claims that Israel will dissolve into an authoritarian theocracy might prove overblown, coalition partners are vowing to embed religion deeper into Israeli civic life and limit the rights of women and LGBTQ+ citizens. Liberal Israel seems set to become much more like its illiberal Middle-East neighbours.
Far-Right leaders like Religious Zionism chief Itamar Ben-Gvir—who is demanding to be made public security minister—have called for “disloyal” Arab citizens to be expelled from Israel. Fifteen years ago, Ben Gvir was convicted of inciting racism and supporting Kach—a terrorist organisation that sought to transform Israel into a theocratic State. Kach sought to ban Jews from marrying Arabs, and even segregate them on beaches.
Last year, Ben-Gvir mobilised against Palestinians resisting eviction from their homes in East Jerusalem and appeared alongside Jewish vigilantes during riots in 2021. At one recent rally, young Ben-Gvir supporters raised a racist chant directed at Arabs: “Your village should burn.”
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The birth of Israel’s far-Right
Like so many 20th-century nationalist movements, Zionism drew inspiration from eclectic ideological tendencies—including the European Right-wing. Led by ideologues like Uri Zvi Greenberg, Abba Achimeir and Yehoshua Heshel Yevin, the Zionist far-Right held that Imperial Britain had betrayed its 1917 promise to support “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” For the Right, independence could only be seized through armed struggle—as it had been in Ireland, Italy and Poland.
The Zionists of the far-Right, author Ehud Sprinzak has argued, imagined the foundations for armed struggle to lie deep in Jewish history. The cause of Israel involved “a romantic glorification of the old days of blood, soil, heroism, and conquest.”
For Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky, founder of the influential Betar youth movement—a revisionist Zionist campaign—this meant the cultivation of a militaristic culture, through pilgrimages to ancient battlefields like Massada and Tel Hai. Faced with the implosion of eastern European democracies, many young Zionists turned to successful ethnic-nationalist movements sweeping the region for inspiration.
The east European youth cohort drawn into Betar, author and professor Daniel K. Heller writes, “embraced a range of convictions and values that they themselves described as Fascist.” The Israel they sought could only be forged from “a total ideology, covering all aspects of human experience, to inspire personal sacrifice and instil discipline, order, and unity.”
Elements of the Zionist far-Right—among them the paramilitary leader Abraham Stern—were even seduced by their belief that national renewal could only be forged through blood and fire into a bizarre attempt to seek an alliance with the Axis powers, led by Nazi Germany.
For most of the Zionist movement’s early years, though, these tendencies were largely irrelevant. Following the formation of Israel, Left-leaning Labour Zionism condemned the Right to the margins—charging it, among other things, of collaborating with Fascism.
Through the 1950s, far-Right groups like Brith HaKanaim, or the Covenant of Zealots, as well as Machteret Malchut Yisrael and the Kingdom of Israel Underground, did conduct terrorist attacks—among other things, attacking non-kosher butcher shops, burning cars driven on the Sabbath and more seriously, bombing the Soviet consulate in Tel Aviv. Israel’s domestic intelligence services, researchers Ami Pedahzur and Arie Perliger have recorded, largely succeeded in crushing the threat.
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The turn to terror
Following the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, the politician—and one-time terrorist—Menachem Begin emerged at the centre stage of Israeli politics, arguing for territorial compromise with the Arabs. Following decades in the wilderness, Begin was elected prime minister in 1977. He promised more Jewish settlements on occupied territories. The religious Right cheered. “The Arabs had, and have, absolutely no national right to the land,” the cleric Kook argued. “If they deny the justice of our cause we must persuade them with our tanks.”
In September 1978, though, Begin signed the historic Camp David peace accord, returning the Sinai to Egypt, and promising autonomy for Palestinians in the West Bank.
The peace deal ended up re-energising the radical Right in Israel. A new generation of young activists, for whom Israel was not just a nation-State to be defended but a messianic project, challenged the Camp David agreement on the streets.
Led most visibly by the American-born orthodox cleric Meir David HaKohen Kahane and his Kach party, the far-Right cast Begin as a traitor. Kahane, professor Shaul Magid has written, argued that Israel’s constitution, which promised equal rights to residents of the Jewish State irrespective of race or religion, was unacceptable. Equality for Arabs, he suggested, would inexorably undermine its Jewish character. Following the peace deal, Kahane’s increasingly-express racism fuelled ugly clashes between his followers and Palestinians.
Followers of the settlement movement Gush Emunim went even further, attempting to assassinate the Arab mayors of three West Bank cities in 1980, staging a shooting at an Islamic college three years later, and plotting to bomb Arab commuters in 1984. The group was also found to be planning to blow up the Dome of the Rock on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, the third most sacred place in Islam.
The Begin government—determined not to resile on its Camp David promises—dug in. In 1982, tens of thousands of troops were ordered to remove Jewish settlements in Sinai, in the face of fierce resistance from the religious Right. Twelve Kahane followers locked themselves in an underground shelter filled with gas tanks, threatening mass suicide. Elsewhere, radicals considered armed resistance.
Kahane’s organisation was barred from running for Israel’s parliament in 1988. The far-Right was again consigned to the margins—but not for long. Another peace deal—the Oslo Agreements of 1993, which saw then Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin recognise the Palestine Liberation Organisation—would again revive the far-Right.
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The normalisation of hate
Figures like Ben-Gvir—who as a teenager appeared on television threatening to kill Rabin just weeks before the Prime Minister was assassinated by a zealot—seemed to represent a lunatic fringe. Then chairman of the Likud party, Netanyahu sensed a seismic shift was underway in Israeli politics. The ultra-orthodox Haredi community—undereducated and underemployed—was growing into a powerful electoral block. Likud leaders largely distanced themselves from the hate polemic targeting Rabin. Netanyahu did not.
Likud had risen to power on the back of votes from Middle Eastern and North African Jews who, author Zachary Harris notes, had been consigned to Israel’s developmental and geographical margins. Prime Minister Begin positioned himself as a defender of their values, against those of elite urban liberals.
This anti-elite posture would be transformed by Netanyahu into a new kind of religion-powered populism. Through his years in office, Netanyahu normalised extremism. Former minister Avigdor Lieberman proposed shifting Israeli Arabs into Palestinian territories. Former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett—then a Netanyahu ally—called for annexing parts of the West Bank.
Ethno-religious chauvinism was given legitimacy by Netanyahu’s support of the so-called National State Law of 2018, which elevated Jewish collective rights over individual political rights conferred as a matter of citizenship. The law, authors and researchers Julius Rogenhofer and Ayala Panievsky write, marked a major shift from Israel’s long-standing commitment to liberal-democratic norms.
Israel is, in many senses, more secure than at any point in its past. The country has crushed Islamic Jihad in Gaza, and successfully hunted down the perpetrators of terrorist attacks. The Abraham Accords with the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Bahrain and Morocco have prepared the grounds for a wider stabilisation of relations with the Arab world. Lebanon has just signed a maritime cooperation agreement, and key rival Iran remains internationally isolated.
The flowering of Israel’s new ethnoreligious politics will jeopardise these gains. Ever more embittered since that November night partition in 1947, Palestinians are now living what the scholar Oren Yiftachel has called a state of “creeping apartheid.” The promise of a two-State solution, involving a sovereign Israel and Palestine, died years ago. The rise of the Right also renders impossible a secular bi-nationalism, allowing Israelis and Palestinians to co-exist in one State.
Israel’s election will perpetuate the long, grinding conflict that has claimed so many of the country’s people.
The author is National Security Editor, ThePrint. He tweets @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Zoya Bhatti)