A new coalition has brought extremist politics into the mainstream, but undemocratic strains go back to the country’s founding.
By Isaac Chotiner
Several months ago, the most right-wing government in Israel’s history took power. Led by Benjamin Netanyahu, the coalition has put forward legislation that severely limits the powers of the judiciary. For several weeks, tens of thousands of protesters have gathered in Tel Aviv and other cities to rally against what they view as a grave risk to their democratic institutions. At the same time, the government is overseeing—and encouraging—brutal attacks by settlers on Palestinians. (At least fourteen Israelis and more than sixty Palestinians have been killed since the fighting flared this year.) Even a pretense of pursuing peace seems to have evaporated; the new government has announced “guidelines” declaring its intent to “advance and develop settlement in all parts of the land of Israel.” Netanyahu, despite being a paragon of the Israeli right, is now more moderate than most of his cabinet, which is full of extremists such as Itamar Ben-Gvir, the national-security minister, and Bezalel Smotrich, the finance minister who has been given a role supervising settlement policy. (My colleague Ruth Margalit recently profiled Ben-Gvir for the magazine.)
To understand what is happening in Israel and what the protests mean for its political future, I recently spoke by phone with Dahlia Scheindlin, an analyst and policy fellow at Century International, and also a columnist for Haaretz. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed why the different strains of the Israeli right joined forces in the latest government, the distinct threats that the government poses to the country’s democratic norms, and how much of Israel’s current course was inevitable in light of its failure to end the occupation.
What do you think is happening today in Israel? How would you describe it?
I think of it as the culmination of long-term forces that have created deep weaknesses and flaws in Israeli democracy, to the point of them being structural flaws. The structure has never been strong, and has always been compromised. But, during the last decade, we saw an acceleration of very anti-democratic trends, both in legislation and in a deepening of the occupation. What we’re seeing now has completely burst the banks. The government is waging an all-systems assault on the judiciary first, but also numerous other areas of Israeli society.
What are the long-term and short-term causes of this “all-systems assault”?
The immediate ones are the confluence of interests between a Prime Minister who needs to undermine Israel’s democratic institutions, particularly law enforcement, because he’s trying to weaken the corruption cases against him and because he wants to stay in power. To do that, he has to legitimize other political allies, who are either corrupt themselves and need the kind of legislation that helps keep corrupt people in power, which would require weakening the courts, or he simply needs to give them what they want for their own agenda. These are short-term political interests that he has because of his situation, combined with what I consider much deeper commitments to the ideological agendas of his coalition partners.
The ideological agendas of his coalition partners are very clear. They want a more religious and theocratic society. They want complete and permanent control over as much of the West Bank as they can have, and they want Israel to retain effective control over the perimeters of Gaza. They don’t ever want there to be Palestinian self-determination. They believe in Biblically granted Jewish sovereignty. And they also believe that Jews should be the privileged class in Israel and have higher status. They’re simply not as committed to citizen equality, and they’re happy to weaken the already weak basis for citizen equality among Israelis. The three major ideological goals of the coalition partners are: annexations, theocracy, and inequality. Combine that with Netanyahu’s expedient need to legitimize corruption, which requires weakening the judiciary. It’s a perfect storm.
I want to make it clear that I do not think that Likud is off the hook for these ideological commitments, either. Likud has made a firm decision as to which of its values to prioritize. Likud, historically, was a party that wanted Greater Israel, like most of the parties that have governed the country, but it combined that with aspects of a liberal party and liberal democratic values. [“Greater Israel” refers to the idea that Israel’s borders would include all of the territory where Palestinians currently live.] Netanyahu essentially nurtured the forces that abandoned liberal values. And then Likud, under his leadership, became a party that has committed itself to undermining anything such as compromising on a partition of the land, or Palestinian statehood. He’s made it very clear, and his own party made a resolution in 2017, that they support annexation of settlements in parts of the West Bank. There is not any sense that Israel shouldn’t be governing another population, and undermining their self-determination. And a number of figures within Likud that Netanyahu has actively supported and nurtured have made common cause with the most illiberal, populist kinds of policies and legislative agendas. Again, I think it’s because it’s served him. In the past, he could position himself as somebody who restrained those forces by convincing everybody that he balanced a hard-line nationalism with a tempering commitment to liberal democracy.
If we’re talking about long-term causes, is Israeli democracy internally being eroded directly because of the occupation? Do all these forces arise because of an inability or an unwillingness by Israel to fundamentally make peace and end the occupation?
The occupation certainly has caused one of the biggest contradictions to democracy. It was inevitable, as some predicted early on, that it would undermine the democratic foundations of Israel. Having said that, I’ve been researching this because I’m finishing a book right now on the history of Israeli democracy, and one of my major observations and conclusions is that the problems with democracy in Israel started long before the occupation. The most accessible example is the fact that Israel was unable to pass a constitution, which it was required to do under U.N. Resolution 181, known as the partition plan of 1947. Israel committed itself to that, in its own declaration of independence.
Based on my reading of the historic documentation, I have very little doubt that the country intended to, that the leadership intended to, but they were unable to. And the reason they were unable to was a combination of undemocratic forms of governance that David Ben-Gurion [Israel’s first Prime Minister] preferred at the time and an unwillingness to antagonize and risk losing the participation of the ultra-Orthodox parties in the coalition. There was no other option, because they weren’t willing to allow Arabs full legitimate political representation at the time—not in the form of their own political parties and certainly not in the governing coalition. They never even had an independent Arab party in the governing coalition until a year ago.
I don’t want to say that all of the problems are caused by the failure to write and ratify a constitution, but it is indicative, and it was a reflection of these completely unresolved problems that are essentially a lack of commitment to the idea of civic equality—equality between all citizens—which to this day is not guaranteed by any primary legislation. We have lots of legislation that provides for specific forms of equality, such as gender equality, and workplace equality—very nice things. Most of those equalities depend on the Supreme Court. That is indicative. We’re nearly seventy-five years old, and we still don’t have anything like a regular law that says all citizens in Israel are equal. That problem goes back to the founding of the state. It’s a problem of preferring to have disproportionate power for a minority of religious Israeli Jews because nobody would consider Arabs as equal political partners. It means that you’re giving disproportionate political authority to people who don’t accept specific principles.
When I said “the occupation,” I think I should have spoken more broadly—I didn’t just mean the occupation that began two decades after the founding of the state, but the larger issue of non-Jews who share the land that is Israel and the West Bank and Gaza.
But that’s a good question—would I call Israel within the Green Line an occupation? Probably not. I would say that it is the sovereign territory that was given to Israel during the partition plan. But the problem of democracy was there. [“The Green Line” refers to the country’s borders before 1967, which excluded the West Bank and Gaza.]
Does the current governing coalition represent the future of the right in Israel? In countries all over the world, we’ve seen insurgent, ultranationalist types take over the traditional right-wing or center-right party, as in the United States, or different parties replace the traditional right-wing or center-right party, as in France. All of the energy and voter enthusiasm on the right seems to be for these new groupings or these new faces in the old parties. Is this new type of right-winger the future of the Israeli right?
That is the key question. Right now, as you point out, all the momentum has been for the populist versions. Avigdor Lieberman—we don’t think about him too much now. He’s kind of quiet these days. But, in 2009, he ran what I would consider to be the first really populist illiberal campaign in Israel. Even compared to [Menachem] Begin, under Likud in 1977, it was different. He ran on a slogan that said “no loyalty, no citizenship,” with relation to the Arab population. He got fifteen seats, and he got way beyond the Soviet-immigrant vote for the only time in his history. And the bulk of those were siphoned directly off of Likud. Ever since, Likud has run in an equally populist direction. But basically the populist right didn’t start with Likud. And it didn’t even start with religious Zionism, with the really messianic forces that we’re seeing now in office. It started with secular right-wingers. Depending on how you characterize each party, there are even more populist versions of right-wing parties in Israel today than are in the governing coalition. The government holds sixty-four seats, to which you can add Lieberman, who got six. [The Knesset has a hundred and twenty seats total.]
So the thing that you’re talking about—I think it’s already happened. It’s exactly what Likud has been winning on: a very populist, very illiberal outrage-and-victim narrative. They’ve been doing that pretty much throughout the past decade, and it’s worked up until coalition politics messed it all up in 2019.
I’m wondering, then—what distinctions were you trying to draw between Netanyahu and the far right?
The only distinction I was drawing were the immediate causes. The immediate cause is that Netanyahu, more than anything else, needs to stay in power and weaken the cases against him. I think he’s less driven by the fundamental, visceral hostility against the Israeli judiciary that the far-right parties represent. People always ask me, and, to your credit, you have not asked this yet, “What does he really want? Is he really committed ideologically to undermine the judiciary, or to annexation?” I’m happy you haven’t asked because my answer is always “I don’t care what he wants in his heart of hearts. He’s the Prime Minister. I only care what he does.”
For a decade, he essentially held back the forces that were rearing to undercut the judiciary. In 2015, he did install Ayelet Shaked, the minister of justice, whose entire political program was basically what we’re seeing now, even though it wasn’t as extreme. Netanyahu held it back because he didn’t have a personal interest—he had more of an interest in showing that he could kind of hold it back. Then, when he got indicted, he completely slipped and threw his entire weight—not only his political weight but his narrative weight, his charismatic weight, his cult-of-personality weight—behind the attack on the judiciary.
I’ve seen polls that seem to suggest that a majority of the country is not in favor of these changes to the judiciary. Could this actually set the right wing back if it mobilizes a new coalition?
Netanyahu is such a savvy politician. He surely knew there was going to be resistance to this. But I wonder if even he underestimated the strength of the resistance, and that even parts of the right are against these changes. He should not have been surprised. I’m a pollster. I’ve been tracking this issue for years. There was always about a fifth of right-wingers who were not happy with the attacks on the judiciary and wanted to maintain judicial independence. An even greater percentage regularly say that they want to retain judicial review of legislation. He should have known. But these policies are on the table. Every single poll has been frankly a disaster for the government. It’s a train wreck in terms of polling. How much they actually care, I don’t know.
It depends on which poll you grab, but the best ones I’ve seen, and even the most diverse questions that get at the issue, show that between fifty-five and sixty per cent either don’t support what’s happening or would like it to not happen in this way, procedurally. Too fast, too extreme, not enough consensus, et cetera. Despite the government’s ten-year campaign to do this, to lay the groundwork for this, the majority of Israelis insist on not being for it, at least not the way it’s happening now. And then of course there’s big, public protest. I do think that it’ll have political ramifications, but we’re in uncharted territory.
This hasn’t been tested before. We haven’t been through a situation where in real life there is such a significant threat to the fundamental institutions that have advanced democratic values in Israel. I have a hard time these days saying “Israeli democracy,” but there are democratic institutions and democratic practices in Israel, and the government is going so fast and so far not to just undermine but to destroy them. There is an opportunity to make common cause between the conservative-pragmatic right, or whatever you want to call it; the center; the left, who are completely committed to salvaging these institutions; and the Arab Palestinian citizens of Israel who understand, even with all their frustrations with the Court, its importance. That could eke out something like a majority in the next election. But who knows when those elections will be, how much damage will be done before then, and whether those opposition parties could ever get it together.
Before this government, there was a ruling coalition composed of Arab parties and anti-Netanyahu factions of the right. It didn’t work, and it seemed politically unstable. More crucially, it seems that such a coalition won’t be able to stop the long-term trends in Israeli society that got us here.
Absolutely right. In Israel, broad coalitions with shades of ideology do not seem to do very well. Obviously, it’s partially because their ideological differences are very fundamental. So that was just one example. The other great example was the Ehud Barak coalition, which was huge, and had seven parties. It also collapsed after about a year. On the other hand, who knows? Anything is possible. And, by the way, before the previous government collapsed, it was quite productive. They passed a lot of legislation, they passed the budget, they made a lot of policy changes, they were able to get a lot of stuff done. So it’s not impossible that they could learn some lessons and try to do it again, especially if they have a slightly bigger majority, which I think they would need because Netanyahu was able to pick them apart with very simple political strategies, because they were so slim.
Given the demographic trends that favor the right wing, is the Israeli public a lost cause? It’s a very important question. Within the Jewish population, young people are more right-wing. The religious communities are obviously growing much faster than the secular communities. Religious communities in Israel are invariably far more right-wing; I call it the iron law of Israeli public opinion. So all trends should be favoring more right-wing approaches. One thing we have to take into account is that, although I’ve been suffering with the sense that the government’s been undermining the judiciary for ten years, many Israelis seem to be just realizing it now. I’m not saying I knew better than them. I do this for a living, and they don’t. People are busy; people are overworked, underpaid. Cost of living is prohibitive and suffocating, and most people just are distracted. But I think now there’s a real sense of urgency.
It is deepening a conversation within the right that has not really been very common in the past. There are right-wing conservatives in Israel who support a strong Jewish identity, but they don’t reject the idea that all citizens need to be equal. And they have traditionally been supportive of even specifically liberal institutions, such as the judiciary. I think we’re at the very early stages of seeing some kind of grassroots movement.
Right, but unless those same forces begin to question the fundamental issues that have been there since Israel’s founding, it does feel like all of this stuff is going to go unresolved.
You are right. I think the main reason Israel did not get the constitution was Ben-Gurion’s particular need to govern without constraints. But the fundamental lack of willingness to commit to equality of all citizens, basic civil liberties, and political rights for all is at the heart of this. Is there a right wing that is now asking itself, Wait a second, how do we preserve a liberal constitutional order, and individual rights? . . . Personally, by the way, I think it can be done. I mean this maybe makes me sound like a liberal Zionist, but I do think countries can establish a national identity while also naming equality for all citizens, naming the national minorities, naming the policies they’re going to put into action—sometimes in their own constitution—in ways that are much more expressive of that commitment. Israel can do that. It just has refused to. So instead of committing to anything it commits to nothing.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Palestinian Media Center In Europe.
Source: The New Yorker
