Israel's Right-wing politics is not all that you think.
The vast majority of Israelis on the Right-wing spectrum are there as a matter of practicality, of survival.
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Much of the international media paints Israel’s current government as “Right-wing” not so much to state a matter of fact, but to subliminally insinuate that there is something flawed and dishonorable about a Right-wing Israeli government.
In reality, Right-wing politics — often associated with conservative ideologies, nationalistic sentiments, and traditional values — vary widely across each country.
While there are common threads that link Right-wing movements worldwide, the context, history, and socio-political landscape of each nation shape these movements in distinct ways.
Israel (with its complex history, diverse population, lack of natural resources, ongoing defensive wars, and geopolitical realities of the Middle East) presents a unique form of Right-wing politics that differs in several critical aspects from Right-wing movements in other countries, particularly those across the Western world.
The first fact of note is that Israel has a variety of Right-wing parties, from more moderate, pragmatic ones like Likud (the party which Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu chairs) to more fanatical parties that advocate for messianism, the biblical Land of Israel, and so forth.
The second fact of note is that, for the first 25 years or so since Israel’s founding in 1948, the country was predominantly run by diehard leftist Zionists who made several mistakes, some happenstance and others more intentional.
For example, the heavily socialist nature of Israel’s economy led to astronomical inflation, first to double digit levels in the early 1970s, to annual rates that averaged 35 percent between 1974 and 1977, then to rates around 125 percent in the early 1980s, and finally to annual rates that peaked at over 450 percent in 1984.
Second, these diehard leftist Zionists were primarily Ashkenazi Jews (of European descent) even though the country was experiencing a major population growth of Middle Eastern Jews.
In part this led to the founding of Likud in 1973 by Menachem Begin and Ariel Sharon, in an alliance with several Right-wing parties. From its establishment, Likud enjoyed great support from blue-collar Middle Eastern Jews who were significantly underrepresented in Israeli politics prior.
Aside from Yemenite Jews and a few others, many Middle Eastern Jewish immigrants and refugees arrived to the State of Israel after its establishment in 1948 — eventually totaling more than 850,000 Jews who either left or were expelled from countries in the Middle East and North Africa.
By 2005, more than 60 percent of Israeli Jews were of full or partial Middle Eastern ethnicity. This percentage is in all likelihood even higher today, mainly due to intermarriages between Middle Eastern and European Israelis.
Upon arrival to Israel, Middle Eastern Jews were typically placed in rudimentary and hastily erected tent cities in developmental towns on the peripheries of Israel (the least-desirable areas), as well as in moshavim (cooperative farming villages). However, many Middle Eastern Jews were craftsmen and merchants, meaning farm work was foreign to them and thus produced minimal socioeconomic rewards for them and their families.
To add insult to injury, the majority of Middle Eastern Jews were forced to leave property and other assets behind in their former countries, leading them to suffer a severe decrease in socioeconomic status in Israel — aggravated by their cultural and political differences with the dominant European Jewish communities.
One of the main differences between Middle Eastern and European Jewish communities in Israel is how they perceive the state. Generally speaking, European Jewish Israelis believe the State of Israel was created in response to relentless Jewish persecution (e.g. the Holocaust) whereas Middle Eastern Israeli Jews perceive the State of Israel as a realization of a millennial dream to return from exile to the Jews’ indigenous homeland, the Land of Zion (Israel).
In other words, many European Jewish Israelis typically define themselves firstly as Israeli and then Jewish, whereas many Middle Eastern Israeli Jews firstly define themselves as Jewish and then Israeli.
Interestingly, the first identifiable Middle Eastern Jewish politics in Israel was on the Left, arising from their initial marginalization within Israeli society. But by 1977, just four years after Likud’s founding, the share of Middle Eastern Jews in the political party’s Central Committee grew from 10 to 50 percent.
As the first political party that truly championed the well-being and upward mobility of Israel’s Middle Eastern Jews, Likud became the de facto party for which many Middle Eastern Jews blindly vote — regardless of who heads it.
That is, a large swath of Likud members vote specifically for the political party and not for its chairman, such as Benjamin Netanyahu. And many of these Middle Eastern Jews have passed down their patronage for Likud to their children who vote the same.
Over time, as Israel’s demographics shifted from a primarily leftist secular society to a more traditionally and religiously Jewish populace (including the rise of Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox Jewish Israelis), Right-wing politics became more ubiquitous, but the original forces at play here were not Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox Jewish Israelis; they were Israel’s disenfranchised and growing Middle Eastern Jewish population.
Finally, the third issue that plagued diehard leftist Zionists who governed early-days Israel was their worldviews regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the greater geopolitical realities of the Middle East.
This came to a head in 1973 when many Israelis believed that their Left-wing government was completely unprepared for the surprise attack launched by an Arab coalition on Yom Kippur (the holiest day in Judaism), leading to significant, unprecedented losses in the first few days of what became known as the Yom Kippur War.
Naturally, being attacked by genocidal Arabs first in 1948 just a few hours after the State of Israel declared its independence, and then again in 1967 and 1973 — not to mention thousands of Arab and Muslim terrorist attacks effectively on a weekly basis — led to a growth in nationalism, which is customary of Right-wing movements across the world.
But in Israel’s case, this is not in any way, shape, or form the same nationalism that has driven Western countries to colonize and settle other territories. Israeli nationalism, by and large, has been a defensive posture rooted in basic survival. As Palestinians and their Arab and Muslim friends continued to wreak havoc on Israeli citizens in the most heinous of ways, Israeli hearts became increasingly hardened with Right-wing beliefs, attitudes, and desires.
The cause-and-effect relationship here cannot be overstated. For example, Israel went on to erect walls and fences to protect its people from virulent, nonstop terrorism emanating out of the Palestinian West Bank and Gaza.
Why?
Because, before these walls and fences existed, Palestinians would freely waltz into Israel to murder Israeli civilians, blow themselves up on packed public buses, kidnap children, and commit other atrocious terrorist attacks intended to create as much physical, emotional, and psychological damage as humanly possible.
The amount of physical, emotional, and psychological trauma that Israelis have endured at the hands of Palestinians and their Arab and Muslim friends — while trying to make peace with them since at least 1937, a good 11 years before the State of Israel’s founding — has convinced many Israelis that building settlements in Judea and Samaria (also known as the West Bank) is a necessary line of first defense for mainland Israel against West Bank Palestinians who are financially incentivized by their own government (the so-called “moderate” Palestinian Authority) to carry out terrorist attacks against Israelis. The worse the attack, the more cash the Palestinian Authority doles out. Hamas, headquartered in Gaza, has a very similar pay-for-slay policy.
Over time, the overwhelming physical, emotional, and psychological trauma that Palestinians and their Arab and Muslim friends continue to gleefully perpetuate has propelled more Israelis (including yours truly) to become more Right-wing — as our hopes of a genuine, peaceful, sustainable two-state solution exponentially evaporate.
October 7th was not some isolated incident; it was just the latest in an endless series of Jew-hating, genocidal assaults that are regularly celebrated across the Palestinian Territories and its diaspora, as well as the so-called Arab and Muslim worlds.
No doubt, Israeli society has an “ugly” side of extremists whose hate for Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims has nothing to do with everything I wrote above. But, in my experience living in Israel since 2013, I can confidently tell you that this “ugly” side of Israeli society is minimal. Indeed, every country has an “ugly” side of its society, and if we judged every country by its “ugly” side, the entire world would be terribly rotten.
In Israel, the vast majority of people on the Right-wing spectrum (which is very long in Israeli politics) are there as a matter of practicality, of survival. Knowing all we know today about the Palestinians’ Jihadist sponsors in Qatar and the Islamic Republic of Iran, as well as Palestinians’ antisemitic propaganda that makes Nazi Germany seem decent, it is purely self-defeating to be a leftist in Israel, so long as you believe that Jews deserve the same self-determination in our indigenous homeland as any other group of people deserves in theirs.
Ironically, many of those who wail and scream about “indigenous” and “native” rights in places like the United States, Canada, South Africa, and Australia seem to forget that the Jews were in present-day Israel thousands of years before these countries even existed as a figment of one’s imagination.
I understand that, at least on the surface, many liberals have a hard time understanding Right-wing Israel, but hopefully this essay shows that Right-wing Israel is not remotely the same as Right-wing America, Canada, Europe, or Australia. To judge Israel through the Right-wing lens of another country is like judging coffee through the lens of tea even though both contain caffeine.
Does Jewish self-determination in our indigenous homeland contradict Palestinian self-determination? Not really. There is plenty of land in the Middle East for those who want to share it with the Jews, one state for us in present-day Israel and another state for whomever wants it alongside the Jewish one.
Let’s not forget that every single Arab and Muslim-majority country which desires peace with Israel has received it in earnest (the latest example being Indonesia).
There are those who are overly sympathetic to the so-called Palestinian plight, as if the Palestinians are the world’s collective 4-year-old child, incapable of agency, compromise, and critical thinking. These people wonder aloud why the Jews and Palestinians cannot just share one state for two peoples, as if asking us Jews to comprise a Jewish majority in our own state will not destroy Jewish self-determination.
The Jewish argument against one state for two peoples is simple: This approach is literally the definition of Jewish suicide, since the Palestinians would purposefully yield more children to — under the banner of “democracy” — overpower the Jews and nefariously rule over us, which would spell Jewish doom with a capital D.
And yet, when you explain this reality to some people, they oftentimes call you “Right-wing” as if there is something inherently flawed and dishonorable with this label.
I think I can speak for a healthy majority of Israelis when I say that I’d rather be alive with the “Right-wing” image than dead and pitied.
A truly well written piece. Every single pundit on Israel should be required to read the historical facts here.
Thanks for providing such a well done explanation. I hope this helps people on the outside understand the situation more.