The Israeli Political Moment, Part 1: Why “Left vs. Right” No Longer Makes Sense
The Israeli Political Moment, Part 1: Why “Left vs. Right” No Longer Makes Sense
by Paul Gross
When we analyze the politics of other countries, we have a natural tendency to copy and paste the political map of our own nation and place it onto a different one. Sometimes this is actually helpful. Growing up in the UK, I found that understanding the Conservative Party and the Labour Party as roughly analogous to the Republicans and the Democrats, respectively, was a useful shortcut for coming to grips with American politics.
But not all countries’ political maps can be so straightforwardly aligned. For one thing, party names can cause confusion. In Australia—which closely follows the British political model, with two main parties—there is the left/center-left Labor Party. But Australia’s center-right party, its conservative party, is called “the Liberal Party.” A tricky one for Americans in particular, where “liberal” has been synonymous with the center-left ever since FDR redefined the term to include not just negative rights such as the freedom of speech and of religion, but also freedom from want and fear.
When it comes in particular to Israel, the country I have called home for the past seventeen years, this kind of copying and pasting is a fool’s errand. For one thing, voters in Israel do not choose between two parties, as in the United States, or between three or four, as in the UK. An Israeli voter walks into the voting booth on election day and is confronted with perhaps twenty or thirty options—little slips of paper with different letters, each representing a different party (there’s no electronic voting in Israel). Many parties do not get anywhere near the 3.75 percent of the vote required to be represented in the 120-seat Knesset. Today’s Knesset, elected in November 2022, contains twelve parties: six are from the governing coalition (though, to confuse things further, three of them ran effectively as one party in the election), while six sit in the official opposition.
And that’s another reason why the copying and pasting doesn’t work. Israeli governments are always coalitions. No single party has ever received close to the 61 Knesset seats required to attain a majority by itself. Although today’s government under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is sometimes referred to as “far-right,” the novelty is actually that it is only “right.” Almost every other supposedly “right-wing” Israeli government, including all of Netanyahu’s previous coalitions, has contained parties from the center or the left, which often supplied highly influential ministers, such as Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni from the centrist Kadima or Defense Minister Ehud Barak from the Labor Party.
But there is another, deeper reason why it is more of a hindrance than a help to attempt to understand Israeli politics by thinking about “left” and “right” in the American or European sense of those words. In the Israeli context, these terms came to mean something quite different than their use elsewhere.
At the conclusion of Israel’s War of Independence in 1949, its Arab citizens, though afforded most of the same rights as their Jewish counterparts, had their freedom restricted. Their villages were placed under military administration, with a curfew enforced every night. This discriminatory measure was imposed by the left-wing government of Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and vehemently opposed by the main opposition party, the right-wing Herut, led by Menachem Begin.
This sounds counterintuitive, but it makes sense in the context of the political constellation of Israel’s early decades. The left, led by Ben-Gurion and his successors Levi Eshkol and Golda Meir, was socialist. The right, led by Begin, was liberal—in the classical, not contemporary American, sense of the word. The socialist left believed in a strong state with powers sometimes bordering on the authoritarian; the liberal right believed that the government was subservient to the civil rights of every individual. “In the beginning, God created the individual,” quipped Ze’ev Jabotinsky, Begin’s mentor and the intellectual father of what became the Israeli right.
After Begin finally won an election in 1977 and removed much of the central planning and other trappings of a socialist state, “left” and “right” in Israel began to mean something else entirely. The Labor Party broadly accepted the new economic dispensation that Begin ushered in. Perhaps uniquely among developed democracies, James Carville’s maxim “It’s the economy, stupid” was almost irrelevant for Israeli elections at this time. The new Israeli divide, as the 1980s progressed, centered on the future of the territories conquered by Israel in the Six-Day War of 1967: as the left became increasingly disillusioned with the status quo of military occupation, the right was determined, for either ideological or security-minded reasons, to hold onto the West Bank and Gaza.
The election of a Labor-led coalition under Yitzhak Rabin in 1992 was the first out-and-out Labor victory since the party was ousted by Begin’s Likud fifteen years earlier. The Oslo Accords, signed between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization—until then, a proscribed terrorist organization under Israeli law—promised peace. Its failure to deliver culminated in the collapse of last-ditch attempts to resolve the conflict at the end of the year 2000, just as fading hopes that the Oslo process could be rescued were about to be incinerated in the inferno of the so-called “Second Intifada”—actually a four-year war by Palestinian terrorists, waged largely by suicide bombers against civilians.
This was the one-two knockout punch for the Israeli left: Yasser Arafat’s rejection of a peace proposal that would have created a Palestinian state in Gaza and ninety-five percent of the West Bank, followed by the ex-guerilla fighter’s return to mass-casualty terror. The left had won support based on a pledge of “security through peace.” Instead, the reliance on Arafat as a peace partner led to the worst security crisis for Israeli citizens in the country’s history, with buses, cafés, and nightclubs being blown up in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv on a weekly basis. Ehud Barak, the Labor prime minister who had attempted to sign an end-of-conflict agreement with the Palestinian leader, returned from Camp David declaring famously, in Hebrew, “ein partner”—there is no partner. The optimism of Oslo was replaced with a grim consensus that united the vindicated peace-skeptics with mugged-by-reality peaceniks: peace with the Palestinians was not possible for a generation or two. And the left crumbled. Barak lost his bid for re-election in 2001, and there has not been another prime minister from the Labor Party to this day.
So has the right been dominant ever since? Not quite. Centrist parties, two in particular, have offered competition to the Likud; and perhaps more significantly, the left-right fault line relating to territory, peace, and a Palestinian state has ceased to be an electoral issue for the past fifteen years. Its electoral centrality was replaced first by socioeconomic issues, and then by a debate around good governance and alleged corruption following criminal charges brought against Prime Minister Netanyahu.
Since then, centrist parties have been a notable feature of the Israeli political landscape. Most have lasted no more than one Knesset term before dissolving. The two exceptions both emerged in the last twenty years. The first, Kadima, positioned itself between Likud and Labor, and it explicitly focused on the Israeli-Palestinian issue. In the wake of the disengagement from Gaza in 2005, with a majority of his Likud partyopposed to this radical departure from its traditional territorially maximalist policy, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon needed an alternative vehicle with which to run in the coming elections—and to further his agenda of continued unilateral withdrawal from territory claimed by the Palestinians. He brought with him to Kadima not only fellow Likudniks but also several senior figures from the Labor Party, including the veteran former prime minister, Shimon Peres.
Sharon’s ostensibly timely innovation was created as a single-issue party. He had determined that the left’s analysis of the need to separate from the Palestinians and end Israel’s rule over them was correct, but so too was the right’s distrust of the Palestinian leadership. The solution was therefore for Israel to decide on its own what its borders should be and to withdraw to those lines, evacuating settlements that would no longer be in Israeli-controlled territory. This was, as it transpired, a solution that foundered on the rocks of reality. The Likud returned to power within three years, proven right in their assessment that the vacuum left by Israeli withdrawal would be filled not by Jeffersonian democrats but by Islamist terrorists. 2006 saw Israel attacked by Hamas and Hezbollah, from two areas, Gaza and South Lebanon, respectively, that the IDF had vacated.
Kadima had hoped to triangulate between the traditional Labor and Likud positions. Yet after some initial success, winning twenty-nine and twenty-eight seats in its first two elections, it had collapsed to just two seats by election number three. Today it exists only as a historic footnote: the first party from outside the Labor/Likud duopoly to lead a government.
The second centrist party of note to come along was quite different and reflected the move away from the Palestinian question as the central political fault line. Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid (“There is a future”) entered the Knesset in 2012, and it remains a force in Israeli politics, currently leading the official opposition in the Knesset. Lapid was briefly prime minister, as part of an unusually diverse coalition that governed from June 2021 until December 2022.
Yesh Atid explicitly defines itself as a centrist party, with “centrism” as a distinct sensibility, or, in Lapid’s words, “a movement.” Not a point roughly equidistant between left and right, but “the unequivocal decision of my companions and I to refuse to concede ground to the complexity of our Jewish and democratic state and of our nationaland liberal identity” (italics mine). His centrism is not only not leftism; he is quite deliberately invoking the ideology of what became the Israeli right: the “liberal nationalism” of Jabotinsky and Begin. Though sounding like a contradiction in terms to modern ears, it can also be rendered more palatably as liberal patriotism: as solidarity—embracing the history, customs, and culture that unite a nation—mutually reinforced by liberal values and institutions guaranteeing individual rights and the rule of law.
In framing his party’s centrism this way, Lapid not only defines his agenda but also hints at the change I identified earlier. Because the best way to understand the political divide in Israel today is not as left vs. right but rather as liberal nationalism vs. conservative nationalism, or National Conservatism. Or as a split between those who wish to preserve the founding Zionist idea of a liberal democratic Jewish nation-state and those who believe that liberalism has taken the country too far away from both Judaism and a more uncompromising brand of Jewish nationalism.
For this second group, a “Jewish and democratic state” is ideally one in which democracy is expressed purely in the system of electing the government; it has no claim on the values of the state or society. Those values are drawn from Jewish religion and tradition, and they should not be diluted by secular liberalism. This formulation has been behind what amounts to a stealth revolution on the Israeli right over the past decade; a push for change led by Yariv Levin, an unassuming Likud Knesset member and minister, whose agenda was initially blocked by Benjamin Netanyahu.
In 2018, however, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister threw his support behind the most illiberal version of the proposed Nation-State Law, a new quasi-constitutional Basic Law. The drafters of this law pitched it as the preamble to a future Israeli constitution, with an opening declarative statement defining “what the state of Israel is,” to supersede Israel’s Declaration of Independence. And while that 1948 founding document promises to “ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; [and] guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture,” the Nation-State Law (full name: “Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People”) pointedly changes Arabic from an official language to one merely granted special status, and omits any mention of “equality” or “democracy” alongside its multiple emphases on the state’s Jewish character. Levin, the principal ideologue behind this legislation, boasted afterward of his achievement in resisting pressure from other legislators to include the word “equality” in the final draft.
Those of us paying attention noticed this quiet drive on the right getting louder. Netanyahu, who learned liberal nationalism from his father, a one-time aide to Jabotinsky, had reassured the judiciary that “every time something arrives on my desk that threatens the independence of Israeli courts, I will block it.” But as the corruption charges against him became indictments, and then scheduled court hearings, he allowed the Likud to be hijacked by Levin and the post-liberals. Upon winning Israel’s most recent election, in December 2022, he formed a coalition with parties explicitly opposed to the classical, liberal-national definition of the Zionist project. He appointed Levin as justice minister, empowered at last to take a sledgehammer to judicial independence, and proposed a series of “reforms” designed to remove any real checks and balances on the power of the government (in American parlance, the executive branch).
These reforms were frustrated, so far at least, by a mass uprising of ordinary Israelis. The government and its supporters insisted on referring to these protestors as “leftists,” as did foreign media; in fact, the weekly mass demonstrations and civil action campaigns fell under a big tent, including centrists and old-fashioned liberal rightists,including many prominent former Likudniks.
In today’s Knesset, the old left, defined by its prioritizing of a land-for-peace deal with the Palestinians, is currently represented by the Labor Party’s four seats. The rest of the parliamentary opposition to Netanyahu’s religious-nationalist-conservative government is comprised of two Arab parties (ten seats) and both center and center-right parties opposing the post-liberal direction of the current government. At the time of this writing, a center-right party made up entirely of former Likudniks opposed to its new orientation is on the verge of joining the coalition in the name of “national unity.” Notably however, it is retaining its opposition to the judicial “reform” proposals and has been assured of the right to continue to vote against those measures.
Since the horrors of October 7, 2023, these issues have understandably taken a back seat in the public discourse. The pressing need to defeat Hamas, Hezbollah, and their Iranian sponsor has taken center stage. Nevertheless, the return in recent months to massive anti-government protests, ostensibly about Netanyahu’s alleged sabotaging of a hostage deal, also reflects the deeper political divide that predates this current crisis. Whether the divide endures beyond the political life of the current prime minister remains to be seen, but we will not quickly be returning to the old “left-right” divide.
October 7 has only pushed more Israelis away from the leftist agenda of urgently moving toward a two-state solution with the Palestinians. According to polls, if an election were held today, the only possible coalition would be one dominated by liberal nationalist, centrist, and right-wing parties. Netanyahu’s Likud and the ultra-Orthodox and far-right parties that make up his current coalition would all be sitting in the parliamentary opposition. If Netanyahu were to resign (or be forced out) and the Likud reverted to its previous, liberal incarnation, the Likud would also be part of this center/right coalition.
At present, the general perception of Israel is that it’s an increasingly “right-wing” society. This is not quite right. It has certainly become not left-wing, as I’ve discussed. It is a hawkish society, unwilling to take the additional risks for peace that many of our friends say we must, because we’ve had our fingers burned once too often: in the flames of the Second Intifada and, more recently, in the hell of Hamas’s medieval barbarism. Israeli society believes in a strong military because without one we would simply not survive in this part of the world. It is also a society where religion is more important to more people than in most Western countries; because we’re patriotic, and (for Israel’s Jewish majority at least) our national identity is tied up with religious traditions and customs.
But we also care deeply about individual freedom. The illiberal parties of the far-right and the ultra-Orthodox combined are currently polling at around 20 percent of the country. The dominant party for so many years, the Likud, which historically attracted the moderate right, started dropping in the polls not just since October 7, 2023—though the drop got steeper then—but actually nine months earlier, after the judicial reform proposals were first announced. In this light, when I interviewed Hungarian and Polish activists who had fought against the growing authoritarianism in their countries, they expressed envy and admiration for how so many ordinary Israelis had come out onto the streets in the name of freedom and democracy.
I began this essay stressing just how different Israeli politics is from its American counterpart. In fact, the liberal-yet-proudly-patriotic sensibility that is instinctive to so many Israelis could provide a model for the United States, and for other democracies where ultra-progressivism and/or populist nationalism have disfigured the politics.1
In my next essay in this series, I will explain how.
Paul Gross is a Senior Fellow at the Menachem Begin Heritage Center in Jerusalem, but he is writing here in a personal capacity. Previously, Gross served as speechwriter for Israel’s Ambassador to the UK. He holds an MA in Middle East Politics from the University of London, and lectures widely on Israeli history and politics. His numerous published research articles and op-eds have appeared in a variety of media outlets in Israel, the UK, the US and Canada, including the Jerusalem Post, Haaretz, Fathom, The American Interest, and Persuasion. He was an active participant in the protest movement against judicial reform in Israel from December 2022 to October 2023. Gross appeared on the TPPI Podcast with Gabriel Noah Brahm earlier this year.
As Gerald Berk discussed in his Telos article “Overcoming Antisemitism by Reinvigorating Twentieth‑Century Liberalism” (TelosScope, May 30, 2024), there is a storied American liberal-patriotic tradition, and American Jews were prominent among its exponents.