At the end of November 2014, Israel’s cabinet agreed to support the so-called “Jewish nation-state” bill. If this bill becomes law, it will entrench Jewish nationalism at the expense of more democratic principles written into Israel’s constitution.
Though at the time of writing the bill has yet to become law, it has inspired a significant reaction internationally, including from the United States. The fact that the bill has won this support is symbolic of an important shift in the nature of Israeli politics towards the reassertion of Jewish nationalism and away from aspirations of a more liberal democracy.
This is a strange shift, particularly for a country whose leaders often laud it as “the only democracy in the Middle East”. Moreover, this bill has not come from nowhere. Rather, it comes in the context of the increasing isolation of Israel internationally.
In such a context, such overt displays of anti-democratic ethno-nationalism would seem to be counter productive. As Israel, the Palestinians and the world prepare for another Israeli election next year, it seems appropriate to ask a deeper question: What explains such a strong shift to the right in mainstream Israeli politics? Can it be reversed?
In seeking to address this question, I suggest there are five factors that are worth considering.
1. Israel has always had tensions between ethno-nationalism and aspirations toward cosmopolitanism/democracy.
There is of course an ongoing and fierce debate among analysts and observers over the question: “Is Israel a democracy or an ethnic state?”. And I don’t propose a resolution to this debate here. Rather, I suggest that it is perhaps better to consider the nature of the state as an awkward hybrid of the two.
Clearly, no matter what arguments are deployed to justify or condemn it, the state of Israel was born out of an ethno-nationalist drive to create a “Jewish Homeland” in a territory that was not already predominantly Jewish. The ethnic cleansing of Palestinians that made this possible has been well documented (by some who believe it was justified and those who reject that).
What followed has become a complex mishmash of political forces and, though few would argue that Israel is truly a democracy for all its citizens (and far less of a democracy if we take into account all those living under military occupation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip), it would be similarly foolish to ignore the fact that some forces have pushed for greater democracy within Israel.
Indeed, Israel has been called an “Ethnic Democracy”, a term defined by Sammy Smooha – Professor of Sociology at The University of Haifa – as:
In short, the point here is that Israel’s has been a political environment where two contradictory forces – ethno-nationalism and aspirations toward greater democracy – have met. Thus, Israel’s current rightward shift is perhaps better seen in this light. In other words, it represents the current ascendency of ethno-nationalist forces over more pro-democratic ones.
As Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu put it, in seeking to justify the “Jewish State” bill, he was attempting to redress what he sees as a “distinct imbalance [that] has been created between the Jewish element and the democratic one. There is an imbalance between individual rights and national rights in Israel“.
2. The detachment of elites in the 1990s
The events of the 1990s were obviously extremely important in terms of setting the stage for the contemporary nature of the conflict and of Israeli politics in general. The Oslo “peace process” effectively trapped the Palestinians in a prison of future promises and slippery half-kept commitments. Below the surface though, something else was going on, on the Israeli side, which changed the political context dramatically.
This was that Israel’s capitalist elite class – a powerful group of individuals who were strongly influential over government and in society more generally – had been pushing for some kind of “peace process” for some time. This was because, for them, the conflict – and the related “Arab Boycott” of Israeli businesses – created a crippling blockage just at the time (the end of the Cold War) when the tide of globalisation was truly rising.
The idea of free markets leading to peace and prosperity for all was not new, of course, but at this time it was truly in the ascendency, and Shimon Peres – who was foreign minister and then prime minister of the Labour government that signed the Declaration of Principles with the PLO – even wrote a book about it.
But, as Markus Bouillon has argued, the capitalist elites needed the “peace process” more for the process element than for achieving real “peace”. Indeed, when the Israeli capitalists got what they needed – overcoming the Arab boycott – they lost interest in pushing for Israel to conform to a liberal democratic ideal.
In fact, according to Nitzan and Bichler, they became rather detached altogether. This meant that the elements within Israeli society that were driving an agenda more in line with aspirations for liberal-democracy over ethno-nationalism were sorely diminished, leaving scope open, of course, for the return of the forces from the right.
3. Benjamin Netanyahu
It seems appropriate to give Israel’s current prime minister a bullet point of his own. It’s not only for his recent actions, it is also for the part he, and the party he leads, played in derailing and undermining the Oslo process in the 1990s.
Indeed Netanyahu, a former commando and lobbyist, the son of a revisionist historian and the brother of the late Jonathan Netanyahu – who was killed in action during the Israeli raid on Entebbe, Uganda, in 1976 – has impeccable credentials, both personal and professional, as a leader of Israel’s right wing. And he has never been shy about asserting his own convictions, even when it has damaged his relationships with powerful foreign leaders.
He rose to prominence in Israeli politics through the Likud party and became its leader in 1992. He was vehemently opposed to sacrificing “land for peace”, a position he laid out in an editorial for the New York Times in September 1995. After comparing Yitzhak Rabin – the Labour prime minister and former Israeli Army General who had promoted the “peace process” on the Israeli side – to Neville Chamberlain (Britain’s pre-Second World War prime minister, who favoured appeasement towards Nazism in Europe), he also rehearsed many of the key arguments that he would continue to deploy:
It also emerged later that even when he took office after elections in 1996, and was forced to carry on the “peace process” under American pressure, Netanyahu would use negotiations not as a method for making peace, but as a means to prolong the occupation.
Indeed, the most important outcome of direct negotiations during the period of Netanyahu’s first premiership was the Protocol Concerning the Redeployment in Hebron. In principle this was designed to clarify how the geographic divisions in the West Bank (agreed upon in the so-called Oslo II talks) would be implemented in Hebron, the largest city in the West Bank, with deep religious significance to all sides.
However, Netanyahu later admitted in private conversation – secretly recorded on camera – that the manner in which the Hebron Protocol was pursued was intended to stall the Oslo process and to be used as a lever on both Arafat and the US to secure Israel’s long term military deployment in the heart of the West Bank.
With “Bibi” Netanyahu back in power since 2009 then, we can see that not much about his position has actually changed.
4. ‘Russian’ immigration
Another factor that is often overlooked in most mainstream analyses is the swell in immigration to Israel, particularly in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the USSR.
According to the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, in 1990 and 1991 Israel accepted 185,227 and 147,839 immigrants from the former Soviet Union, equating to 92 per cent and 83 per cent of total immigration for those years; a dramatic increase on the levels of immigration in the proceeding decades. In total it is estimated that Israel accepted nearly a million immigrants from the former USSR in the decade that followed. They made up around 14-16 per cent of the population.
Contrary to the expectations of many Israeli elites at the time, those moving from the former Soviet Union tended to represent the most politically hostile towards the peace process.
As Lily Galili has argued, the former Soviet communities have essentially integrated into Israel’s economy and societal life but remained culturally and politically separate, effectively creating a new presence on the right wing of Israeli politics. Indeed, Galili goes on to say that for many “Russians” the notion of land for peace is an anathema:
This is a sentiment that was echoed by former US President Bill Clinton:
The impact of immigrants from the former USSR and the related rightward shift can be viewed through the lens of electoral politics.
Since it was founded in 1999 – Israel’s foremost political representative of (primarily) immigrants from the former USSR – Yisrael Beytenu – has grown as a significant electoral force. This is represented not only in terms of its increased popularity among the electorate, but it is also evident from the fact that Likud – Israel’s major right-wing, revisionist party – sought a formal electoral pact with Yisrael Beytenu in the 2013 elections.
5. Settlers
Like the immigrants from the former USSR, the demographic makeup of the settler population has shifted dramatically in recent years with a similar impact on the political spectrum, shifting it to the right.
According to the International Crisis Group, a think tank, the national-religious element populating settlements in the West Bank has grown rapidly, partly out of religious conviction, partly because they enjoy significant material support from the government of Israel and other backers.
Moreover, these settler communities have tended to adopt a far more radical political perspective than that which is represented by the traditional Israeli mainstream. Thus their impact on national politics is also reducing the likelihood of territorial concessions in the name of peace.
On closer analysis
While mainstream analyses often present Israel’s politics only in terms of the “peace process” we can see that the situation is not in fact static. Israel’s right wing is currently in the ascendency. Its power has grown dramatically over the past few years, but a closer analysis encourages us to look beyond these immediate changes to look at the deeper, structural forces at play in the background.
The “Jewish state” bill clearly did not come from nowhere. Rather, it has been incubating in a womb of anti-democratic, ethno-nationalistic sentiment for decades.
Don’t hold your breath for the outcome of Israel’s election next year. It will take far more than a change of government to confront such entrenched structures.
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