Israel’s election campaign began last week, when the Knesset dissolved itself and formally opened the contest among the country’s political parties and religious movements. The three-month campaign will conclude at the end of October, when Israeli voters go to the ballot box to re-elect the same forces of the extreme right or choose political groups that are less hardline and less damaging.
Logic would suggest that voters reconsider their country’s political direction. The hard-right has failed to provide the security they seek or the prosperity to which they aspire. Key figures are now subject to arrest warrants issued by the International Criminal Court, an unprecedented development in the history of the Israeli state. Public sympathy for Israel has also declined sharply across the world, particularly in the West.
If these developments matter to Israelis, they should use this opportunity to change the country’s political course with parties capable of restoring calm, reviving prosperity, and freeing society from the fear and anxiety of recent months. Yet most opinion polls point in the opposite direction. ‘Political Judaism’ appears firmly entrenched within Jewish society in Israel, comprising the religious-right, represented by the Haredim (or ‘strictly Orthodox’), and the religious far-right, represented by religious Zionists and settlers.
Embracing exclusion
The parties of the left and centre-left, which once led the peace process, are in visible decline. The Haredim, in both their Sephardi and Ashkenazi branches, want to secure their religious demands, exempting young Haredi men from military service. They show little interest in the broader political destiny of the state, but do not reject every peace initiative, so long as their religious requirements are met.
Religious Zionists, on the other hand, embrace an exclusionary religious, political, and social vision that rejects non-Jews, who they subject to grave abuses, displacing Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza to extend Israel’s borders and establish a ‘Greater Israel’ of biblical reference. It is this project that led to genocide in the Gaza Strip, the systematic encirclement of Palestinian villages in the West Bank, and other policies advanced by their representatives in government, including finance minister Bezalel Smotrich and national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir.
This marks a profound shift in the region’s political thinking. Across much of the Arab world, political Islamist parties are being actively opposed and, in some cases, outlawed, but in Israel, political Judaism is fully supported, not least by the Israeli military, with soldiers and settlers acting together in the West Bank. Political Judaism also has the backing of American neoconservatives, including evangelical Christians.
Pursuing agendas
This is the calamity. The former Saudi intelligence chief and ambassador to Washington Prince Turki Al-Faisal warned of it in an interview with CNN earlier this year, arguing that the war against Iran that began on 28 February was a fuse lit by Israel’s extreme right, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, that succeeded in drawing the US into the confrontation and sought to embroil the Gulf Cooperation Council states as well.
