Netanyahu’s Election Win Dealt a Grievous Blow to Judaism

T. Belman. This is a fascinating discussion but the title is very off. Pfeffer makes the point that the left always quotes the stock phrase “Jewish and Democratic” but only makes the case for “Democratic”.  Bibi on the other hand makes the case for “Jewish”. At the same time the Left never explained what’s “Jewish” for them.  He ends by saying:

” if we can’t make a robust case for our own Jewishness as Israelis who don’t support Netanyahu’s bleak authoritarianism and his partners’ fundamentalist vision, then what’s the point of living here anyway?

“Netanyahu has proven in every election victory that if you can’t explain what it means for you to be a Jew in Israel, then you won’t be able to fight for Israel’s democracy either.”

In effect, the Jews won and the Democrats lost.

Over numerous election campaigns, Benjamin Netanyahu has continually used Jewishness as a dividing and binding means to ensure his own political success

By Anshel Pfeffer, HAARETZ

Benjamin Netanyahu saluting supporters at Likud campaign headquarters in Jerusalem on Wednesday morning.Credit: RONALDO SCHEMIDT – AFP

This hasn’t been a good week for Israel’s fragile and limited democracy. It has seen the return to office of Benjamin Netanyahu, a prime minister who is on trial for bribery and fraud, and incited during the campaign against the Arab minority. Furthermore, on Election Night, he embarked on a totally false series of accusations of voter fraud that he claimed – without any basis in reality – were taking place at polling places in the Arab community.

Guaranteeing his majority is a large far-right and Arab-baiting party, and two ultra-Orthodox parties who have been granted autonomy over an education system where hundreds of thousands of children are not taught basic subjects and skills.

It’s hard to exaggerate how awful this election result is (though some have succeeded).

But for all the talk of the dire threat now facing Israeli democracy, no one is speaking of how this week delivered a grievous blow to Judaism. It was the culmination of a long process in which the perception of what it means to be Jewish in Israel has been welded to Israeli nationalism.

This isn’t the first time Likud and its far-right and Haredi allies have managed to win a majority of this kind of size (with almost all the votes counted, the Netanyahu bloc has a 64-56 majority). Under Yitzhak Shamir in 1988, they won 65 seats. Also in 2009. However, it was a different Likud then – nationalist but secular. The Haredim were different too: much less nationalist. And the far-right component was smaller and less openly fascist.

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The process began, of course, 55 years ago in the wake of the Six-Day War, when the formerly moderate national-religious community began shifting to the far right. It took up the leadership of the settler movement and then gathered momentum among the ultra-Orthodox following Rabbi Elazar Shach’s “rabbits and pigs” speech in 1990 – when he made it clear that the Haredim have no truck with the godless leftists.

However, it was Netanyahu who sent that process into overdrive in 1996, during his first campaign as Likud leader. On the advice of his American election strategist Arthur Finkelstein, Likud targeted the voters who felt their “Jewish” identity superseded their Israeliness. And it wasn’t just the official campaign led by Finkelstein. Likud also had an unofficial campaign, launched in the final days of the campaign by Chabad Hasidim, who plastered the country with the slogan “Netanyahu is good for the Jews.”

As the defeated Shimon Peres put it in a Haaretz interview after the election: “The Jews beat the Israelis.”

But Peres was wrong. Netanyahu wasn’t pitting “Jews” against “Israelis” – he was redefining the meaning of both.

The product of a secular and Western education, mostly in the United States, Netanyahu discovered this in 1996. And throughout his 10 subsequent campaigns as Likud leader, he has continued to use Jewishness as a dividing and binding means to ensure his personal victory.

There is a direct line from the Chabadniks’ “Netanyahu is good for the Jews” to his pressure on the religious-right, in this epic five-election cycle, to merge with the once-untouchable, Jewish supremacist Kahanists. It’s how he won then and now, and it’s what prepared the ground for Itamar Ben-Gvir’s incredible electoral success this week – though Netanyahu didn’t intend for that to happen. All he wanted was for Ben-Gvir and his partners to merge so that far-right votes wouldn’t be lost to his bloc if they fell beneath the electoral threshold.

The center-left camp has pushed back against Netanyahu on the democratic front, winning back power for brief periods in 1999, 2006 and 2021. But it deserted the Jewish front.

Netanyahu and his political partners hadn’t just built a transactionalist alliance whereby the Haredi partners supported him as prime minister and he gave in to their demands on religious legislation and funding.

They had gone much further than that and articulated a new form of Jewish identity. This fused the original anti-enlightenment and anti-Zionist Haredi ideology that “new is forbidden by the Torah” with the ultra-nationalism of the hard-line faction in the Revisionist Zionism movement.

When, back in 1997, Netanyahu was overheard whispering in the ear of Rabbi Yitzhak Kaduri that left-wingers “have forgotten what it means to be Jewish,” he was delivering that message in its most basic form. Israel needed him as prime minister because he remembers what it is to be Jewish. If you are a left-winger and don’t support him (and according to Netanyahu, anyone who doesn’t support him is “part of the left,” including staunch nationalists like Avigdor Lieberman and Gideon Sa’ar), then you’ve forgotten how to be a Jew.

And if you’re a practicing Jew, someone who openly keeps the commandments of the Torah, then you have to support Netanyahu – because to do otherwise would be to support those who want to uproot Jewishness from the land.

But despite Netanyahu saying it quite plainly for the past 26 years, his political opponents have done nothing to try to fight for their vision of Jewishness, even if they have one. Instead, every time they used the stock phrase “medina Yehudit ve’demokratit” – a Jewish and democratic state – they felt the need to stress only the second part. By doing so, not only did they concede Netanyahu’s point that they were uncomfortable, even ashamed, by their Jewish identities, they were basically also giving up on half of Israel’s core identity: the half that makes Israel unique.

There are many reasons why the center-left in Israel has been so weak at defining its Jewishness. It would take an entire column to detail them – and I will in the next few weeks. But there is no reason for that to be the case.

None of the forms of Jewishness being used by the Netanyahu camp, by the Haredim or ultranationalists, are authentic or original Judaism. Both are modern and reactionary versions. There should be no reason for left-wing Israeli Jews who believe in a full political and social partnership with Israel’s Palestinian citizens to not have a clear Jewish identity as well, or be uncomfortable expressing it.

After all, if we accept the fact that our Arab-Israeli partners can have a complex set of identities – Israeli, Palestinian, Arab, Muslim, Christian, Druze – then we should be able to express our own complex identities as Jews and Israelis. If we fail to do so, if we can’t make a robust case for our own Jewishness as Israelis who don’t support Netanyahu’s bleak authoritarianism and his partners’ fundamentalist vision, then what’s the point of living here anyway?

Netanyahu has proven in every election victory that if you can’t explain what it means for you to be a Jew in Israel, then you won’t be able to fight for Israel’s democracy either.