Why was Netanyahu Elected to an Unprecedented Fifth Term in Israel?

Unlike US Jewish millennials who have evinced troubling views about Israel, their Israeli counterparts voted overwhelmingly for Netanyahu and the center right nationalist coalition. The Wall Street Journal in a post-election analysisnoted:

Ahead of the election, Mr. Netanyahu had the support of almost two-thirds of 18- to 24-year-olds and 54% of 25 to 34-year-olds, according to Israel Democracy institute survey.

More than 55% of Israelis now call themselves right wing, up from 40% a decade earlier, the same survey found.

The major story with this Netanyahu victory is the demise of the once powerful Labor governments led by the Israel founding generation with names like David Ben Gurion, Golda Meir, Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Perez and Ehud Barak. Except for the short-lived government of Barak in 2000, Labor has been virtually out of power for the past 20 years. Netanyahu has served fully half of that span since 2009. That is a transition of political power in Israel from the Labor Socialists. They were bent on perfecting the failed Oslo Accords of 1993, eviscerating the security and religious national heritage and control of Samaria and especially the Judean Hills; what the world calls the West Bank. These are the so-called disputed territories left unresolved following the June 1967 Six Day War that unified Jerusalem. An estimated 400,000 Jews live in thriving religious nationalist communities like Ma’aleh Adumim, Efrat and Ariel. The question of what to do with the Palestinians awaits the long-promised delivery of the Trump “deal of the century” this June following the Muslim month-long Ramadan observances. Based on comments from the White House diplomatic team of Jared Kushner and Jason Greenblatt, as well as, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo at a US Senate testimony there may not be support for the failed “two states solution”.

The once dominant Labor and extreme Leftist Meretz parties in the April 2019 elections were barely able to cross the threshold for representation in the new Knesset. The WSJ report noted how devastating the turn of electoral events were for the Left in Israel:

The Labor party finished with six seats, a historic low. It garnered just 3% of 18- to 24-year olds in a Smith poll.

“Young Israelis have internalized Mr. Netanyahu’s message that the left wing would damage the country if put in power”, said Itai Glazer, a teenage supporter of Meretz, a left-wing organization.

“We live in a world in which the left has never been in power and we’ve never seen what the left can do. We’ve grown up in the world in which we were told the left is a catastrophe,” Mr. Glazer said.

And some young Jewish Israeli voters say they can’t ever envision voting for parties that advocate engagement with Palestinians.

“I think that basically Arabs hate us,” said Elazar Cohn, 20, of Jerusalem. “I don’t think there will be peace.”

Israeli Arabs virtually boycotted the elections. Less than 20 percent of eligible Israeli Arabs went to cast a ballot in the blue boxes at voting booths. They identify more with the struggle against Israel of their Palestinian brethren across the green line than they do with the democratic values of the Jewish nation state. President of Israel, Reuven Rivlin, is the bete noire of PM Netanyahu. Rivlin is accused by the right of lavishing economic, education and social aid to Israeli Arab communities despite their disloyalty. The Rivlin and Netanyahu families despite being Likud stalwarts, have s been a veritable feud for three generations.

With this in mind, we interviewed former Hebrew University Professor and expert on Middle East minorities, Dr. Mordechai Nisan, author of The Crack -up of the Israel Left just before the recent Knesset elections.

Rod: We have been talking politics because of the Israeli election and we want to try to inform you, the listener, about Israeli politics. If you’re Israeli, you are probably more informed than you care to admit right now. However, we want to talk about the left in Israel. That is those who lean to the left in politics in Israel. Have they harmed Israel? What is it all about? We have a great person that we are going to be talking to. Jerry, who is our guest?

Jerry: He is a former Professor at Hebrew University, an expert on Middle East minorities. He has also been a lifetime observer since he’s a Canadian who made Aliyah to Israel. He is Mordechai Nisan. He is the author of a whole host of books, most recently on this issue, The Crack -up of the Israeli Left., published in Canada because it couldn’t be done in Israel. Because the left has controlled the cultural mindset of the Jewish nation.

Rod: Right. So those people living in the United States who are not Jewish will recognize the tenor of what the left is in Israel because the left in the United States is very much the same ideologically. You almost see it mirrored exactly. Our guest is Mordechai Nisan and we are going to be talking about the left, what the politics of the left is like in Israel. We hope to provide our listeners outside of Israel with an understanding of what Israeli politics are all about.

Jerry: Mordechai Nisan, why did you write The Crack-up of the Israeli Left?

Mordechai I wrote The Crack-up of the Israeli Left because it is an accurate description of what has happened to the Israeli left. I have been following Israeli politics for many decades and what became so prominent in my thinking is that the left is out of touch with two basic things. Out of touch with the fundamental definition and identity of the Jewish people, our heritage, our memory, our land, our honor. They seemed to have disconnected from these fundamental aspects of what it means to be a Jewish people in Israel. The second thing that I found was they are out of touch with the region, with the nature of the war with the Arabs, with the character of the Middle East as unstable, vicious and terroristic. They therefore are unable to understand adequately who they are and who the other is, meaning the Arabs within us, around us with whom we must contend.

Rod: For those people that live outside of Israel, especially people in the United States of America, would you consider the Israeli left somewhat like the left that we have represented in politics in the US?

Mordechai: No. the left I think is pretty much of an Israeli brand. Because when we say the left historically in Israel going back to pre-state times the Zionist left was active, pioneering, committed, daring, sacrificing for building up the Yishuv of the Jewish community. Even though some of their political ideas are on the far left, the early leaders were uncomfortable with the very idea of a Jewish state. Yet, they were committed to the Jewish Renewal in the land of Israel. They had a strong patriotic sentiment. What happened over the decades, since 1967 in the aftermath of the Six Day War, is that the left decided that its fundamental commitment to Zionism was no longer extended to Judea and Samaria. That therefore somehow Israel should “normalize itself” by abandoning the ideological national patriotic bedrock of what the enterprise was all about. They abandoned the foundation of what real Zionism meant.

Jerry: Mordechai, what is the story about Mantua Books, the Canadian imprint that published your book?

Mordechai: The great virtue of Mantua Publishing Company in Ontario, Canada is that it is committed to a conservative outlook and philosophy which is relevant in Canada, the United States and elsewhere. In addition, it made a commitment is to be a pro-Israel publisher. Therefore, my book fit in with their agenda. I think it may be their first book on Israel that they have published. My book fit the outlook of Howard Rotberg the founder and publisher of Mantua.

Rod: How did the works of R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. of The American Spectatorinfluence the selection of the title?

Mordechai:  I came across R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. and his extraordinary magazine, The American Spectator, many years ago. I subscribed and read it avidly because it is a magazine which combines a conservative outlook on things political and cultural with a very witty humorous satirical writing style. I subsequently got to know Tyrrell from The American Spectator and books he wrote, entitled, The Liberal Crack-up and The Conservative Crack-up. The purpose of the title, The Crack-up of the Israeli Left makes it a kind of humorous title on a serious subject. When you say crack-up in English we are kidding or joking. Yet the subject is serious and really that was the combination that I was looking for.

Jerry: Mordechai, how totalitarian, in your view, are the precepts of the left in Israel?

Mordechai: That’s a wonderful question. Totalitarian is a very strong word. We have images of Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia and the like in our mind, when we speak of totalitarianism. We think of Hannah Arendt’s famous, The Origins of Totalitarianism. There is nothing comparable in Israel after 1948 and in 2019. Yet the term “totalitarian” suggests the nature of the governing ethic. Their governing ethic was to control, certainly influence, incorporate all areas of life. Somehow the socialist and far left prior governments in Israel sought to dominate and control the economy, the cultural domain, the judicial apparatus, and the media networks. In this way we have a form of a totalitarian regime. However, it doesn’t have the thuggishness, ruthlessness and violence that we know from other places in the world. Therefore, I use the word in a sense to which it only fits the parameters and nuances of Israel.

Jerry: What are some of the examples you discuss in you book about how the left in Israel has historically undermined the core nation state Zionist precepts?

Mordechai: I think the first and obvious example of the left abandoning or undermining Zionism is when it decided with the military victory in the Six Day War of 1967 that the land of Israel was not going to be settled, controlled, incorporated within the borders of the State of Israel. By that I mean the core of the Jewish homeland from biblical times, Judea and Samaria, were not to remain with the Jewish people. They were to be negotiated away to some Arab partner in some delusional peace deal. Once you agree to give up parts of the land of Israel, the essence of the land of Israel, then I think you are really abandoning Zionism. I used the quote in my book from Ben-Gurion in 1937 where he said, “that no Jew has a right to concede any part of the land of Israel because it is the collective possession of the Jewish people from time immemorial until the end of times”. The left decided that they were willing to concede a portion of Judea and Samaria of the land of Israel after 1967, under the leadership of Golda Meir and thereafter under Rabin, Peres and Barak. Then we can say that they abandoned Zionism. I think that is the most staggering example of the left undermining Zionism.

The other example is in terms of the nature of the state. The state is called in the Declaration of Independence from May 14, 1948, a Jewish state. That is how Ben-Gurion confirmed the formulation in the document and as he stated it on that May 14th before Shabbat in 1948. It is a Jewish state. Once we say a Jewish state it means that the state is the property or the repository of a Jewish national vision. It belongs to the Jewish people. How can it not belong to the Jewish people from our own point of view? If the land of Israel doesn’t belong to the Jewish people, it means we have no land. Meaning we are without any territory on the surface of the globe. Our claim to the land of Israel is natural, permanent, and consistent and founded on our texts, our history, our memories. However, the left decided that the State of Israel, though it is the home of the Jewish people, it somehow belongs in the same sense to non-Jews as well. Now I have no rejection of non-Jews in the State of Israel. We must embrace those non-Jews in Israel who accept the idea that Israel is the state of the Jewish people. It is a Jewish state and should be recognized as such and one should be loyal to it. Their idea that somehow the State of Israel is not only a Jewish state but, let us say, also a Jewish Arab state. If you say Jewish-Arab, that Arab part tells me that it is not my state anymore. Or if you say it is a state of the citizens of Israel then that is saying it is not the state of the Jewish people. When we say the state belongs to the Jewish people, we mean the Jews of Israel and the Jews all over the world. It is their Jewish state, as Jews have a claim and a right to that state. However, if we say it is the state only of the citizens of Israel then somehow a non-Jew and Arab in Israel have a claim to the state perhaps more than a Jew outside of the country. That is unacceptable.

Rod: As most of us know Israel has a very long history of those people that are not Jewish living within the state and living as part of a citizenry. It totally makes sense what you just said, Mordechai. How could someone could go about purchasing your book?

Mordechai: The Crack-up of the Israeli Left is available on Amazon.com. In addition, you might visit local bookstores to see if they will order copies.

Jerry: Mordechai what currently constitutes the liberal left versus the conservative right ideologically in Israel?