The Daily - The Far Right Rises in Israel

Episode Date: November 17, 2022

This week, Israel swore in a new Parliament, paving the way back to power for former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, even as he is on trial for corruption. Now, the country is on the cusp of its most right-wing government in history.Who and what forces are behind these events in Israeli politics?Guest: Patrick Kingsley, the Jerusalem bureau chief for The New York Times.Background reading: To win election, Mr. Netanyahu and his far-right allies harnessed perceived threats to Israel’s Jewish identity after ethnic unrest and the subsequent inclusion of Arab lawmakers in the government.The rise of the Israeli far right has stoked fear among some Palestinians of a surge of violence.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.

From The New York Times, I'm Sabrina Tavernisi, and this is The Daily. This week, Israel swore in a new parliament, paving the way back to power for the country's former prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, even as he is on trial for corruption. Today, I talked to my colleague, Jerusalem Bureau Chief Patrick Kingsley, about what of the men behind Netanyahu's improbable return and why Israel is about to get the most right-wing government in its history. It's Thursday, November 17th. So Patrick, Benjamin Netanyahu is about to be back in power,

which is pretty surprising given that he's on trial for corruption and that when we last talked about him on the show, he'd been voted out. So how in the world is he back? Well, the answer to that question is linked to that very corruption investigation that you mentioned. And that corruption trial had a huge effect on Israeli society. It split Israeli society in two, between those who thought Netanyahu should leave office until the corruption trial was over and those who felt he should stay in office

because the trial was some kind of stitch up by the deep state. And what the corruption trial did was it split the Israeli right in half between the pro-Netanyahu right and the anti-Netanyahu right. And one reason why he'd left office was because enough of his former allies on the right teamed up with his old enemies on the left to force him from power. And after he was finally ousted as prime minister last year, he kept plotting from the sidelines to get back in. And because parts of the mainstream right had abandoned him,

he had to go much further to the right to find parties that would do business with him. Parties on the right that were previously considered too far right, too extreme to be part of his coalition. And as a result, he encouraged a series of very small right-wing parties, far right parties and extreme right parties to unify. So that collectively they had a better chance of entering the Israeli parliament at the next election. And in the process, giving him a majority large enough to bring him back to power. And that's exactly what happened earlier this month. There was an election.

The coalition that Bibi had assembled with the far right won a narrow majority. The majority was entirely dependent on these very hardline, ultra-nationalist groups who joined with Bibi, as he's known. And as a result, we are on the cusp of seeing the most right-wing government that Israel has ever had in its history. So let's talk about how we got here. Who are the people behind these far-right groups? I think the best way of answering that question is to focus on one of the leaders of the far-right alliance, one whose support Netanyahu will depend to form his next government.

And that leader is a man called Itamar Ben-Gavir. Itamar Ben-Gavir is 46. He is a lawyer. And his far-right alliance holds the balance of power in the Israeli parliament. Without that alliance and without Itamar Ben-Gavir, Netanyahu has no majority. And Itamar Ben-Gavir is considered

one of the most extremist politicians in Israel. On election night, Itamar Ben-Gavir stood up in front of his supporters at a sort of victory rally and said, We will be the owners of our home and our country. The time has come for us to be the landlords in our own country.

And by saying that, he's implicitly positioning Jewish Israelis as the landlords in Israel and the Arab minority as their tenants. And it's through that juxtaposition that we can get a sense of the power dynamic that he seeks to uphold in today's Israel. And the journey that Itamar Ben-Gurvier has made since his youth until this point, from the extreme parts of Israeli discourse, the fringe of Israeli discourse to the heart of mainstream politics in Israel, is on some level, the story of Israel's own evolution over the past three decades,

and one that helps illustrate, to some extent, why many feel that the two-state solution is now essentially dead. And Patrick, where does that story begin? Set the stage for me. What were Israeli politics like at the time of his beginnings? Let's go back to 1988, the year that Benjamin Netanyahu himself entered frontline politics for the first time, and in fact, got elected to parliament for the first time. That was also the year that Netanyahu's own right-wing party, Likudud effectively would bar from participation in parliament

an extremist party, a radical, ultra-religious, ultra-nationalist party who wanted to segregate Israeli society, strip Arab Israelis of their citizenship, and turn Israel into some kind of theocratic state. Wow. And that was a party so extreme that the United States labeled it a terrorist group. And so did Israel. And Itamar Ben-Gavir was a member of this group, and he was considered so extreme himself that in the early 1990s,

the Israeli army refused to accept him as a conscript, something that in Jewish-Israeli society is basically unheard of. A large proportion of Jewish-Israelis serve as conscripts when they turn 18. Not Itamar Ben-Gavir. And for years, Itamar Ben-Gavir remains at the fringes of Israeli discourse and Israeli society. He gets involved in extreme right activism. He's charged with hate speech, incitement to racism, support for a terrorist organization.

And he gets convicted, not all the time, but some of the time for those charges, including for holding aloft a banner that said Arabs out, implying that he wanted to expel Israel's Arab minority. And he ends up moving from a town just west of Jerusalem, inside the state of Israel, to a very hardline settlement deep in the occupied West Bank. And in a sign of where his mind was at, he hung a portrait in his living room of another extremist, a man who gunned down, killed 29 Palestinians as they worshipped in a mosque nearby his settlement. Wow. There's a video of him in his living room.

And you can see behind Itamar Ben-G of beer on the wall of his home a large picture of this Jewish extremist behind him and the journalist asked him why have you got a picture of Barrett Goldstein this extremist on your wall. And when your son asks who he is, what will you say? And he defends it. He says, I tell my son he's a righteous man. He's a hero. Wow. A picture of a mass murderer hanging on his wall.

Exactly. So Patrick, what's the next chapter in Ben-Gur's story? Well, around that time, in the early 90s, there were a series of diplomatic agreements between the Israelis and the Palestinians known as the Oslo Accords, which at the time created the sense that Israel and the Palestinians were on the cusp

of some kind of historic peace deal. So Oslo actually began just as I was graduating from college. I remember it really clearly because there was all this hopefulness about peace in the Middle East. And, you know, it just felt like this was a real game-changing moment. And effectively what happened, if I remember correctly, was that Israel withdrew from a bunch of Palestinian areas and basically gave Palestinians limited autonomy over themselves. And then in 1994, I remember Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli prime minister at the time, actually won the Nobel Peace Prize together with other leaders that had brokered the agreement.

So that was a real kind of indication of just how hopeful everybody was. Right. I mean, never before and never since has there been a time when it felt like peace was so close. And yet, swimming against that flow was Itamar Ben-Gavir. There was this incident where the car of one of the people you just mentioned, Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli Prime Minister who was driving the peace process, was vandalized. Far-right extremists got to his car, ripped a piece of it off, the emblem of the car. And at some point in the aftermath of this act of vandalism against Rabin's car, Itamar Ben-Gavir is filmed

holding the emblem of the car. Talking to a news team about that act of vandalism. And he said, just as we got to this emblem, holding up the emblem, we'll get to Rabin. Oof. And less than a month later, Rabin was assassinated. Now, there's no question of whether Ben-Gavir was involved in that assassination. He's never been linked to it. But the fact that several weeks before his assassination, he was talking approvingly about the vandalism of Rubin's car, just shows where on the political spectrum Itamar Ben-Gavir was at that point in time in the middle of the peace process.

Interesting. How long does Ben-Gavir go on like this? I mean, as this hardcore political radical, like how long is he on the periphery? political radical. Like, how long is he on the periphery? Well, he stays there for about two decades, two and a half decades. But what happens over the course of that time is that he gradually works out how to play the system without necessarily changing himself. He changes the way that he plays. And in 2012, he becomes a lawyer. And he goes from being someone that is always in court as defendant to being someone who's in court as a lawyer defending other radicals, other people accused of violence and extremism, and even becomes fairly accomplished defending Jewish Israelis who are accused of attacking Palestinians, for example.

So maybe not really changing his ideology, it sounds like, but just kind of finding new avenues to express it in a way that sounds more socially acceptable. Yes, exactly. He starts to take on more traditional mainstream roles that gradually give him a veneer of respectability. He becomes a parliamentary assistant to a far-right politician. He joins that politician's political party. He becomes the leader of the party. Yet, even as recently as three years ago, he was still very much on the fringe of Israeli discourse. He's still very much an isolated player within Israeli politics. He runs for parliament, but he can't get elected. His party cannot cross the threshold needed to enter parliament.

And that remains the case until the beginning of last year, when a sequence of events occur that radically change the fate and trajectory of Itamar Ben-Gabir and, to some extent, the trajectory of today's Israel. We'll be right back. So Patrick, we left off with you telling me that Ben-Gavir came from the radical periphery into Israeli politics. But his party was tiny, didn't really carry much weight. And you said a few things happened at the beginning of last year that changed all of that. So what happened?

Well, the first thing that happened was that Benjamin Netanyahu started laying the groundwork that would ultimately result in the new far-right coalition that we see today. Even before he was ousted from power last year. day, even before he was ousted from power last year. And because he did that, Itamar Ben-Gavir, as part of this new alliance of far-right parties, was elected finally to parliament in March 2021. And that development meant that Ben-Gavir was catapulted into the Israeli mainstream discourse. Suddenly, he was a lawmaker, and not only a lawmaker, but a lawmaker with, effectively, a kosher certificate from the sitting prime minister of the time, Benjamin Netanyahu.

And Patrick, what does he do with that platform? Well, he uses that platform to take advantage of a second pivotal shift that occurs about a month and a half after he was elected to Parliament. Tensions boiling over in Jerusalem after more than a week of nightly clashes. Hundreds of Palestinians protested the closing of a space in front of the Damascus Gate while Jewish extremists marched elsewhere shouting death to Arabs. In April and May 2021, there was a bout of unrest beginning in Jerusalem that Itzma Van Gevier is able to capitalize on. Israeli police are again clashing with Palestinians

as the threat of possible evictions stirs already heightened tensions. There was a series of planned evictions of Palestinians living in East Jerusalem whose eviction had long been sought by settler groups, groups that promote the interests of Israelis who settle on occupied territory. And Itzmaman Gebir supports these settlers.

He rushes to this neighborhood of East Jerusalem and sets up a makeshift office, uses the sheer fact that he's a lawmaker and has some element of parliamentary privilege and protection to bring greater numbers of policemen to the neighbourhood to protect his ad hoc office, which is really just a tent. And by being there, he draws great attention to the situation. He helps stoke the temperature there. A far-right Israeli MP in the center of this melee.

Palestinians deeply unhappy about the settlement on the street that's been here for many years. It just takes a spark to make these things ignite. And that whole situation is one of the contributing factors that leads to the 11-day war in Gaza last May. And that war was something that then triggered widespread unrest and rioting and clashes between Arab citizens of Israel and Israel's Jewish citizens in several cities where there is a mixed Arab-Jewish population.

But violence is not that rare a thing in Israel and the Palestinian territories, right? I mean, what was it about this that was different? What was unsettling about this set of riots for both Jews and Arabs in Israel was that it was violence between large numbers of citizens of Israel. This wasn't attacked by Palestinians on Israelis or Israeli settlers on Palestinians in the West Bank. This was within the state of Israel, between Jewish citizens of the state and Arab citizens of the state. And it created a dynamic in which Arab citizens felt terrified. But more importantly for Itamar Ben-Gavir, Jewish Israelis felt terrified and

unsettled. And they grew quickly to see, or some of them did, Itamar Ben-Gavir as some kind of protector or someone who understood their sense of insecurity and instability that the riots caused. So this is a man who spends his whole political career really tapping into the anxieties that some Jewish Israelis have about sharing society with Arab Israelis. And he comes into parliament at this very critical moment that's bad for Jewish-Arab relations, but it sounds like pretty good for his political career. His platform really seems to speak to exactly what's going on in Israel at this moment. Right, exactly. And this feeling among Ben-Gurion's growing base of supporters just deepens after these riots. Benjamin Netanyahu is ousted from power over the summer and is replaced by a governing

coalition that included, for the first time ever in Israeli history, an independent Arab party. Now, to be clear, some Israelis and Palestinians, many of them, saw this as a big step forward. It suggested that there was a possibility for a shared existence between Jews and Arabs. But it enraged some right-wing Jewish Israelis who believed that having an Arab party in government made the government less able to react to security threats and maybe on just a more existential level somehow eroded the Jewish character of the Jewish state. And those people, by their very own words, were more interested in living, own words, were more interested in living, are more interested in living in a Jewish state than in a democratic state. And that is a fear, is an anxiety that Ben-Gavir was able to successfully

tap into over the last year and a half. Which, of course, brings us up to today, to this new, very right-wing government. Exactly. Ben-Gavir has used all that to build his profile, create a sense that he more than ever is needed for Israel's future. And when the government collapsed this summer, kick-starting election campaign, he was in a pole position not just to scrape into Parliament, but to return as part of a strengthened far-right alliance without whom Netanyahu could not form a coalition government. And that's exactly what came to pass on November the 1st. And where does Ben-Gavir fit into this new government? What's his role going to be? And where does Ben-Gvir fit into this new government? What's his role going to be?

Well, Ben-Gvir's far-right alliance won 14 seats in this election, making it the second largest in Netanyahu's bloc after Netanyahu's own party. And that means Ben-Gvir is in a very good position to demand the position that he wants in government, which is to be the minister who oversees the police. And that, if he's successful, will give him extraordinary powers over many of the flashpoints that lead to arise in tensions and violence between Israelis and Palestinians. And it will complete a remarkable turnaround for a man who began his adult life as someone deemed too extreme to play even a lowly role in the Israeli security hierarchy, but who now as an adultmaker, will play one of the top two leadership roles within Israel's security apparatus. Patrick, this doesn't sound good for Arab Israelis.

I mean, this is a person who's wanted to put his finger on the scale for a long time, and actually potentially running the police sounds like it would probably be pretty alarming to them. What are they saying? What does this hold in store for them? You hear two main points coming from Israel's Arab minority or its Palestinian minority. The first is that this guy really doesn't represent that much of a departure from Israeli policies under his predecessors. And this will finally show the world Israel's true face and reveal a policy that they believe has always been lying not far from the surface in the Israeli government. Now, many Israelis would dispute that characterization,

but that is nevertheless something that Palestinians have said often in recent days and weeks. But the second more common reaction is one of fear and terror. This is a guy who on election night stood up and said, it's now time for us Jewish Israelis to become the landlords here. And if you're a member of a minority in Israel, you know very much the power dynamic that that suggests, and it suggests nothing good for you. Patrick, I guess my question after all of this is, what does this actually say about Israeli society? I mean, is this more just a weird accident of history? Like a guy who

was in the right place at the right time meets an opportunistic Netanyahu? Or is this really a reflection of Israeli society and how it's changed? Well, first of all, I want to avoid any sweeping generalizations about Israel, about Israelis, about what Israel is and who Israelis are. But I think what we can say is that Ben-Gurion's ride to the cusp of government from a position of obscurity and the fringes of Israeli society in some way tracks a wider movement within in some way tracks a wider movement within Israeli society towards the right that we've seen over the last three decades. Back in the early 2000s, polling shows that there was majority support for a two-state solution for an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict within Jewish-Israeli society. And the product of the last two decades and a rise in violence following the Oslo process led some Israelis to conclude that peace was not an option,

that they had no partner for peace among the Palestinians, and that engaging in peace negotiations would only lead ultimately to more violence. And whether that's algorithmic right or wrong, that has definitely become the dominant narrative among mainstream Israelis, to the extent that the Palestinian question is barely a feature of election campaigns in Israel. He was effectively going against the grain of mainstream Israeli society back then, but several decades of disappointments, frustrations have passed. And now it's not as though necessarily he's pushing completely on an open door, but he's entering at a time when his ideas are kind of rowing in the same direction as the mainstream

in Israel. Like, still extreme, but not as discordant. At the end of the day, his ideological forebads in the 1980s barely got 1% of the vote at that time. Today, Itamar Ben-Gavir's party won more than 10% of the vote. It's not 50% of the vote, but it speaks to some kind of profound shift within Israeli society and discourse. And even if Ben-Gurion himself were to leave the political stage tomorrow or at some point in the next few years,

he has managed in the space of 18 months to inject ideas that were previously considered beyond the pale into the Israeli body politic. And that's something that Israelis will have to reckon with for years to come. Patrick, thank you. Thanks for having me. Patrick, thank you. Thanks for having me. We'll be right back.

Here's what else you should know today. Republicans formally took control of the House of Representatives on Wednesday, capturing the 218 seats needed for a majority. It was a delayed yet consequential finish to the 2022 midterm elections and begins an era of divided government. Democrats have kept control of the Senate. Several close House races, including in California and Colorado, have yet to be called. They will determine the final size of the slim majority that Republicans will command in the House. And a missile that killed two people in western Poland on Tuesday appears to have been

launched by accident from the territory of Ukraine. Initial reports indicated that Russia was responsible for the blast. But NATO leaders and Poland's president confirmed on Wednesday that it had been launched by Ukraine's air defenses as they tried to defend against missile strikes from Russia. Today's episode was produced by Jessica Chung and Rob Zipko. It was edited by Liz O'Balin with help from Lisa Chow. Fact-checked by Susan Lee, contains original music by Marianne Lozano, Alicia Baitube, Dan Powell, and Roman Nemisto, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Special thanks to Tali Abakasas. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Lansford of Wonderly. and Ben Lansford of Wonderly.

That's it for The Daily. I'm Serena Tavernisi. See you tomorrow.