The Zionist revolution sought to turn a people dispersed across the globe into a nation and to reshape the Jew into a political being—one who enjoys full and equal rights unconditionally and who is a citizen responsible for the character and conduct of his or her state. While this revolution is in many ways a success against all odds and has helped to revise Jewish conceptions of freedom in history and notions of what can be achieved through radical collective action, the current political predicament of the state of Israel is puzzling. Because of its own deeds, its future is highly uncertain. Rather than preserve its integrity as a Jewish and democratic state (an uneasy balancing act in itself), since the 1967 war the state has embarked on settlement activities in the territories it has occupied that will force it either to forgo its character as a Jewish nation-state and establish one state between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea or to relinquish its democratic-liberal principles.
Ami Pedahzur's The Triumph of Israel's Radical Right explains how Israel arrived at its current crossroads. It meticulously and lucidly analyzes the ascent of the Israeli Right, step by step, after 1967 and up to the present. Pedahzur traces the humble beginnings of the settlement movement under hesitant and confused Labor governments, the expansion of the settlements by Menahem Begin and Ariel Sharon in the 1980s, and the seeds of racist language introduced by Rabbi Meir Kahane and later by the religious party Shas. The book demonstrates the marriage between resistance to settlement evacuation and hateful and inciting speech leading to the assassination of Prime Minster Yitzahk Rabin and shows how these two features of the new Right have been intertwined ever since. This book joins Oded Haklai's Palestinian Ethnonationalism in Israel (2011), Motti Inbari's Messianic Religious Zionism Confronts Israeli Territorial Compromises (2012), and other recent, fresh works in trying to explain the changing landscape of Israeli politics.
Space will not permit me to mention all of the events, processes, organizations, and individuals discussed by Pedahzur. His analysis, however, underscores two factors: the settlers' “network” and the idea of “nativism.”
First, he suggests that, rather than understanding the ascent of the Right in Israel in terms of parties and parliamentary politics, we should think in terms of a flexible political network—“a loose and dynamic composite of political actors whose worldview on various issues overlaps and who frequently come together for the purpose of shaping policies in the spirit of their shared ideology” (p. 9). The network includes social movements, settlers' organizations, individual activists, bureaucrats in government agencies and semigovernmental bodies, Knesset members and ministers, Jewish-American financiers, security forces personnel, and more. Pedahzur demonstrates the network's effectiveness in expanding Jewish settlements in terms of both the territory controlled by Jews and the number of settlers. The network's members are intensely committed to their cause, legally and financially sophisticated, masters at co-opting officials in the Israeli system and penetrating the system, and able mobilizers of masses of people. Over the years, the network has expanded the number of settlers in the West Bank from none to about 350,000 (not including Jewish neighborhoods in East Jerusalem). Since the 1990s, the Yesha Council (which represents the municipal councils of Jewish settlements in the West Bank) has followed a sophisticated plan. “Geographically,” writes Pedahzur, “the goal was to divide the West Bank into vertical and horizontal continuums of Jewish settlements” and to prevent “Palestinian population centers from expanding and therefore eliminating the possibility for Palestinians to attain territorial continuity” (p. 131).
The rise of the radical Right in Israel, according to Pedahzur, is also due to the second factor: the growth of “nativism” in Israeli society and politics. Nativism means that the state “belongs” to those of a certain ethnicity; non-native individuals, groups, and ideas are seen as threatening to the homogeneity of the nation-state (p. 6). The term is a bit confusing in the Israeli case, since modern Jews immigrated to Palestine rather than being “natives” of the place. Yet the book superbly demonstrates how nativist language—married to populist politics—became increasingly influential in Israeli politics and led to the formation of a new Right that brings together supporters of the Likud Party (secularists and masortiem, who are attached to the religious tradition), individuals from the geographic and socioeconomic periphery, new Russian immigrants, religious Zionists, and the ultra-Orthodox community.
Nativism in Israeli politics was and is intertwined with two critical developments. First is a fierce attack against the elite, especially against the judicial system and the High Court, the universities, the intellectuals, and the media. Second is a covert and overt animosity toward Palestinians (and foreign workers and refugees).
Palestinians who are citizens of Israel are put on the defensive, with some of their rights curtailed and their loyalty to the state continuously being questioned. Israeli nativism has affected Palestinians in the West Bank even more, legitimizing not only the occupation but the settlement activity there, making it seem natural and just. Nativism implies that politics is about the assertion of Jewish power and about rendering Jewish the space in any territory that the State of Israel controls.
The successful operations of both the network and the nativist ideology have depended upon the weakness of the Israeli state. The lack of coordination among governmental departments, the numerous legal gray zones and unwillingness to enforce laws, the inadequate supervision of state funds, the entrusting of responsibilities and powers to nongovernmental organizations, and other factors have allowed the network ample room to maneuver. Without state resources and backing, settlements would have been few; with a well-organized, hierarchical state, the settlers' manipulations would have been difficult. Equally problematic is the fact that the Israeli government's bureaucracy is not autonomous but is subject to the interests of the Jewish majority; it has not developed a solid equalitarian ethos in matters as diverse as housing plans and the creation of industrial parks. The state apparatus has not served as a bulwark against nativist ideology.
While the overall picture Pedahzur portrays is convincing (though at times one-sided, ignoring, for example, efforts by recent Israeli governments of the Right to integrate Arab citizens into the labor market), there are a few significant omissions in his discussion. A recent report by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), for instance, found that Israel has the highest percentage of poor people among the countries in this organization (13.8% in 1995; 20.9% in 2010). The disparity in wealth distribution is also among the highest in the OECD, and more than a third of the children are poor. Put differently, the dramatic rise of neoliberalism and the weakening of the Israeli welfare state have left many individuals and families vulnerable and their bond to society weak. The leaders who initiated these economic processes, particularly Benjamin Netanyahu, also championed the nativist language to generate Jewish solidarity at times of great socioeconomic distress. Yet Pedahzur does not examine the complex interplay of the economic and political spheres in the rise of the new, radical Right.
Since its inception, moreover, Zionism has been attracted to and has measured its success in light of tangible changes in the phenomenal world: the size of its Jewish population, the extent of the territory controlled by Jews, the houses constructed, and roads paved. Zionism has focused more on palpable nation building and less on what it means to dwell in the house it has built. Israel does not have a constitution or other canonical texts that articulate what it is about and that could serve as a common foundation for political conversation. More generally, it has not developed a clear vision of its moral ideas, democratic principles, notions of citizenship, and the ends to be accomplished as a community. There are understandable reasons for this neglect. But the point is that the settlers—and their celebration of place and land—have succeeded in hijacking Israeli politics only because there was and is a feeble Israeli countervision and because of the passivity of the majority of Israelis, whose notions of citizenship do not entail the active guarding of democratic principles. There is no substantial, political-intellectual tradition to oppose the settlers' tangibly oriented politics, which has strong Zionist roots.
Finally, Pedahzur's discussion of nativism and settlement would have benefited from perspectives found in the theoretical literature on colonialism. Hannah Arendt is particularly germane, since (in The Origins of Totalitarianism [1951]) she suggests that nation-states that embark on colonial projects are destined to encounter a grave dilemma: They embody the notions of popular sovereignty, national self-determination, and the equality of the nation's members, yet they deny these very same notions to the people they dominate, while unable and unwilling to integrate the latter into their own political body. To overcome this betrayal of their own founding ideas, they find (often racial) reasons for legitimizing their superiority and for judging the colonized to be inferior. Pedahzur believes that ethnic democracy “serves as an ideal habitat for the growth of … right-wing radicalism” (p. 29), and perhaps he is correct. The rise of Israeli nativism, however, is less about the nature of ethnic democracy and more about the nature of colonialism: It is the rule rather than the exception. This nativism will begin to evaporate only when the settlement project comes to an end; so far, however, it is the fuel propelling that project forward.
