The Rise of the Right Wing in Israel

26:13The founder of the Jewish Defense League was assassinated in New York City last night. Mayor Kahane had just finished speaking to a Zionist group in a midtown Manhattan hotel when he was gunned down. Two years later, in 1990, Mayor Kahane was murdered by an Egyptian American man. But neither his death nor the outlawing of the Koch party could stop the spread of his ideas. Kahana's ideology came to be known as Kahanism, and he'd already inspired the next generation of leaders, like a teenage activist who was in the crowd at that rally against Rabin in 1995.

26:58Coming up, how Itamar Ben-Gavir, Israel's current minister of national security, carried the Kahanas torch into the future.

27:16Hi, this is Adrienne Stutler calling from Morgantown, West Virginia, and you're listening to ThruLine from NPR. Part two. We can get to him.

27:52It is 1995. We are back at that rally in Jerusalem where Benjamin Netanyahu gave a fiery speech against Yitzhak Rabin and the Oslo Accords. the rally that some point to as inciting the violence that led to Rabin's assassination. In the crowd was a 19-year-old man, an activist, who would go on to become one of Israel's most powerful politicians. His name, Itamar Ben-Gavir. He really first came to infamy in 1995 during protests against the Oslo Accords. And during one of these protests, Israeli right-wing activists yanked the ornament off the hood of Rabin's car. And there is a television interview of Yitzhak Ben-Gvir holding this ornament up to the camera and saying, you know, if we can get to Rabin's car, we can also get to Rabin.

28:57That video of Ben Gevir holding up Rabin's hood ornament thrust him into the public eye. A few weeks later, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated by a far-right extremist.

29:12Irmar Ben Gevir was born in the suburbs of Jerusalem in 1976, a year before Menachem Begin's political earthquake. Ben-Gavir's parents were Mizrahi Jews with Kurdish and Iraqi ancestry. He grew up in a conservative household that supported both the Likud and labor parties. His early activism was tied to the settlement movement, a movement that was going through its own internal tensions. Should the aspiration be where people are going to live in bougie settlements and that satisfy the requirements of living in the whole land of Israel while still having a shopping mall down the street? Or is this a fringe movement that is engaged in essentially open warfare against a state that isn't doing enough to make Israel into more of a theocratic state?

30:02It was also the moment when tensions between Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories were about to erupt.

30:14Fighting began after four workers from the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip were killed when their car collided with an Israeli army truck. In December of 1987, the First Intifada, or Palestinian Uprising, began. Palestinian violence seems motivated by despair. It was not just the buildup of frustration among West Bankers and Gazans at the lack of political progress or the lack of social services. The first intifada was fueled by Palestinian frustrations against Israel's occupation and the expansion of settlements. It lasted almost six years. It's when Hamas, the current ruling government in Gaza, was born and was marked by sporadic attacks on Israeli targets.

30:56This was also when Itamar Ben-Gavir became radicalized and joined with the Kakh party and the Qahannes movement. Itamar Ben-Gavir's views were so extreme so early on that they kept him out of Israel's mandatory military service. He would rack up a ton of arrests. He's been indicted over 50 times and was found guilty of carrying a sign that said, Expel the Arab enemy. He has been convicted of inciting racism and supporting a terrorist organization. And a lot of this was happening during the second intifada that began in 2000. The second intifada was a terrible time in Israel where buses were blowing up on every street corner.

31:41You never knew when you got on a bus, is today going to be the day that you're on your way to work or school or to visit a friend and a bus is going to blow up. As the cycle of violence intensified, and after defending himself so many times in court, Ben Gavir decided to go to law school. His first part of his career was defending settler terrorists. then he runs for the Knesset. All this time, you know, he is bringing with him this legacy as a youth activist, deeply involved in Kahanism and radical politics in the settlements. And he was just always seen as this random fanatic in many respects.

32:19This is Amjad Iraqi again. But the scene slowly started to evolve that allowed him to not only become legitimate, allow him to be seen as someone who actually has rational thought, as someone whose ideas, whose political ideas, actually have a rational place in our spectrum.

32:44This is Ben Gavir in a 1994 interview saying, I think if settlements are dismantled in the West Bank and Gaza, blood will spill. And he ends up at the head of a party called Otme Yehudit, which means Jewish power. Jewish Power is a far-right party that advocates for deportation of Palestinians. It's a descendant of the Koch Party. Ben Gavir has led the Jewish Power Party since 2019. Until recently, he kept a picture in his living room of Baruch Kolstein, an American-Israeli settler who massacred 29 Palestinians in Hebron in the 90s.

33:30Today, everyone also understands that running away brings war, that if we don't want to be there again, we have to return home and rule the territory, and indeed propose a moral, logical, and advantageous solution encouraging immigration and the death penalty for terrorists.

33:56There has been increasing violence, and an increasing inability to reach any kind of resolution. Has that opened up the door for the message, an extreme message like the one from Kahana or Ben-Gavir, or many other right-wing Zionists, to find a place in the mainstream discourse? Yes, definitely. We can really think about it as the post-Oslo generation. After the Oslo Accords, what it essentially did was it hermetically sealed off many, many Palestinians. from meeting Israelis just in the course of day-to-day life. And so the only encounters that you really had were between Palestinians in the West Bank and Israeli soldiers or Israeli settlers.

34:40What you have is two populations that are kind of sealed off from one another. It's hard to really communicate the extent of just the everyday grinding violence that the occupation demands. And it's everything from extreme levels of surveillance to checkpoints to segregation to structural violence, keeping Palestinians penned in ever smaller areas of land. you have a wholesale internalization of the idea that this kind of violence is not only normal is not only acceptable but is actually justifiable and is righteous you should not feel bad for accepting this kind of violence or instituting this kind of violence because actually when you do so you are doing it for love of your people and love of your country that message is going to resonate.

35:44Coming up, Itamar Ben-Gavir brings Kahanism into the highest levels of government after the prime minister comes calling.

35:59This is Margo Vandenhelder from San Francisco, California, and you're listening to ThruLine from NPR.

36:20Part 3 The Rise of Netanyahu

36:29Do the Palestinians have a right to a separate state? No, I don't think they do, but I think that it's quite instructive that the Palestinians who are invoking the right of self-determination, which is an attribute for separate nations, themselves are the ones who define themselves as part of the Arab nation. This is a 28-year-old Benjamin Netanyahu on a TV debate show called The Advocates. It was 1978, and back then he went by the name Ben Nittai. Mr. Nittai is a graduate of MIT. He is an Israeli, and he is a man who has written widely on this question before the House tonight. That question was, should the United States support self-determination for Palestinians in a Middle East peace settlement?

37:24Here was Netanyahu's answer. I think the United States should oppose the creation of a Palestinian state for several reasons. The first one being that it is unjust to demand the creation of a 22nd Arab state and a second Palestinian state at the expense of the only Jewish state. Even in his 20s, Netanyahu emerged as an effective spokesman for conservative Israeli politics in the U.S., including the mention of a second Palestinian state, since many right-wing Israelis argue that Jordan already exists as a Palestinian state. Netanyahu's role as a conservative spokesman may not be a surprise when you consider the world and the family he was born into.

38:08Benjamin Netanyahu had been known to Israeli politics because his father was a key figure in the revisionist Zionist movement. He was not well accepted by Israeli labor government leaders or by Israeli socialist society and always been sort of on the margins of both an academic career and a political trajectory. Benjamin Netanyahu was born in Tel Aviv in 1949, just over a year after Israel's creation. But when he was a teenager, his family moved to Pennsylvania when his father took a job there as a professor. He had much of his education in the United States. And that's important because it gave him a particular kind of political approach that has proved very, very successful in Israel.

38:54And he also speaks very good English, which is really, really considered a boon in Israel. And not just for speaking to the outside world, but it's just kind of, there's like a cachet that comes with it. He returned to Israel after high school to join the military. He eventually became a special forces soldier and saw combat action in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. After the war, he returned to the U.S. And reinvents himself as kind of a political commentator and, you know, security expert and other guises, I guess. He served several posts in the U.S. for the Israeli government, including at the Israeli embassy.

39:33Ver really fine-tuned the message that he likes to deliver to the outside world about why Israeli politics is the way it is and why Israel has to treat the Palestinians the way that it does, which is that Israel is this kind of last outpost of quote-unquote Western civilization and that it's, you know, the last line of defense between Europe and the Middle East. Netanyahu returned to Israel with deep connections in the U.S. and a renewed sense of purpose. He jumped straight into politics, getting involved with the conservative Likud party. He climbs the ladder in Likud and he wins the chair of the party in the mid-1990s.

40:23Netanyahu, who is always very savvy to the pulse of the Israeli public, you know, really understands that the 1990s is a moment where Israel is at the brink of the Civil War.

40:47And so when he delivers his rousing speech at that 1995 rally in Jerusalem against Oslo and Yitzhak Rabin, he has his own political ambitions in mind. This is something that he knows will draw a political base toward him, will help a right-wing political base consolidate around him. Netanyahu was right. It worked. and sets about campaigning for prime minister at the elections that follow Rabin's assassination. And by the way, in his campaigns for the prime ministership, he actually enlists the support of American Jewish political advisors who were advising various GOP candidates. So there's this kind of importing of American political tactics into Israel, which are very much about the individual.

41:41It's about the personality. And, you know, Netanyahu kind of leans into that. He ran on a platform of economic reform and promised to oppose a Palestinian state. And he was able to tap into the anger against the Oslo Accords to bring out the vote. He becomes prime minister, despite the role that he played in the incitement campaign as, you know, one of its most high profile figures. While a lot of Netanyahu's political success was due to his own shrewd strategy, he also benefited from the failures of the Labour Party-led negotiations with Palestinians. As the promise of Oslo faded away and the Second Intifada loomed, suicide bombings and violence were a regular occurrence on the streets of Israel.

42:26For a lot of Israelis, it almost like disproved, designed this left thesis. This is writer Amjad Araki again. The idea of giving Palestinians more rights, potentially a Palestinian state, the Oslo process in general, the narrative is that you try to give Palestinians their rights in their statehood, and what we actually got was suicide bombings. That's the logic. And it's not to minimize, I think, the social and political trauma that was experienced by Jewish Israelis during that time, but the answer that was provided to that was to say, like, actually the right-wingers were right. But Israelis got tired of Netanyahu's hawkish posture, a sluggish economy, and a peace process that had ground to a halt.

43:04He was being accused by many on the right of being too centrist. So in 1999, he lost his re-election bid. It was a crushing defeat for Netanyahu. Therefore, I am today on my intention to return from the loss of the loss.

43:23In the time he was out of office and out of the public eye, he seems to have figured something out. If he were going to make a political comeback, he'd need to move further right. And 10 years later... In Israel, conservative Benjamin Netanyahu was sworn in as prime minister last night. Today, he returns to the office he held a decade ago. In 2009, he recaptured the prime ministership. And again in 2015, when he was challenged for re-election, he pushed his messaging further to the right. His surprising and crushing victory, the product of an 11th-hour push for right-wing votes, promising there would be no Palestinian state on his watch.

44:07The right regime is in danger. The Arab voters are coming in huge amounts to the polls. But unlike the U.S., Israel has a parliamentary system, which means even if your party wins an election, you still have to form alliances with other parties to create a majority in order to be a ruling government. Because of his inflammatory rhetoric, it was going to be hard for Netanyahu to create that government with mainstream parties who were turned off by his strategy. So he looks towards, you know, parties to his right and decides that, you know, the kind of government that he wants to form is an ultra-nationalist and ultra-orthodox coalition because he doesn't want to have a national unity government.

44:46And he certainly doesn't want to partner with leftist parties. Netanyahu is starting to get into a lot of legal and thus political trouble because he has corruption and bribery charges racking up. And so the country keeps going to elections as Netanyahu sort of tries to outrun these charges and tries to remain in power. He certainly doesn't want to be in government with anybody who might want to replace him and put him in prison. So these are his options. And he acquiesces to this situation. Netanyahu, to survive, has courted the most right-wing parties in the country. And one of the people he has cut a deal with is a politician who was also at that anti-Rabin protest back in 1995, Itamar Ben-Gavir.

45:34And in the next election, which was back at the end of 2022, Two, the combined slate that he runs on with another far-right party called Religious Zionism pulls in 14 seats. Ben Gvir gets into the Israeli government and he basically gets to play kingmaker because of the number of seats that he's pulled. And Netanyahu, you know, he is crucial to Netanyahu's coalition at this point. And so he gets appointed as national security minister, which is a new position which puts him in charge of all the police on both sides of the green line. The Green Line refers to the pre-1967 border between Israel and the West Bank.

46:12And nobody's held power over both sets of police in that way before. And so they're all interconnected. Everyone thought they had something to gain. And this is what allows what was once a kind of, you know, seemingly random, thuggish activist slash lawyer to become someone who has an entire ministry designed around him, who is now sitting in major meetings of the government, who is now prodding the prime minister and the defense ministry and the military that you're not going hard enough. Natasha Roth-Roland says Ben Gavir went from a pariah to a popular figure in Israel, especially with young people.

46:53He voices what they see as things that they may not be allowed to say themselves. You know, he kind of, he voices the id of the nation in a way. in much the same way that Trump did. And what kind of views was he expressing? Just unabashed racism toward Palestinians. Understanding every Palestinian essentially as a terrorist. Supporting the death penalty for quote-unquote terrorists, which in this case is simply a dog whistle for Palestinians. Supporting mass expulsion of Palestinians. Terrorizing Palestinians who are simply going about their daily lives. basically implementing Kahane's vision in any way that they are able to.

47:36Netanyahu has basically been in power since 2009. And with each coalition that he had, he enabled more and more far-right people to come into the Likud, to come into these coalitions and to be accepted into the political sphere. And Netanyahu definitely helped to facilitate that. Amjad Araki says that Netanyahu's prime ministership, the longest in the country's history, by the way, His attempts to survive politically haven't just had an impact on the Knesset, but also on Israeli public opinion. Bibi's tenure was really a lesson for Israelis that actually you don't have to play, that if you kind of just keep pushing the envelope, you'll find that there are actually no consequences.

48:18So why wouldn't you just keep going more right-wing? Why wouldn't you keep saying more racist and explicit things? They're so unafraid to say things that three decades ago they would have had to think many times before they could say so. But Netanyahu and his Likud coalition overplayed their political hand in 2023 when they proposed a law that would eliminate the oversight power of the Israeli Supreme Court. Israelis woke up today to their three largest newspapers carrying a black front page. The black pages were ads that protesters took out calling it a dark day for democracy in Israel. This move to weaken the judiciary was met with intense protests throughout Israel.

49:02Until now, the Supreme Court in Israel has had the right to reject some government actions it did not consider reasonable. So what happens now that the Knesset stripped that power away?

49:16People of all ages are protesting in Israel. Doctors and lawyers are among those objecting to the parliament removing a check on its power. You know, I think if you actually ask the average Israeli on the street, like, what are the three major, you know, platforms of the, you know, of the judicial reform plan? Most people weren't necessarily interested in the technical details of what was going to happen with basic laws or overrides and all these kinds of things. But they did see this as being my values against your values, secular versus religious, interest in some kind of future negotiation of the Palestinians versus hardline or even violence towards Palestinian civilian communities.

50:00Do you want peace or do you want Itamar Ben-Gavir? It often, you know, sort of got framed along those terms. Although Israel's right wing had won the day politically, there were still many Israelis who were deeply uncomfortable with the direction the country was going. Enough to fill the streets with protests. But Natasha Roth-Roland and Amjad Araki argue that there were still many voices missing. The most telling thing about them was that they were not protests that involved Palestinians. And the reason for that is that what Israelis were protesting against was not the huge decades upon decades upon decades long oppression of Palestinians or the unjust conditions in the West Bank or anything like that.

50:51They were simply protesting by and large against what they saw as the potential curtailment of their own rights as Jews in a Jewish state. It's not a battle for democracy. It is a battle to maintain at least a little bit more of an image, or to try to reclaim a bit more of an image that we're a democracy, that for Jewish Israelis to convince themselves, because they realize that maybe we took it a bit too far. But Palestinian citizens know full on, no matter who was the head of the coalition, no matter who the judges were in the court, that actually the state always pursued the same objectives against Palestinians.

51:25Sarah Yael Hirshhorn says the divisions on Israel's left and right are fundamental and got to a dangerous point. Really felt like Israel was on the brink of a kind of civil war and people were really worried. And it was starting to happen towards the end of the judicial reform process as things were starting to get a little violent. You know, it was becoming increasingly scary because no one really knew, you know, how this was going to play out. You know, October 7th in some ways, you know, just ended this whole debate because Israel, you know, immediately came together because of this tragedy, but also the necessity of the war effort to unify as a country.

52:06But some of these divisions are still simmering under the surface.

52:17And that's it for this week's show. I'm Randa Abdel-Fattah. I'm Ramtin Arablui, and you've been listening to ThruLine from NPR.

52:53This episode was produced by me. Thanks to Johannes Dergy, Kara West, Tony Cavan, James Heider, Jerome Sokolowski, Edith Chapin, and Colin Campbell. And finally, if you have an idea or like something you heard on the show, please write us at throughline at npr.org. Thanks for listening.