Analysis | Israel Election: A Quasi-fascist, Ultra-religious Government for a Country That Deserves Better

 Israel News | Israel Election 2022

Analysis | Israel Election: A Quasi-fascist, Ultra-religious Government for a Country That Deserves Better

Alon Pinkas  Nov.04, 2022

With all the votes counted and the coalition talks starting, a far-right, racist and corruption-tolerating government is about to take office

Religious Zionism leaders Bezalel Smotrich (left) and Itamar Ben-Gvir visit Nablus Gate in East Jerusalem, in 2021.Credit: Ohad Zwigenberg

Nov 4, 2022

Israel isn't a far-right/religious country. But soon it will have a far-right/religious government.

Israel isn't an ethnocratic Jewish supremacist country. But soon it will have an ethnocentric government filled with racist Jewish supremacists.

Israel isn't a fascist country, but soon it will have a government that smells a lot like fascism. (See Umberto Eco's list of the 14 common features of fascism.)

Israel isn't an apartheid state. But in a few weeks it will have a government that will set policies and make statements that are sure to stoke the false accusation of apartheid.

Israel isn't a (particularly) corrupt country. But it will inaugurate a government led by a man standing trial on suspicions of bribery, fraud and breach of trust. It will also have a senior minister – Arye Dery, leader of the ultra-Orthodox Shas party – who not only has served jail time for corruption, he was dropped from the cabinet two years ago as part of a plea deal for a new indictment.

Israel isn't a replica of the utopian, liberal, tolerant, egalitarian and inclusive state described in Theodor Herzl’s “Altneuland,” but not in his worst nightmares did Herzl dream of a coalition government in which 45 of the 65 members were religious – with only nine women.

Open gallery view

Shas leader Arye Dery voting on Tuesday.

Shas leader Arye Dery voting on Tuesday.Credit: Oren Ben Hakoon

Beyond sophisticated analyses and number crunching there's an inescapable reality: 50 percent of Israelis voted for a quasi-fascist, ultra-religious, corruption-tolerating coalition. Sure, there are extenuating circumstances that make this outcome logical for some observers, and of course identity politics accounts for the vast majority of those votes. But the bottom line is clear.

Sociologists and political scientists like to talk about Israeli “tribalism” and fragmentation. That's an accurate portrait of the Israeli mosaic. Over the years, Benjamin Netanyahu has conveniently clustered and simplified the divisions: Jews versus Israelis, Jerusalem versus Tel Aviv. In other words, secular, liberal democrats versus the patriotic, nationalist, traditional and religious. He fused nationalism and religion into one voting bloc.

That’s what 50 percent of Israelis voted for. It wasn’t a right-left divide, it remains a divide of democracy versus anti-democracy, liberal versus illiberal.

All the lachrymose, angry, end-of-time commentaries have been written in the last 48 hours. They employ the same self-flagellation that the left and center-left have perfected into an art form. And they're similar to the situation in the United States.

The left that lost and the left that won

Bibi may prefer a radical coalition this time – until he drops Ben-Gvir

If Netanyahu wins a majority, he faces a far right nightmare

The Israeli right always blames the other side for everything. It never apologizes, never rethinks, never relents and always doubles down on “false facts.” The Israeli right’s most useful arguments are “whataboutism” that leads to accusations of insufficient patriotism and the inevitable “treason.”

As in America, the liberal-democratic center-left is always busy with introspection that's a euphemism for self-immolation. And similar to America, every right-wing talking or screaming point begins with “it’s the left’s fault that …”, while every left or centrist conversation begins with “the left’s problem is …” followed by a trashing of the left's politicians. There’s always a lot of culpa, never a mea culpa.

Open gallery view

Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem on election night.

Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem on election night.Credit: Emil Salman

The frustration is real. Look at the numbers. In the election, the Netanyanu bloc won 49.55 percent to 48.92 percent, a difference of well under a percentage point. But if you include the parties just under the electoral threshold – Meretz and Balad – and exclude Ayelet Shaked's Habayit Hayehudi, which came in well below the threshold, the numbers are 48.92 percent for the center-left and 48.36 percent for the right-religious.

All the same, the following is what Israel will get in the new coalition. People who didn’t serve in the military will decide on matters of peace and war. About half the men in this community don't work and pay taxes, but their representatives will be managing the economy. People who broke laws and committed crimes will “reform” the judiciary, and people who never studied history, math or English will run the education system.

Because of what's at stake – democracy, the rule of law and an open society – the 2022 election could arguably eclipse the 1996 vote as a watershed that will shape Israel for years. The circumstances are different; in 1996 it was Shimon Peres running a few short months after the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. He lost by 0.25 percent in a direct election for prime minister, but the effects are similar.

Like America, Israel is toxically divided with dwindling common denominators and a quickly evaporating defining narrative. What the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were for America, Zionism and the Declaration of Independence were for Israel. In both countries, these values are no longer a consensus.

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