The Culture Wars Return to Israeli Politics

Feb. 26 2015

As Israel’s major political parties have grown closer on the key issues of security and the economy, other divides are surfacing. These divides, according to Haviv Rettig Gur, hark back to the decades when the left dominated Israel’s government, culture, and society, while the right spoke for the poor, the religious, Mizraḥim, and other non-elite groups. The current electoral campaign suggests that these old cleavages have not disappeared:

[S]upport for the political center-left is concentrated in “large cities,” . . . precisely where Israeli conventional wisdom suggests, while the right is stronger in the geographic and social peripheries, just as it was in [Menachem] Begin’s day. Much has changed over the past five decades, but some of the most basic patterns of Israeli political identity have remained intact.

So when the Likud campaign declares the race to be between “us” and “them,” between patriots and “anti-Zionists,” the explicit personal attack against Isaac Herzog and Tzipi Livni is only half the story. There is a larger “them” in the right’s political imagination, nebulous, shifting, but undeniably there. Despite ruling Israel for thirteen of the past nineteen years, with Netanyahu himself serving as premier for nine of those, Likud leaders still appeal to the not-yet-forgotten memory of exclusion by that adversary.

Similarly, when the [religious-Zionist] Jewish Home party bases its entire election campaign on the slogan “We don’t apologize anymore,” it too is speaking to this older culture war, the sense that the religious right’s narrative has been shunted aside for too long by the disenfranchising elitism of the left.

These identity politics are less helpful to the left. The party perhaps most clearly identified with socialist politics and a robust welfare state is Meretz, yet Meretz is also the party with arguably the least appeal to the very poor and disenfranchised who loom so large in its ideological narrative. . . . Rightly or wrongly, the party is widely perceived as too secular, too centered on Tel Aviv’s northern suburbs, [and] too Ashkenazi.

Read more at Times of Israel

More about: Israel & Zionism, Israeli politics, Likud, Menachem Begin, Meretz, Mizrahi Jewry

American Middle East Policy Should Focus Less on Stability and More on Weakening Enemies

Feb. 10 2025

To Elliott Abrams, Donald Trump’s plan to remove the entire population of Gaza while the Strip is rebuilt is “unworkable,” at least “as a concrete proposal.” But it is welcome insofar as “its sheer iconoclasm might lead to a healthy rethinking of U.S. strategy and perhaps of Arab and Israeli policies as well.” The U.S., writes Abrams, must not only move beyond the failed approach to Gaza, but also must reject other assumptions that have failed time and again. One is the commitment to an illusory stability:

For two decades, what American policymakers have called “stability” has meant the preservation of the situation in which Gaza was entirely under Hamas control, Hizballah dominated Lebanon, and Iran’s nuclear program advanced. A better term for that situation would have been “erosion,” as U.S. influence steadily slipped away and Washington’s allies became less secure. Now, the United States has a chance to stop that process and aim instead for “reinforcement”: bolstering its interests and allies and actively weakening its adversaries. The result would be a region where threats diminish and U.S. alliances grow stronger.

Such an approach must be applied above all to the greatest threat in today’s Middle East, that of a nuclear Iran:

Trump clearly remains open to the possibility (however small) that an aging [Iranian supreme leader Ali] Khamenei, after witnessing the collapse of [his regional proxies], mulling the possibility of brutal economic sanctions, and being fully aware of the restiveness of his own population, would accept an agreement that stops the nuclear-weapons program and halts payments and arms shipments to Iran’s proxies. But Trump should be equally aware of the trap Khamenei might be setting for him: a phony new negotiation meant to ensnare Washington in talks for years, with Tehran’s negotiators leading Trump on with the mirage of a successful deal and a Nobel Peace Prize at the end of the road while the Iranian nuclear-weapons program grows in the shadows.

Read more at Foreign Affairs

More about: Iran, Middle East, U.S. Foreign policy