While there is much about the new prime minister Naftali Bennett that is unusual—the small size of his party, the parliamentary gridlock that preceded his formation of the government, the heterogeneity of the coalition he leads—perhaps most noteworthy is that he is the first religiously observant head of Israel’s government. Oddly, his victory signals a loss for both the ḥaredi parties and for the Religious Zionist party that Bennett himself once led, albeit under a different name. Bennett’s chief coalition partner, who will succeed him in two years per a rotation agreement, is Yair Lapid—the embodiment of the secular, liberal Tel Aviv elite. Likewise his other partners include two secular left-wing parties and an avowedly secular right-wing party; the only other religious party in the government is Muslim.
Oren Kessler, writing before Bennett was confirmed in his position, considers the significance of Israel’s first kippah-clad chief executive:
Prime Minister Bennett represents the mainstreaming of religion in the state of Israel’s 73rd year. He aims to unite right and left, devout and secular, the hills of Samaria with the country’s high-tech center. He has long believed religious and right-wing Israelis are the silenced majority, their voices obstructed by left-wing elites in media, the courts, and academia. But he favors honey to vinegar; he wants to bring [the religious West Bank community of] Tekoa to Tel Aviv. If in the process the country’s face becomes a little more religious, a little more right-wing, so much the better.
But [his selection as prime minister] represents a broader acceptance in Israel of religion’s growing presence in the public square. Lapid’s late father headed a party whose core platform was protecting secularism and combating [what it believed to be] religious coercion; as recently as the early 2000s it was the third-largest faction in parliament.
Much water has flown since then, to borrow a Hebrew expression. There were the grim years of the second intifada, the 2005 pullout from Gaza and the surge in rockets that followed, and the crashing failure of the Oslo Accords’ two-state vision. There is no straight or direct line leading from these developments to a Bennett premiership, but there is the feeling, deep and wide across the country, that the future promised by Israel’s historically secular, center-left leadership has proved a mirage.
“I don’t support religious coercion, but I do believe that Judaism is our ‘why;’ Judaism is the reason for our existence and the justification for our existence, and the meaning of our existence,” he once told the liberal journalist Ari Shavit.
Read more on Foreign Policy: https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/06/07/naftali-bennett-israel-first-religious-prime-minister/