The Israeli right: authoritarianism and ethnic supremacy

https://progressivepost.eu/spotlights/the-israeli-right-authoritarianism-and-ethnic-supremacy

To understand Israel properly, one must get to know the political right, its characteristics, components, and the changes it has undergone in recent years. The right has been in power since 1977, save for the brief terms of Yitzhak Rabin (1974–77, 1992–95) and Ehud Barak (1999-2001) as prime ministers. It has been a partner in and leader of Israeli governments, shaping domestic and foreign policies. The structural and ideological shifts on the Israeli right express to a large extent a sea-change that has swept Israeli society in recent decades, and that is still under way.

Adopting radical neo-liberalism

Israel was founded by workers’ parties and labour organisations from the left. As such, it evolved into a welfare state inclined to socialism and embracing solidarity. The rise of the right in the late 1970s brought about economic change that reflected the trending neo-liberal capitalism around the globe. In Israel, as in other countries, this generated increasing privatisation, eroded the public sector, weakened labour unions, and resulted in growing inequality. Capital was increasingly concentrated in the hands of few wealthy individuals and families, which shape the economy, the media, politics, and, to a growing extent, Israeli society by and large. It is therefore hardly surprising that the criminal indictments against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stem from his ties with business and media tycoons.

Abandoning liberal ideas

While the Israeli right adopted neo-liberal economic principles, it abandoned the liberal underpinnings of these principles, especially over the past decade. The basic concepts of human and civil rights, a substantive component of the Likud party’s ideology in its early days, was subsumed by ideological and political considerations. The marginalisation of human and civil rights makes it easier to justify occupation, and allows the right to question the legitimacy of Israeli Arab voters and thus make it more difficult for them to join up with the political left to provide an alternative to right-wing rule. It also lays the groundwork for the formation of a right-wing coalition of non-liberal parties, leaving the concepts of human and civil rights as the purview of the political left. Liberal voices within the Likud party, such as former ministers Benny Begin and Dan Meridor or President Reuven Rivlin, have been cast aside. Right-wing governments labelled human rights organisations as ‘traitors’ and adopted legislation and a public discourse designed to undermine their legitimacy, funding, and freedom within the public arena.

The rule of law is yet another fundamental liberal principle targeted by the right. The new Israeli right finds Israeli and international law, based on a liberal world view, disruptive. The law gets in the way of the Israeli settlement enterprises and the occupation. While Israeli courts have used various tactics to successfully whitewash the settlement enterprise, for example differentiating between so-called legal and illegal settlements and thereby greenlighting the whole settlement enterprise, these rulings do not satisfy the nationalist proponents of a Greater Land of Israel, especially when the court rules in favour of Palestinians whose human rights are violated by the occupation. The law is also a thorn in the side of the Israeli plutocracy, and it seeks to protect individual rights against the power of the majority. It battles corruption and therefore personally threatens leaders on the right who have run afoul of the law: Netanyahu, two leading ultra-Orthodox politicians – Yaakov Litzman of the United Torah Judaism Party and Shas party chair Aryeh Deri, Likud Members of the Knesset David Bitan and David Amsalem, and others. For all these and other reasons, the Israeli right seeks to weaken and undermine the courts, the police, the state prosecution and the justice system, which serves as basic building blocks of the liberal order.

A non-liberal coalition on the right......

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