Israel’s Right Turn

When Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called last October for elections, it was from a position of confidence and strength. He had already served as Premier longer than all his predecessors except Israel’s founder, David Ben-Gurion. His approval ratings were solid, and his efforts to draw the world’s attention to Iran’s nuclear program were wildly successful. Even so, to all but guarantee that he would return as Prime Minister, Netanyahu kicked off the campaign with an audacious bargain, merging his right-wing Likud party on the ballot with Yisrael Beiteinu, an even more right-wing party controlled by the ultra-nationalist Avigdor Lieberman. The move was planned as a twofer, to lock up the support of Lieberman’s famously loyal voters while pivoting conspicuously in the direction Israeli society has been moving rapidly in recent years: to the right.

Turns out it’s moving faster than Netanyahu thought. Less than a week before the balloting, he was still heavily favored to remain Prime Minister — as the leader of the largest party in a coalition government, as is the norm in Israeli politics — but that is about all that has gone as planned. The story of Israel’s 2013 elections is not Netanyahu’s glide path to victory in his embrace of Lieberman but the incumbent’s bruising by a newly potent rightist force in Israeli politics. One band of energized right-wing activists took over Netanyahu’s party in its primaries, bumping aside more centrist members like Benny Begin, son of Menachem, a former Prime Minister and Likud’s founder. At the same time, a formerly obscure party championing West Bank settlers, Jewish Home, came alive behind a commando turned high-tech entrepreneur named Naftali Bennett, whose campaign activated a secret weapon: a generation of young Israeli Jews who are markedly more conservative and nationalistic than their parents. “If all voters were under 30, we’d be the largest party in Israel,” says Bennett.

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Jewish Home, like Bennett, seemed to come out of nowhere, marketing a “Something New Is Beginning” campaign with a technological sophistication that even rivals speak of with admiration. An Israeli news app on your iPhone is likely to open to an image of Bennett. “Naftali Bennett is a brother,” the campaign ad says, using a term of respect from one soldier to another. The result: Jewish Home is in third place in every poll but one, and in that survey it is tied for second with the Labor Party.

Bennett is in the enviable position of having an impressive CV but a short political career, which gives him the sheen of newness for voters. He was an officer in the elite commando unit Sayeret Matkal, then made a fortune with a software start-up. Only then did he enter politics. After two years as Netanyahu’s chief of staff when Bibi led the opposition, Bennett ran the main settler lobby. In each position, he says, he served as a bridge between the right-wing Orthodox community and Israel’s secular population. Which, he says, are slowly converging. “There’s sort of a big undercurrent for the past, I would say, 15 years in this society of returning to the basic Jewish and Zionist values, but it’s not manifested itself yet, until these elections, in the politics,” Bennett tells TIME.

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Because of what that means for the prospects of a peace deal with the Palestinians, the result could be a watershed election even if voters return Netanyahu to power. Polls have long showed Israelis growing more skeptical of a negotiated peace in the almost 10 years since the brutal second intifadeh ended, and Israel’s 2005 withdrawal from the Gaza Strip produced not a Palestinian renaissance but waves of rocket fire. This, however, is the first campaign to make the sentiment plain. Of the five largest parties, only one, the Movement party of former Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, harks back to reviving the moribund negotiations that much of the world still sees as the only way to bring peace to the region. Center-left parties prefer to thump domestic issues, while in the ascendant right wing the conversation has emphatically moved on from discussions of a deal with the Palestinians.

The primary goal of the surging right now appears to be not making peace with the Palestinians but rather figuring out how best to annex the West Bank. One Likud candidate suggests paying Palestinians $500,000 per family to leave their homes and the West Bank entirely. Jewish Home’s proposal, laid out in a Facebook video, calls for Israel’s annexing most of the West Bank and leaving the remaining 40% — urban areas — to the Palestinians. Such ideas are not likely to be implemented anytime soon. But their serious discussion in the campaign surprised a political class that had grown comfortable with the status quo and with the double-talk that analysts say has made the ongoing stasis palatable to Western powers: lip service to the importance of talks while Israel continues to build settlements.

“We are, at this point, passive,” says Efraim Inbar, who runs the Bar-Ilan University think tank where, in 2009, the recently elected Netanyahu announced he was casting aside his career-long opposition to a Palestinian state. “Let’s manage the conflict and tell the world, ‘Yes, we are in favor of the two-state solution.’ That’s what they want to hear. That’s what Bibi is doing.”

(The West Bank’s 2012: The Year of the Israeli Settlement)

In Washington, where the policy of every Administration since that of George H.W. Bush has been to sponsor or push for peace talks in the hope that the two sides will reach a deal, faith in negotiations lingers even if polls show Israelis are losing interest in compromise. “There’s no doubt you have a generation of young people who don’t remember any handshakes on the White House lawn, of [slain Prime Minister Yitzhak] Rabin’s legacy, of a sense of possibility,” says David Makovsky, a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “This is an Israeli public, a younger public, that has maybe been persuaded by Netanyahu that basically Israel is living through a hurricane when it comes to the Arab Spring, and in a hurricane you can only hunker down in a cellar. America’s rejoinder seems to be ‘That may be true, but if it’s a permanent hurricane, can you live in a cellar?'”

See Richard Stengel’s 2012 TIME Magazine Cover Story on Netanyahu.

See Pictures of Israel and Palestinian Militants Trading Fire.

Backing the Settlers
The most striking evidence of the campaign’s rightward turn is the competition among the parties to support settlements, the Jewish towns whose presence already bars Palestinians from more than 40% of the West Bank. In November and December, Netanyahu’s government announced plans for more homes in East Jerusalem and the West Bank than had been approved in the previous nine years, according to data compiled by Peace Now, a left-wing activist group. The moves, which brought outcries from Europe and Washington, prompted no great dissent in the campaign.

Yair Lapid, a former anchorman, entered politics hoping to rouse the majority of Israelis who consider themselves nonreligious and who historically decide elections. But even Lapid aligned himself with the settlers, many of whom are religious, by unveiling some of the platform of his new Yesh Atid party at an event in the West Bank settlement of Ariel. Talk to the Palestinians, Lapid says, but don’t expect much. And don’t give up Ariel. “I told the BBC, ‘Yeah, right, why didn’t you give back Ireland 100 years ago?'”

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Lapid has carved up Israel’s center-left vote with two other parties — Livni’s Movement party and Labor, the major party that has been historically associated with the peace process. No more. Its new head, Shelly Yachimovich, also a former journalist, has reached out to settlers and talks almost entirely about economic justice. “Because people believe there’s not any hope at this moment, they live in denial and prefer to concentrate on their economic, private lives,” explains Isaac Herzog, Labor’s No. 2. “We were identified with the Palestinian peace narrative forever and kept losing.”

Bennett describes Israel’s steady move rightward as a natural progression. For almost the entire 2,000 years they were scattered across the globe, he notes, most Jews were religious. The late 19th century Zionist movement that produced Israel was a secular, existential mission to create a haven for Jews, who were being persecuted in Europe, especially in Russia. “It was all about a safe shelter, and certainly after the Holocaust it became more relevant,” Bennett says. “But now we’re 64 years old, and the notion of our raison d’être being a safe shelter is not sufficient. Israel is not the safest place in the world for Jews. Melbourne, Australia, is safer. Teaneck, N.J., is safer. We won’t be here to stay if it’s only about shelter. What we’re doing is going back to the sources and moving from existential or security-based Zionism to Jewish-based Zionism.”

(MORE: Is Netanyahu Trying to Make the Two-State Option an Impossibility?)

It helps Bennett, who is 40, that almost two-thirds of Jewish Israelis ages 15 to 24 called themselves right-wing in a 2010 survey. Numerous polls show young Jews are less inclined to grant equal rights to Arab citizens, less likely to support a negotiated peace and more inclined to prefer “a strong leader” over democratic values.

“We’re becoming Sparta,” says Tamir Leon, an Israeli anthropologist who visits schools routinely. “People go into the army. We ask them, ‘Why do you go?’ Forty years ago, they said, ‘To serve my country.’ Twenty years ago, they talked about self-fulfillment. The focus was on himself. Now they say, ‘I want to kill Arabs.’ I ask hundreds of them. Hundreds.”

Gaining Ground
Bennett’s December surge caught Netanyahu’s campaign flat-footed. Israeli elections are tallied in Knesset seats — control of 61 of the 120 available is needed to form a government — and in one monthlong stretch, polls showed the conjoined Likud-Beiteinu bloc was losing a seat a week to Jewish Home. The hemorrhaging got worse when Netanyahu attacked Bennett for saying in an interview that as a military reservist, he could not obey in good conscience an order to evict settlers from their homes should the army be called in to dismantle settlements as part of a peace deal. Swing voters found Bennett’s agonizing more attractive than Netanyahu’s attack.

Danny Danon, a Likud parliamentarian regarded as vehemently pro-settler, shakes his head. “I’m a leftist compared to these people,” he says. He spoke to Time in Petah Tikva, an electoral battlefield city in central Israel where a high school had just hosted a candidates’ debate and mock elections. In the courtyard, a 10th-grader had plastered her body with stickers for both Bennett and Netanyahu. “I’m Naftali and Bibi. I love the right,” says Jordan Zecharia, 16. “I’m looking for a party that will take care of the— “

“Arabs,” says her friend Gal Hachmon. “The security issues need to be finished.”

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Netanyahu’s slate prevailed in the mock elections, though perhaps not by the margin he’s seeking in the real elections. Bibi wants to win big: “Strong Prime Minister, strong Israel” is his slogan. But the incumbent’s campaign, knocked back a few paces when Lieberman was indicted Dec. 30 on fraud charges, was having a tough week. Danon had been with Netan-yahu in northern Israel the day before, when the Prime Minister bristled at people repeating the conventional wisdom that he is a lock. “Stop saying it,” Danon said in frustration after the event, “because if you keep saying it,” people will stray to other parties. “God forbid. It happened in 1996.” That was the year that then Prime Minister Shimon Peres called elections, fully expecting to return to power, only to be blindsided by a challenger from the right. No polls suggest that Bennett could do that this year, but surveys do show an unusually high number of undecided voters. And the risk of underestimating the pace of Israel’s drift to the right should not be lost on the young conservative who prevailed almost 17 years ago. His name: Benjamin Netanyahu.
— with reporting by Aaron J. Klein / Tel Aviv

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