Something troubling has happened in Israel. The previous government, before it collapsed earlier this month, had been remarkable for its glorious diversity, both political and ethnic. Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid shared a rotating prime ministership, presiding over a coalition of parties spanning the entire political spectrum. It was the first administration to include Arab parties; when I met him last year, Issawi Frej, the country’s first Arab minister, told me that he firmly rejected Amnesty’s ‘apartheid Israel’ slur, and envisioned a role for himself in building on the Abraham Accords. Now here was a country that it felt good to defend. The Jewish diaspora loved all this, hailing Israel at its best.
The return of Benjamin Netanyahu two weeks ago swept this tolerant, pragmatic mosaic away. In its place now stands a right-wing majority; slender by the standards of many countries, but pretty conclusive for the Israeli proportional representation system, which has been gridlocked for years. Netanyahu relied on stimulating a high voter turnout, followed by coalition-building and horse-trading to achieve his majority. Above all, he relied on support from the far-right Religious Zionism alliance, which rocketed from 225,000 votes in March last year to 516,000 votes this month, taking it from ninth-largest to third-largest party.
As Netanyahu draws up his cabinet, he will have no choice but to offer plum positions to its rabble-rousing leaders, Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich. Both these characters are highly divisive, to say the least. Ben-Gvir believes that non-Jews should not have voting rights in Israel and has described Israeli Arabs as ‘enemies of the state’; Smotrich, a self-confessed ‘proud homophobe’, has advocated the separation of Arab and Jewish women in maternity facilities.
There can be no defending that.
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