David E. Rosenberg
Foreign Policy / September 5, 2024
Just 1 in 10 voters support the far right, which shapes key policies.
On July 29, a day before rioting by anti-immigrant protesters broke out in Britain in the wake of a deadly stabbing attack, dozens of Israeli right-wingers stormed two army facilities to protest the arrest of soldiers for allegedly abusing a Palestinian prisoner. What the two incidents had in common was the role of social media in organizing and fanning the flames of far-right violence and an underlying foundation of populist distrust of government. But they differed in one very important way: In Israel, the protesters were openly backed by some government officials and lawmakers; indeed, at least two Knesset lawmakers and a junior cabinet minister were among the rioters. The events in Israel thus were more analogous to those in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021.
The ordeal in Israel began when military police came to arrest nine reserve-duty soldiers at the Sde Teiman detention facility, where Hamas prisoners are held. Dozens of civilian activists answered calls broadcast on social media to protest and were soon storming the base. Later that day, the rioters moved on to Beit Lid in central Israel, the base where the military court was to hear the charges against the arrested soldiers, and briefly forced their way in.
Rather than expressing concern about a vigilante attack on a military facility, far-right leaders condemned the army. National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, alongside Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, demanded that the military prosecutor “take her hands off the reservists.” The police—which are under Ben-Gvir’s authority—took nearly two weeks before beginning an investigation. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has taken no action against members of his government who took part in the riots.
The Sde Teiman incident was an unusual case of far-right violence inside Israel proper. The West Bank has long been a wild west, with extremist settlers not only directing their attacks against Palestinians but against the army, too, when they feel it is interfering with their interests. That the lawlessness and violence have now spilled over the border into Israel, aided and abetted by some in the government, should come as no surprise: The far-right elements in Netanyahu’s government value chaos not only as a vehicle for promoting annexation of the West Bank but as a means of undermining institutions at home to better secure their grip on power.
How did these extremists come to wield so much power so quickly? The far right in Israel doesn’t have anything close to popular backing for its agenda: In the 2022 election, it captured just 10.8 percent of the vote (considerably less than the 37.1 percent for France’s National Rally and its allies and 23.5 percent for Geert Wilders’s Party for Freedom in the Netherlands, to name two recent European elections). But it has managed to exploit an unusual situation in Israel: a combination of Netanyahu’s political vulnerability and Hamas’s devastating success on Oct. 7, 2023.
Israel has been under almost continuous right-wing rule for the past half-century, but the government formed by Netanyahu at the end of 2022 was right-wing in a very different way. The Religious Zionism and Otzma Yehudit parties, together with much of Netanyahu’s once center-right Likud party, not only take a traditional right-wing hard line on national security issues, but they also distrust the institutions of government and the people who work in them—what, in the United States, Trump supporters call the “deep state.” Everyone from the attorney general and army generals to officials in the Finance Ministry are seen as ideological enemies, perhaps even traitors. Thus, it’s no surprise that when the army, which is ordinarily regarded in Israel as sacrosanct, finds itself in conflict with extremist settlers in the West Bank or rioters at Sde Teiman, the far right sides with the latter.
This worldview is not very different from the anarchical, archly anti-establishment, and paranoid strain of Trumpism. In the Israeli context, however, the religious element is paramount; indeed, it is rare to find people on the extreme right who are not religiously observant. Thus, the far right’s program seeks not only to undermine the country’s liberal and democratic foundation and replace it with a more authoritarian government but to turn Israel into a religious state. Many even hold that the war and violence now besetting Israel will bring the Messiah and redemption. They want to encourage it.
The early months of the Netanyahu government saw the far right try to undermine the state from the inside. The judicial overhaul, which sought to subordinate the judicial system to politicians, was the centerpiece of that campaign. But it was not the only one. Ben-Gvir wrested personal control over the police, turning it into an instrument for protecting the right and repressing anti-government protests. Taking control of civilian affairs in the West Bank, Smotrich unilaterally advanced a policy of de facto annexation, illegal land grabs, and settlement-building.
As far-right leaders have grown more assured of their grip on power, their followers have come to feel freer to take their agenda to the street. There is no evidence that Ben-Gvir and Smotrich are personally directing this violence and vigilantism, but they are encouraging it. Ben-Gvir ensures that the police avoid confronting and investigating far-right violence. He has eased the rules for handing out gun licenses, enabling more than 100,000 to be issued since Oct. 7, in many cases with little or no vetting.
It is unlikely that there is any grand strategy to spread the violence from the West Bank into Israel, but the occupied territories have served as a testing ground. Under the current government, extremist settlers have felt a new sense of empowerment and immunity in the knowledge that many of those in power back them while the rest remain silent. The result is that far-right violence has soared.
The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs estimates that in the first 10 months of the war, settlers were responsible for some 1,250 attacks against Palestinians in the West Bank, of which around 120 led to death or injury. Most of those incidents have been relatively small, but from time to time they involve dozens of rioters or more. The most recent mass rampage occurred on Aug. 15, when some 100 masked settlers stormed the Palestinian village of Jit, shooting, torching vehicles and homes, and throwing stones. One Palestinian was killed. An army investigation revealed that troops arriving at the scene initially failed to stop the rioters, who appear to have included off-duty reserve soldiers, in uniform and carrying army-issued weapons.
There’s no indication that this violence is condoned by a majority of Israelis or even a majority of religiously observant Jews, who make up less than a quarter of Israelis. But none of this matters because the far right has gained control over large swaths of the government. Spurned by the center right, Netanyahu saw the far right as the only way he could return to power in the 2022 election and engineered a merger between Religious Zionism and Otzma Yehudit to ensure that they amassed as many votes as possible. Today, they have the power to make or break the government and have established their authority over the police, the state budget, and West Bank policy. Determined to stay in power at all costs, Netanyahu turns a blind eye to their provocations and their repeated affronts to his authority.
Since Oct. 7, the far right has also set its sights on the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) as another establishment bulwark of secular values. Traumatized by its failures during the Hamas assault of Oct. 7 and preoccupied by fighting the war, the IDF was slow to respond to the surging violence in the West Bank and the penetration of far-right values into its ranks, especially among reservists.
The defense establishment has finally woken up. “Nationalist crime has reared its head under the cover of war and has led to revenge and sowed calamity and fear in Palestinian residents who do not pose any threat,” Maj. Gen. Yehuda Fuchs warned in a parting address to troops in July before stepping down as army chief for the West Bank. In a letter to ministers in August, Ronen Bar, the director of Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service, warned about “vengeful attacks that are sparking another front in the multi-front war we are in; putting more players into the cycle of terror; a slippery slope to the feeling of a lack of governance.” The United States and some other Western powers have also sought to contain the violence by imposing sanctions against known perpetrators.
But the pushback is unlikely to have any profound effect on a government that sees the defense establishment and Israel’s allies as enemies. In any case, the IDF’s hands are largely tied since it’s subordinate to the civilian politicians who are creating the problem to begin with. Inside Israel, the army has no authority to act, and the police now appear firmly in Ben-Gvir’s hands.
Where will it lead? Having gotten away with it once at Sde Teiman and Beit Lid, violent right-wingers will no doubt try to strike again inside Israel. Polls show that Israelis increasingly distrust institutions, and social media can be effective at bringing out crowds. Whether they can scale up the anarchy by enlisting hundreds or thousands of people to join them remains to be seen. The far right has yet to create a mass organization capable of mounting a sustained campaign of chaos. But with its iron grip on power, it might not need one.
David E. Rosenberg is the economics editor and a columnist for the English edition of Haaretz and the author of Israel’s Technology Economy
