Marc Champion: Is Israel strong enough to go it alone?

It is a tragedy for Israelis and Palestinians alike that the state of Israel happens to be home to two extraordinarily charismatic populist politicians. The first is Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The second is his national security minister, Itamar Ben Gvir.

The word tragedy is cheapened by misuse, but in this case it fits — not only because of the scale of the damage that Israel’s government has already done since coming to power in 2022, but because should the pair win re-election later this month, the damage can only deepen and will likely become irreversible.

By any measure, another Netanyahu victory should be inconceivable. Both he and Ben Gvir were in charge of Israel’s security on Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas succeeded in what should never have been possible: a massed attack on Israeli soil by a vastly inferior military force.

The prime minister and his government have since blamed everyone but themselves for the manifest policy and security failures of that day, while at the same time blocking the full public inquiry that could credibly establish what went wrong and whether — as recent reporting suggests — Netanyahu ignored warnings. And yet opinion polls suggest this will be a tight race. And that was before the president of the United States put his hand on the scales by endorsing the incumbent.

To a visitor, there is a head-snapping paradox in the way Israelis talk about this vote, agreeing simultaneously that it is the most consequential in the modern state’s history and likely to change little. On big issues such as ending wars or addressing the Palestinian question, the major candidates either aren’t far apart or have no magic solution to offer. The election is seen here as being less about any specific policy change than the nature and future of Israel itself. It’s a question so polarizing that when Israelis were surveyed this year about what threat they feared most, the winner was civil conflict among themselves, narrowly edging out a nuclear-armed Iran.

Which Israel?

Will this country cling to the intentions of its founding leaders, that it should at once be a Jewish homeland, a safe haven from persecution and an outpost of secular, liberal democracy in the Middle East? Or will it become another religious-nationalist, managed democracy, more akin to Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey or Vladimir Putin’s Russia? Make no mistake, that is the direction of travel.

The concern of many opposition voters is that if the current coalition receives a fresh mandate to rule, Israel will accelerate down the ethno-nationalist path it has taken under Netanyahu, Ben Gvir and their coalition partner Bezalel Smotrich, the country’s far-right finance minister.

A less widely appreciated risk is the swiftness with which Israel could find itself diplomatically and economically isolated. That potential was already signaled in the decision by UK Foreign Minister Ed Miliband — whose father escaped the Nazis and whose grandfather died in the Holocaust — to sanction goods from the West Bank in protest against Jewish settler violence against Palestinians there.

“You haven’t seen anything yet” in terms of the international punishment Israel will face should Netanyahu be re-elected, former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told me. Nor in terms of the radicalism of cabinet members who, unlike the prime minister, are driven by a deep messianic belief system. “You are talking about people who have a strategy, a concept, which is the realization of the promise of God,” Olmert said.

It’s unclear to secular, liberal Israeli parents whether their children would stay if Netanyahu and Ben Gvir win. These younger, educated Israelis are the engine and fuel for Israel’s tech-driven economy. They will provide the taxes that pay for the country’s outsized military and subsidize the fast-growing population of ultra-Orthodox Jewish Israelis who are exempt from military services and rarely work, not least because their religious schooling omits sciences, secular history and more than basic math.

The Fourth Quarter

Israelis are well aware that their state is young and its survival can’t be taken for granted. Jews may have spent more than a thousand years in the Holy Land, but Israel existed as a united, fully sovereign nation only for two short periods previously, folding after about 80 years in both cases as internal divisions made those states vulnerable to attack.

Israel’s third incarnation is now in its 79th year. The Fourth Quarter, a social movement formed in 2022 for fear that rising political polarization risked again preventing Israel from making it to 100, now has about 170,000 members. Arguably, Hamas attacked on Oct. 7, 2023, after months of Israeli mass protests against Netanyahu’s plans to weaken democratic oversight by the judiciary, to exploit exactly that weakness born of disunity. It’s over how to respond to this existential threat that Israelis are now so bitterly divided.

“It is a total revolution!” Ben Gvir’s interpreter, fellow Knesset candidate and political alter-ego Yishai Fleisher told an energized crowd of English-speaking newcomers to Israel at a small campaign rally for the two men in Tel Aviv last week. He was talking about his boss’s past and coming achievements in office.

Ben Gvir represents a rising tide of religious nationalists in Israel, who believe their nation’s rights and borders are determined by God and history alone. In this messianic worldview, settlers in the West Bank (including the so-called Hill Top Boys) are not stealing Palestinian property. They’re just taking what is rightfully theirs.

Ben Gvir, who has put at least 300,000 weapons into the hands of Israeli civilians, many of them settlers, told the crowd he had no problem whatsoever with Palestinians who respect Israel’s rights, only jihadists. In fact, Fleisher told me later that if Ben Gvir lived in Texas, he’d be considered a typical law-and-order Republican.

But Texas is not the Holy Land, and the jihadist accusation is applied so widely that it’s hard to see any line drawn. “When Arab storefronts in the old city of Jerusalem sell cups and key chains with images of a state of Palestine on them, that is a swastika,” Fleisher told me later. “It’s about the eradication of Israel.”

Ben Gvir’s Appeal

Ben Gvir’s world is an upside-down realm in which the things that cause horror elsewhere become points of pride. He is, for example, proud to have destroyed the homes and villages of Bedouins in the Negev desert and elsewhere, because they were illegal (the state refused planning permission) and in his view were hotbeds for future terrorists. He’s happy to publicly call for Israel to “encourage” the voluntary emigration of Palestinians, not just from Gaza but also the West Bank. Should this succeed, it would not be voluntary and would amount to ethnic cleansing.

He was equally proud to have introduced Jewish prayer to the Temple Mount, located within the compound of Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque, contrary to rules that were set to keep the peace in 1967. That arrangement, he told his audience, had been “apartheid,” allowing Muslim but not Jewish prayer at a place sacred to both. No doubt this was discriminatory, but apartheid is a term more often applied to the limitations Israel places on Palestinian rights and liberties in what international law considers occupied territory.

Likewise, Ben Gvir boasts of his success in making Israel’s prisons — which he runs — harsher places for terrorists to serve time. Human rights organizations say this involves routine torture. He said it was about ending the reward of murderers with a “Club Med” of fresh meat, fruit and exercise. He was proud, too, to defy the judicial institutions on which Israel relies almost entirely for its democratic checks and balances. Like all populist leaders, he calls these constitutionally mandated institutions part of a “deep state” that frustrates “the will of the people.”

Perhaps most telling, though, is that Ben Gvir is also proud to declare himself a supporter of Meir Kahane, the profoundly racist New York-born Orthodox rabbi who called for the imposition of religious law in Israel and the enslavement or expulsion of all Palestinians from the Holy Land. His followers killed dozens of Palestinians and others. Kahane was jailed multiple times in both the U.S. and Israel on charges related to terrorism, until his eventual assassination in 1990.

Listening to the chatter among Ben Gvir’s audience, his attraction was clear: Amid all the intractable problems Israel faces, here was a politician unafraid to say what he thought needed to be done, and to do it. He was crystal clear that the future of the West Bank — or Judea and Samaria, as he and many other Israelis call it — is a God-given part of the Land of Israel and will never be a Palestinian state.

But the Palestinians, like Israel’s Arab and Iranian neighbors, are going nowhere, which is one reason the Palestinian question — whether in Gaza or the West Bank — hasn’t been much of an election issue.

Even so, before re-electing Netanyahu or Ben Gvir (he says he wants the job of defense minister next time), Israeli voters should ask themselves this question: Can their country remain secure for their children and grandchildren if they achieve their goals at the expense of a strong economy and international isolation?

Nothing would fall apart immediately, of course. The country might for a time seem stronger than ever as it fights forever wars on multiple fronts. But for how long?

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This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Marc Champion is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Europe, Russia and the Middle East. He was previously Istanbul bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal.

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