The Self-Orientalization of Israeli Politics

IDF soldiers putting on tefillin and tallit for morning prayer before entering Gaza (May 22, 2024) | Elyasaf Jehuda / Shutterstock

Israel has often been described as the only democracy in the Middle East. This perception—flawed and problematic as it is—has been central not only for Israel’s defenders abroad but also for many Jewish Israelis’ self-perception. The power consolidation of an extreme coalition of right-wing political parties in recent years, coupled with the judicial reforms pushed forward by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government before and during the war on Gaza, call Israel’s democratic identity into question. While external observers focus on the widespread protests in Israel or the transformation of its image in the US, much less attention is given to the ominous dynamics of the Israeli public discourse.  

While Netanyahu’s apologists outside Israel, such as Bernard-Henri Lévy and Ben Shapiro, have doubled down on the argument that Israel carries the values of the “Global West” and leads its fight, within Israel, the current war amplified the voices of skeptics who cast doubt on the survivability of liberal democratic values in the Middle East and even reject them.

The religious right in Israel, particularly its hotbed in the occupied territories, has been at odds with liberal democracy and Western values for several decades. The messianic-nationalist forces within the Religious Zionist community have grown stronger since the 1967 war, which was regarded as a miracle marking the beginning of messianic redemption. However, as the Israeli historian Emmanuel Etkes has shown, the widespread opposition to Jewish theocracy among the secular majority forced the leadership of the Religious Zionist minority to work within the parameters of the secular state rather than challenge it and channel their energies toward parliamentary activity on legislation and education. 

The demise of the Zionist left in the past two decades, coupled with the deepening of the occupation in the West Bank, changed the demographic and political balance in the Jewish constituency in Israel, giving rise to new subcultures. Sociologists and cultural researchers noted the rise of a nationalist ultra-Orthodox subculture called Hardalim (a blend of the Hebrew words for ultra-Orthodox and nationalist). This subbranch of Religious Zionists leans toward ultra-Orthodox practices and distance themselves from the pragmatic approach of mainstream religious Zionism while, at the same time, embracing a nationalist ideology that glorifies Zionism, Jewish nationalism, and the state and encourages military service. Another subculture is known as the “Hilltop Youth”—young, primarily religious Jews who have dropped out of educational frameworks and conventional institutions and live in remote outposts or improvised structures scattered around the West Bank. The Hilltop Youth are notorious for often being driven by a radical right-wing ideology, including acts of terrorism against Palestinian neighbors. This group has also developed a dialectical relationship with the state: On the one hand, they are anarchists who reject authority, including that of rabbis, the police, and military officers. On the other hand, they see themselves as successors of the early secular Zionist pioneers, engaging in shepherding or farming—agricultural work symbolizing a rootedness to the land that they believe the urban bourgeoisie lacks.

It is predominantly from these circles that one identifies a growing pushback against the liberal and democratic values of the state. Much as Islamists in the Arab Middle East resent Western cultural influence as “Westoxication,” many on the Jewish right wing scorn “Westernization” (Hitmaarvut or Hityavnut) as an alien implant. Despite the relatively small size of these ultra-nationalist and religious subcultures, their radical ideas spread quickly. Today, this anti-Western attitude is especially common in the circles of the religious right, who possess significant political power. 

The relatively recent mainstreaming of these radical views occurred through multiple channels. One was the establishment of religious study groups (Garin Torani, literally “Torah nucleus”) within secular city centers, alongside a new ideological focus on “settling in the hearts” (the equivalent of the Islamist term Da’wah) to bridge the divide between Religious Zionists and the Jewish liberal-secular public—initiatives that began in the mid-1990s in response to the Oslo Accords. Another key avenue was the growing presence of religious right-wing officers, many of them settlers, in the armed forces. This rise was, in part, the result of the activity of Religious Zionist rabbis, who encouraged their followers to volunteer to special military units and to put in the additional service time required to advance to the officer ranks, so cultivating a narrative that the religious right were replacing a secular elite that had become fatigued, disenchanted, and lacking in ideological zeal. Their influence in combat units and military leadership became so pronounced that former Chief of Staff Moshe (“Bogi”) Ya’alon, later a Likud minister of defense, called for dismantling the prestigious religious pre-military academy in the settlement of Eli (Mechinat Bnei David), accusing it of political subversion.

Israeli media has provided another crucial venue spreading nationalist ideologies. Prominent right-wing TV anchors and political journalists such as Amit Segal, Kalman Libeskind, Yinon Magal, Shimon Riklin, and Erel Segal embrace populist policies hostile toward both Palestinians and liberal Zionists. Analysts of Arab and Palestinian affairs have made a point of their own illiberalism. The most salient example is Zvi Yehezkeli, a correspondent and commentator on Arab affairs who has progressively deepened his religious observance, eventually moving to the extremist Bat Ayin settlement. Yehezkeli, who stated openly years ago that “Jews are the sons of a King and Arabs are the sons of a maid,” called on the Israeli army to kill 100,000 Palestinians in immediate response to October 7. Another case in point is Eliyahu Yusian, a rising extremist analyst of regional affairs, who went on a lecture tour across the country this year called “Stop Talking Westernization.” 

After October 7, and especially in the context of the ground invasion of Gaza, the slogan “We began speaking Arabic” gained a sinister meaning. It appeared as a hashtag on social media and as graffiti reportedly sprayed on the ruins of houses in Gaza; it was even written on an artillery shell in combinations with other various wartime slogans and phrases, such as “You have opened the gates of hell” and “You are messing with the wrong people.” 

The idea behind the slogan was not only that Arabic is the language of the ultimate “Other”—an imagined language of violent threats and terrorism that recognizes no Western norms of fair play or laws and customs of war—but that Israelis had finally learned how to respond to this so-called “Arabic” behavior “in the same language.” The problematic slogan was embraced by the Israeli Christian-Arab Yoseph Haddad, a staunch defender of right-wing Israeli policies who highlights his own Arabic origins. It was also promoted by Ofer Rosenbaum, a marketing and public relations expert, who volunteered his advertising agency, Rosenbaum Communications Group, toward the war effort. The agency produced a series of videos designed to boost soldiers’ morale and intimidate Hamas supporters using this slogan.

Yehezkely, Yusian, and Haddad represent a particular line of thought that has been boosted in Israeli public discourse since October 7. The “Arab mind,” the argument goes, is essentially different from the “Western logic” of Israel. If Israel is to survive in this tough neighborhood, it needs to “start speaking Arabic.” According to this logic, an authoritarian mindset, especially in terms of the conduct of war and crushing of internal opposition, is crucial to preserve Jewish supremacy between the river and the sea. Level-headed people demanding restraint and adherence to the laws of just war are denounced as naïve Westernizers detached from the realities of the region as opposed to the self-described experts who argue that Israel must adopt regional norms. In other words, becoming an “authentic” Middle Eastern nation-state is seen as a survival strategy for Israel.

This evolving discourse marks a voluntary departure from the long-held liberal narratives of Israel’s integration into the region, which revolved around economic incentives, normalization, and establishing diplomatic ties with neighboring countries. This narrative guided Israel’s foreign policy for decades, particularly during the 1990s. It was articulated most succinctly in the The New Middle East, written in 1993 by the former Israeli prime minister and president Shimon Peres, who was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize the following year for the key role he played in designing the Oslo Accords. Despite Netanyahu’s animosity toward Peres and the Oslo process, he deferred to the same neoliberal economic logic to justify the Abraham Accords signed in 2020 between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco. However, for the Netanyahu government and the right wing, the Abraham Accords marked a historic break from the “land for peace” equation of the 1990s: The “Deal of the Century” planned by the first Trump administration and the Netanyahu government earlier that year floated the establishment of clusters of Palestinian municipal authorities in the West Bank and labeling them a “Palestinian State.” In that respect, the transactional economic logic never guaranteed commitment to Western values of humanitarianism and liberal democracy. To a large degree, the signing of the Abraham Accords by powerful Gulf states aligned Israel with authoritarian regimes: a significant step toward the Right’s mission of self-orientalizaton. 

The debates surrounding the war on Gaza shifted the conversation further in the isolationist direction. Netanyahu’s increasing dependency on extremist Jewish supremacist politicians—who were appointed to key positions and can punch beyond their weight category, knowing that they are vital for the survival of his coalition—energizes the self-orientalizing discourse. The pressure of the settlement movement’s call for the annexation of Gaza and the West Bank and the perceived consent these developments will receive from the second Trump administration make this discourse more prevalent.

While the Kremlin and Beijing insist that the West is in decline—both morally and geopolitically—most Israelis, including moderate right-wing Zionists, are not quick to bid it farewell. Nonetheless, accusations of “betrayal by the West” have become more pronounced since the outbreak of the war. These accusations often refer to a perceived lack of sympathy for Israel from American and European colleagues after the October 7 carnage, which the Netanyahu government misconstrues as an antisemitic purge by the international community. A growing number of Israeli media pundits accept, rather than discard, populist narratives of “cultural decay” or caricatures of American culture as a hotbed of “wokeism.” Attempting a complex balancing act, many center-right commentators are homing in on the narrative that despite the West’s ills, Israel is still part of it, and its current war is a battle to preserve the values of the “free world” against the “axis of evil.” Such arguments should be seen as last-ditch efforts to counter the pervasive “self-orientalization” discourse or as a signal aimed at foreign audiences that Israel’s conduct in the war could serve as a template for the West’s future conflicts. 

The West-skeptical and self-orientalizing discourse is likely to increase, given the current trajectory of local and world politics. It is one of the symptoms of the “one-state reality”—a phrase coined by political scientist Ian Lustick to describe the current stage in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in which the Palestinian Authority is practically dismantled and single entity, Israel, effectively controls the entire territory between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. Scholars have only begun mapping the subculture developed in the settlements in the Occupied Territories, which includes daily interactions and violent frictions with Palestinian neighbors and a considerable degree of settler mimicry, whereby Palestinian civic tenets such as the principle of Sumud (steadfastness) that celebrates rootedness and practices aimed at maintaining Palestinian presence on the land are appropriated and imitated by the Jewish settlers. The increasing polarization of Israeli society, especially around the axis of secular-liberal versus religious-illiberal groups, and the growing number of middle-class, predominantly secular Israelis who emigrate overseas has intensified this dynamic.  

Although many in Washington like citing Henry Kissinger, who famously claimed that “Israel has no foreign policy, only domestic policy,” things are far more complicated under Netanyahu, especially at a time of war that depends heavily on US arms. For the Zionist liberals, “integration into the region” used to mean signing peace treaties with Israel’s neighbors based on mutual acknowledgment and respect and reflected at least a willingness to recognize Palestinian rights and end the occupation. However, the politics and society of contemporary Israel are very much different, and so is the international scene. The likelihood of the second Trump administration forcing Israel to move in the direction of a genuine two-state solution is very low. The war has weakened the traditional position of centrist Israeli pundits, foreign policy advisors, and decision-makers who used to stress that Israelis must acknowledge the limitations of their power and seek global engagement with Western powers. An isolationist strand is no longer accepting the assumption that Israel’s international position requires a peaceful political resolution to the Palestinian problem and the expansive plans promoted by the Likud party and religious extremists are taking the lead. In the one-state reality, old liberal Zionist acrobatics trying to balance Israel’s Jewish and democratic dimensions are no longer needed, as the latter collapses under the weight of the former. Procedural norms and regulations that maintain parliamentary democracy are scrutinized and dismissed as foreign imports alien to the “Jewish” state, especially if they check or slow expansionist utopias. Israeli diplomatic efforts have long tried to maintain a “double-speak” of alliance with the West while bypassing the Palestinians. In recent years, the Netanyahu regime seems to have formed an alliance with authoritarian powers in the region and beyond based on similar worldviews and shared political values. Self-orientalizing, West-skeptical rhetoric might very well be Israel’s future language.