Something strange has been happening to the Israeli Right for decades. It keeps losing people and somehow stays roughly the same size.
The list of defectors is extraordinary.
Ariel Sharon, leading light of the settlement movement, eventually broke with Likud and founded Kadima. Tzipi Livni traveled from Likud to the leadership of the political Center. Ehud Olmert followed the same route. Dan Meridor and Benny Begin, once Likud “princes,” became increasingly alienated from what their party had become.
Moshe Ya’alon went from Likud defense minister to a bitter opponent of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Avigdor Liberman, whose credentials as a dove remain well concealed, became an implacable enemy of the haredi political project.
These days, Gilad Erdan and others are joining the list – and their constituencies are moving with them.
Collectively, they represent a political migration whose significance should be clear. The Israeli Right that formed them was largely secular, nationalist, and security-minded. The Israeli Right replacing it is increasingly religious, messianic, and hostile to the ideals of classical liberalism – the rule of law, citizens’ rights – upon which Israel was built.
The key factor is the demographic accelerator. Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) Israelis have vastly more children, on average, than secular Israelis, while religious Zionists also tend to have larger families.
Every election therefore introduces another cohort into an electorate whose internal balance is slowly changing. Children inherit their parents’ politics often enough that it can be stated that with every religious child born, the Right becomes more religious.
The math is clear. Shas and United Torah Judaism account for some 15 seats in most plausible scenarios. The parties associated with Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, both strongly religious and traditionalist, can contribute roughly another dozen or more.
Likud itself contains a large and growing religious and traditional constituency increasingly defined by the likes of Shlomo Karhi. How long, post-Netanyahu, will Avi Dichter and Nir Barkat survive in this milieu?
Voting patterns show the same sorting. Haredi Israelis overwhelmingly support haredi parties. National-religious Israelis overwhelmingly support the Right, particularly the religious-nationalist parties and Likud. Secular Israelis lean heavily toward the parties opposing Netanyahu.
Religiosity (along with income and educational level) has become one of the most powerful predictors of an Israeli Jew’s political allegiance.
This is why the stability of the Israeli Right is somewhat illusory. Its size can remain remarkably stable while its composition changes radically.
The old secular nationalist Right is gradually being replaced, and the secular voters who once regarded themselves as natural members of the Right are increasingly finding themselves on the other side of the country’s political divide.
That is changing the nature of the “Left” – which, with every Likudnik that switches, becomes less dovish – forcing it to rebrand itself as the “Center.”
Possible faces of the future
Ben-Gvir may already understand where this is going. The right-wing firebrand has spent the past several days under intense pressure from Netanyahu to join forces in the coming election with his far-right rival and fellow religious pol, Smotrich.
Netanyahu has good reason to worry. Every serious poll shows Smotrich’s Religious Zionist Party near or below the electoral threshold of 3.25%, while Ben-Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit is comfortably above it.
Yet Ben-Gvir insists he will run separately. The decision makes considerable sense if he believes Netanyahu’s defeat is already likely and has begun thinking about the battle that follows it. If Ben-Gvir expects the Right to enter the opposition anyway, preserving every possible seat for Netanyahu becomes less important than who inherits the bloc.
Only a few years ago, Netanyahu regarded Ben-Gvir as sufficiently embarrassing that he refused to be photographed with him. Ben-Gvir inhabited the outer fringes of Israeli politics, a disciple of the racist extremist Rabbi Meir Kahane who had been convicted of offenses including supporting a terrorist organization and incitement to racism.
His rise makes greater sense when Netanyahu himself is placed in historical perspective. Netanyahu is a secular politician of an older Israeli type: cosmopolitan, Western, personally unobservant, and ideologically descended from the Revisionist nationalism of the 20th century.
Ben-Gvir looks considerably more like the constituency the Right is becoming: religious, ethnonationalist, impatient with liberal restraints, and comfortable presenting Jewish supremacy throughout the land as an organizing political principle.
Netanyahu may turn out to have been the culmination of the old Israeli right, while Ben-Gvir becomes one possible face of its future.
For Israel as a whole, the consequences extend far beyond the identity of the next leader of the opposition, because the emerging divide concerns the character of everyday life.
Secular conservatives and secular liberals can fight ferociously about taxes, judges, settlements, borders, and military strategy while inhabiting roughly the same social universe. A struggle over whether religious law should shape public life reaches into the basic organization of society.
That change would poison democratic politics in a way ordinary polarization does not.
It is one thing to lose an election based on ideas. It is quite another when elections become closer to a census between tribes that cannot agree on anything.
A secular Israeli who wants public transportation on Shabbat, civil marriage, liberal education, equality for women, universal military, or national service and a Western-style constitutional democracy faces an existential problem if electoral defeat reflects the permanent numerical ascendancy of a population committed to another conception of the state.
At that point, the question becomes how long one population remains willing to be governed by the other.
For the foreseeable future, Israel’s secular and moderately traditional population remains a majority, and it is overwhelmingly economically powerful and central to the country’s military, technological, scientific, and cultural life. But the demographic dynamic is with the religious Right.
The geographical element opens up possibilities. Much of the wealth and productive capacity of modern Israel is concentrated in the secular and religious moderate coastal belt running from the Tel Aviv metropolitan area north to Haifa.
There will be an increasingly glaring mismatch as political power moves steadily toward a faster-growing religious population while a disproportionate share of the country’s economic productivity, high technology, global integration, and liberal culture remains concentrated among a population that finds the direction of the state increasingly intolerable.
Such an Israel may eventually be forced to contemplate arrangements that today sound fantastical: federalism, cantonization, confederal structures – or even partition between a more secular, liberal, and prosperous Israel along the Mediterranean coast and a religious, hyper-nationalist one in the hinterland, Jerusalem, and the West Bank.
That would make sense – but it would also be a small, narrow, and strategically vulnerable coastal entity in one of the most dangerous regions on earth. Viewed through the political sorting that is underway, the religious-secular struggle in Israel is about far more than draft evasion by the haredim. It is a national emergency.
The writer is a former Cairo-based Middle East editor and London-based Europe/Africa editor of the Associated Press. He served as chairman of the Foreign Press Association in Jerusalem and authored two books about Israel.