My Relocation from Israel’s Right to Its Center
Ideology in the Jewish state is not at all the same as in America.
Thirty-eight years ago, when I moved to Israel from the US, I identified as a US conservative, and it seemed natural to affiliate with the Israeli right. I kept doing so until a few years ago, when I redefined myself as belonging to the Israeli center—while remaining, in the US context, a conservative. How could that be?
The answer is that the right-left terms don’t actually have the same meaning in Israel as in the US. But first, a recap.
In 1993, a phenomenon emerged in Israel known as the “Oslo process”—a supposed peace process between Israel and the Palestinians, with the latter represented by Yasser Arafat and his PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization). Up until then—having moved here in 1984—I’d kept aligning with the Israeli right, though sometimes feeling discomfort about it. From that point, as the “Oslo process” got underway, my Israeli right-wing identity intensified and got quite fierce for a while. And there was good reason for it.
In brief, the “Oslo process” divided Israeli society quite bitterly along the left-right line. The left believed the “process” was genuine and would lead to peace; the right did not, pointing to evidence that Arafat and the PLO had not really changed in their fundamental hostility to Israel. The right was all too right; the “process” enabled a major spike in Palestinian terror attacks in the mid-‘90s, and then, from 2000 to 2004, a horrendous terror onslaught known as the Second Intifada—from which the Israeli “peacenik” left emerged tattered and severely depleted to this day.
But even back then, broadly speaking, there were two different modes of opposing the “process,” even if the distinction was obscured by the political passions.
The first mode was territorial: opposition, usually (not always) on a religious basis, to any territorial compromise involving Judea, Samaria, and Gaza. The second was pragmatic: not opposition to territorial compromise per se, but to a “process” in which the “partner” was a sworn, incorrigible enemy like Arafat. (Of course, territorial opponents were also aware that Arafat hadn’t changed.)
Indeed, since Israel’s conquest of territories in the 1967 Six-Day War, “right,” “left,” and “center” had been defined primarily on the question of what to do with those territories—and that continues to be the case today. The Israeli left used to be socialist, but now just about everyone agrees that the right formula is a free market (i.e., capitalism) with a social safety net. Issues that bitterly divide America, like abortion and transgenderism, are almost totally absent from the Israeli polemical map. Religion-and-state issues do occupy Israel, but they have their own dynamic and don’t divide clearly along a right-left line.
Meanwhile, in the post-Oslo (i.e., post–Second Intifada) years, I increasingly admitted to myself that I wasn’t so comfortable with my “right-wing” identity. “My” party, the mainstream-right Likud, included both pragmatic and territorial right-wingers, but was closely aligned with farther-right territorial parties. Indeed, Likud often seemed to play the role of cheerleader for those parties and their activists, who believed in settling and eventually annexing all of Judea and Samaria with their almost-three-million deeply antagonistic, unassimilable Palestinian Arabs.
At the same time, with the Israeli peacenik and/or socialist left relegated to one or two fringe parties, the Israeli “left” increasingly took the form of larger parties that were realistic about the enemies we face, endorsed a free market, and were essentially centrist. The only remaining difference between these parties and the Likud pragmatists was that—if a genuine peace partner on the Palestinian side were to emerge, which remains, for now, a very hypothetical scenario—some of the “center-left” politicians would probably be willing to take greater territorial risks than the more cautious Likudniks.
The upshot for me was that when, in 2018, former chief of staff Benny Gantz announced the formation of a new party, now called the National Union in English, I came to realize that it suited me better than Likud. Though the National Union is an eclectic party and includes a couple of territorial right-wingers, its basic line is set by Gantz and entails a hawkish-realistic outlook on our security issues, with a readiness in principle for cautious territorial compromise if a moderate interlocutor were to emerge, and without any affiliation with the far-right parties.
In Israeli terms, that’s me. And it’s quite compatible with—though not the same as—an American stance that’s pro-defense, pro–free market, and mostly conservative on social issues.
This picture has sharpened for me in recent months as Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu has aligned his party with a couple of very-far-right, territorial-maximalist parties from whose outlook I strongly dissent. Meanwhile, Gantz’s National Union has turned into the most popular party in polls. What Israel needs, in my view, is a centrist coalition based on National Union, Likud (which still has a lot of pragmatists), and Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid, which will represent the Israeli mainstream and should be able to run Israel’s security, economic, and diplomatic affairs pragmatically and sensibly.
