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Notes -
A couple of weeks ago, the NYT Magazine had a long in-depth article about certain factions of Israeli society who tend toward violence against Palestinians. If you ignore the click-baity title of the article, the body seems mostly descriptive, and like the sort of investigative journalism I want to see more of. It's not an overview of the entire conflict, not about the Palestinians, and mostly not about the many Israelis who don't do this. It focuses on groups connected to Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, and their respective Mafdal-Religioius Zionism and Jewish Power parties, which together have 11.67% (14/120) of seats in the Knesset and got 10.84% of the votes in the last election back in November 2022. (Ignoring the existence of Noam for simplicity.)
The upshot seems to be that there's an active minority of Israelis who are intentionally engaging in hostilities against Palestinians, and who are subverting attempts to mitigate those hostilities. The only comparisons that come to mind are areas where gangs and mafia have hollowed out the state, and the example of the US South after the Civil War, working around Reconstruction. Since the number is at least 10%, we have to assume that they're present at most levels of civil society and the military.
Then there were these tweets from Haaretz, about the IDF command losing control over some units. It didn't sound like full "Apocalypse Now" donkey-slaughtering, but still worrisome.
(And there was the IDF reservist who posted a video which effectively threatened mutiny. Of course, it would be wrong to judge an entire group based on the most extreme thing one of them posted online.)
I've got questions in two main areas.
First, how accurate is all this? This stuff passes my "bounded distrust" filter: it seems plausible from what I know of human nature and society, matches what information I have about conditions in Israel and the settlements, and makes sense of some contradictions I'd been seeing regarding the Gazan war. But I'm hoping that people who know more (@Dean seems like one) will chime in. Maybe I'm suffering from Gell-Mann amnesia.
Second, assuming this is roughly accurate, what the heck does Israel do about it? More generally, how can a state recover when a substantial minority refuses to go along with its orders? As anarchists delight in telling anyone who'll listen, a lot of what we think of as "government" is a consensual hallucination. There's fiction about what happens when people say "I won't" or "mind your own business" or "fuck off", but how often does it happen in real life? If we're supposed to "never give an order that won't be obeyed", where does that leave legitimacy when 10% won't obey certain types of orders? Maybe an Israeli Eliot Ness could put together a modern day group of Untouchables, but (going by vote totals) there's over 500,000 Israelis who at least nominally support this agenda. And the political factions that represent them are in the government coalition.
Not only is this Gell-Mann amnesia, it's the literal ur example of it. You don't trust the NYT when they imply (never outright say) that MAGA republicans want to destroy American democracy, so why do you trust them with the equivalent reporting on another country? Do you understand Israeli politics well enough to know why ~10% of the Israeli population will vote religious-right regardless of who's leading it? Probably not, and it would take actually living here to get it.
The equivalent is if a European would think that 50% of Americans want to turn the US into literal hands-maid tale. It's a not-even-wrong level understanding.
I'm always interested in learning more about the domestic politics of other countries. What are some things you think are important to understand that media outlets like the NYT don't tell people?
Politics is a bit similar everywhere, in that people don’t actually vote on policy and the resulting government is nobody’s 1st choice. But when reporting on Israel, suddenly this fact is forgotten.
Israeli politics is tribal, and foreigners don’t understand the tribal landscape. The religious right gets most of its power from the “zionist religious” portion of the population, which is mostly a religious caste. There’s competition over who gets to wield this power, but it’s basically a constant portion of the population that they get to “represent”. That’s with a small caveat, that Likud also has representation from the religious right these days so they’ve also started siphoning those votes a bit.
What's the tribal landscape like? It it Ashkenazi vote one way while Mizrahi vote another way, or do things split in some other way?
Complex. I’ll try to simplify as much as possible, and keep in mind these are general statements that obviously won’t apply to every individual voter.
First order: Jewish or Arab. Arabs vote for Arab lists (or the Arab list when they unify). Other groups are slightly represented in Jewish parties, but are very minor blocs anyway.
Second order: Jewish religiosity. There are several factions, but in general various Mizrahi-Haredi vote Shas, various Ashkenazi-Haredi vote Yehadut HaTorah (or don’t vote at all, if they’re anti-Zionist), Zionist Religious vote whatever current flavor of Zionist Religious list in this cycle or Likud. Secular and Traditional are the remaining majority.
Third order: Left-Right. This is almost meaningless in terms of policy, and doesn’t conform well to the American Left-Right dynamic, despite that influence continuously seeping in. For example, the right-coded government just implemented food stamps, and the left-coded Meretz stated they’d lower taxes last cycle (they didn’t get in). In broad strokes, ‘right’ leans slightly Mizrahi, slightly poor, rural-but-not-farming, urban poor, and a hawkish rhetoric. Left is the opposite: urban middle-class, rural-farmer and kibbutzim, slightly Ashkenazi, rhetoric can be anything re: Arabs. There are more flavors of left and centre to choose from than right, since Likud ate up most of the right (and is now being eaten from the inside by various pressure groups).
Cool!
If i can bother you for more info - what tribal allegiances have shifted as Israel has moved to the right? E.g. who do all the people who used to vote Labour vote for now?
I don’t know if I’m qualified enough to give you a good answer, to be honest. Labour was strongest before I was born, I wasn’t there to see it.
As far as I can tell, the Israeli left gradually lost power both due to demographic changes and because socialism in Israel failed economically. The biggest turning point was in the late ‘70s when labour lost the plurality vote for the first time, following… a whole bunch of stuff, really. Wiki has a long list under ‘history’ on the 1977 election. As I understand it, and again I wasn’t there, hyper-inflation was one of the biggest factors here. Older people tell of going back to a barter system for some items.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1977_Israeli_legislative_election
I’d say the second biggest inflection point was the stabilization program in the mid 80’s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1985_Israel_Economic_Stabilization_Plan
After the Labour-led government distanced itself from socialism in practice, it lost the ideology it was previously offering. Today Labour is less socialist than Shas, and mostly serves as a vehicle for whoever wins leadership there to enter politics. Case in point, Yair Golan just won leadership of Labour - two years ago he lost when trying to gain leadership in Meretz. He just won because he’s perceived as a hero (rightly, I think) due to his actions on October 7.
The same tribe who used to vote Labour today vote for Yesh Atid (Yair Lapid) or Benny Gantz (I don’t even remember his party’s bame off the top of my head). They’re both kinda generic ‘centre’ parties, saying they like good things and dislike bad things. It’s not a good time for Israeli politics, honestly. The tribe’s biggest issue is that they (we?) don’t have as many children as everyone else, so over time the left-urban section of the population has lost a lot of electoral power.
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