The Ascendance of Ethno-National Populism in Israel: A Comparative Analysis

• In Event: Democracy and Populism

Abstract

In the elections to the 25th Knesset held in Israel on November 1, 2022, three populist political parties – Likud, Shas, Religious Zionism – together won fifty-seven seats out of 120, just short of an absolute majority. This achievement was part of world-wide populist upsurge – from India to Argentina, from Turkey to the United States. As I understand it, populism is not a coherent ideology, not even a “thin” one, but rather a rhetorical device of political mobilization in formally democratic societies. The key concept populism shares with nationalism is “the people.” The two differ, however, in that for nationalism the people are defined through vertical inclusion and horizontal exclusion – by formal citizenship or by cultural-linguistic boundaries – whereas populism defines the people through both vertical and horizontal exclusion, by ascriptive markers as well as by class position (“elite” vs. “the people”) and even by political outlook.
In Israel the underlying causes of the populist success are different than in most other industrially developed countries. In the West ethno-national populism is conventionally assumed to feed on economic and/or cultural insecurity caused by deindustrialization, immigration, or the empowerment, real or imaginary, of an outside group characterized by ascriptive attributes. Israel, however, does not accept non-Jewish immigrants to any significant extent, and ethno-national populism has persisted and gathered strength there through bad and good economic times for its base. What, then, are the reasons behind the successful populist mobilization in Israel? My argument, based, inter alia, on an attitude survey conducted right before the 2022 elections, is that, unlike in the US and Europe, in Israel ethno-national populism does not feed on economic deprivation or cultural fear of immigration, but on a combination of both negative and positive factors:
• Resentment among Mizrachim (Jews originating in the Muslim world), who constitute a significant segment of the populist electoral base, against the Ashkenazy (European)-dominated Labor Zionist Movement which governed the country at the time of their arrival in the 1950s and 1960s, and a resultant quest for recognition.
• Resource competition with the Palestinians at both the working- and middle-class levels.
• Existential insecurity that is common to all Israeli Jews because of the protracted Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
• Neo-liberalism, introduced in 1985, after initially hurting Mizrachim economically, has subsequently benefited many of them.
• Much of this beneficial effect occurred under Israel’s foremost populist leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, as Prime Minister.

The anti-liberal judicial reform planned by the newly elected populist government since January 2023 was halted (temporarily?) by the still ongoing war that ensued from the massacre carried out by Hamas in southern Israel on October 7, 2023. If my argument is valid, the war and the potentially revived judicial reform will further enhance the fortunes of the populist forces in Israel.

Author

• Yoav Peled, Tel Aviv University