This week’s elections in Israel have cemented the rise of the country’s far right, with arsonist Itamar Ben-Gvir set to occupy a powerful position in government.
After waging a vigorous campaign focused on security and Jewish identity, Ben-Gvir celebrated as his Religious Zionism alliance achieved third place – and likely kingmaker status – in the November 1 vote.
“It is time we went back to being masters of our house in our country,” he told jubilant supporters on Wednesday after exit polls showed the nationalist bloc had more than doubled its parliamentary seats.
Religious Zionism is expected to play a central role in a new coalition led by Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s veteran leader whose right-wing Likud received the most votes.
Securing the prime ministerial post for Netanyahu – who faces corruption allegations he denies – is impossible without the support of Ben-Gvir and his religious Zionism ally, the more discreet Bezalel Smotrich.
According to the electoral commission late Thursday, the right-wing bloc won a clear majority of 64 seats — 32 seats for Netanyahu’s Likud party, 18 for ultra-Orthodox parties and 14 for religious Zionism.
This gives the far right unprecedented clout and ensures Ben-Gvir’s transformation from political pariah to ruler.
According to researcher Yossi Klein Halevi, such a shift was orchestrated by political puppeteer Netanyahu.
“Netanyahu whitewashed the far right he needed for his coalition, and so many Israelis just saw it as a harder version of the Likud,” said Halevi of Jerusalem’s Shalom Hartman Institute.
– Religious hardliners –
Ben-Gvir lives in a religious hard-line settlement in Hebron in the occupied West Bank, but has tried to moderate his public appearances in the run-up to the election.
“When I said 20 years ago that I wanted to expel all Arabs, I no longer believed it. But I won’t apologize,” he told AFP ahead of the vote.
Before entering the political mainstream, Ben-Gvir hung in his living room a portrait of Baruch Goldstein, the Israeli who killed 29 Palestinian worshipers at a mosque in Hebron in 1994.
The image was removed before he entered parliament last year, but Ben-Gvir still appears regularly at hotspots of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
As a policymaker, he has set himself the goal of annexing the West Bank and ensuring that the Israeli security services use more force to quell the Palestinian unrest.
The United Nations says the past few months have been the deadliest in years in the West Bank, with almost daily raids by the army and an increase in clashes and attacks on Israeli forces.
Regardless of whether such moves are backed by the Likud or their other coalition allies, ultra-Orthodox parties, Netanyahu will have to make some concessions to religious Zionism to maintain their support.
“Netanyahu will have a hard time controlling his new partners,” Halevi said.
“Because he will be obliged to them to pass legislation that will exonerate him from his corruption process,” added the researcher, who wrote a book about his own attraction to Jewish extremism as a teenager.
– “More violence and humiliation” –
For Shlomo Fischer, sociologist at the Jewish People Policy Institute in Jerusalem, the poll results follow a long-term phenomenon.
“Israeli society is becoming more right-wing and in some ways more traditional, ethno-religious, nationalist,” he said.
The electoral success of religious Zionism has fueled fears among political opponents and Arab Israelis, who have been on the receiving end of Ben-Gvir’s stinginess for years.
Jaafar Farah, head of the Mossawa Center which campaigns for the rights of Arab Israelis, said “people are afraid of the actions they are going to take”.
“There is trouble here because of the fragmentation of the Arab parties,” he added, who represent 20 percent of the population.
Four Arab-led parties merged in 2020 but have since split into three, one of which failed to make it into parliament in the last election.
Mansour Abbas, whose Raam party joined the outgoing coalition, blamed inaction for the emergence of the right-wing government.
“We are bringing him (Netanyahu) back to power, we are offering him this gift because we are passive,” he said on Wednesday.
Raam will be firmly in opposition along with the Arab-led Hadash-Taal Alliance, whose activist Feda Tabouni has warned Israel is becoming “a more racist, fascist state”.
“The expected scenario is that there will be more legislation, more violence and humiliation of the people of the West Bank and the occupied (Palestinian) territories,” she told AFP.
