The Text:<\/strong> At a makeshift theatre in the port of Tel Aviv, hundreds of young immigrants from Melbourne, the Five Towns, and other points in the Anglophone diaspora gathered recently to hear from the newest phenomenon in Israeli politics, Naftali Bennett. A forty-year-old settlement leader, software entrepreneur, and ex-Army commando, Bennett promises to build a sturdy electoral bridge between the religious and the secular, the hilltop outposts of the West Bank and the start-up suburbs of the coastal plain. This is something new in the history of the Jewish state. Bennett is a man of the far right, but he is eager to advertise his cosmopolitan bona fides. Although he was the director general of the Yesha Council, the main political body of the settler movement, he does not actually live in a settlement. He lives in Ra\u2019anana, a small city north of Tel Aviv that is full of programmers and executives. He is as quick to make reference to an episode of \u201cSeinfeld\u201d as he is to the Torah portion of the week. He constantly updates his Facebook page. A dozen years ago, he moved to the Upper East Side of Manhattan to seek his fortune in high tech, and his wife, Gilat, went to work as a pastry chef at chic restaurants like Aureole, Amuse, and Bouley Bakery. Her cr\u00e8me br\u00fbl\u00e9e, he declares proudly, \u201crestored the faith of the Times food critic in the virtues of cr\u00e8me br\u00fbl\u00e9e.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Closer to his ideological core is an unswerving conviction that the Palestinian Arabs of Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem might as well relinquish their hopes for a sovereign state. The Green Line, which demarcates the occupied territories from Israel proper, \u201chas no meaning,\u201d he says, and only a friyer, a sucker, would think otherwise. As one of his slick campaign ads says, \u201cThere are certain things that most of us understand will never happen: \u2018The Sopranos\u2019 are not coming back for another season . . . and there will never be a peace plan with the Palestinians.\u201d If Bennett becomes Prime Minister someday\u2014and his ambition is as plump and glaring as a harvest moon\u2014he intends to annex most of the West Bank and let Arab cities like Ramallah, Nablus, and Jenin be \u201cself-governing\u201d but \u201cunder Israeli security.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI will do everything in my power to make sure they never get a state,\u201d he says of the Palestinians. No more negotiations, \u201cno more illusions.\u201d Let them eat cr\u00e8me br\u00fbl\u00e9e.<\/p>\n
Onstage, he waited as a nervous host flamb\u00e9ed the introduction: \u201cHe loves a good run! His favorite ice cream is pistachio! And his favorite movie is \u2018The Shawshank Redemption\u2019! . . . Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Naftali Bennett!\u201d Bennett acknowledged the applause and stepped to the lip of the stage. He is modest in height and wears a plain open-neck shirt and khakis. Like many Israeli men faced with the first sign of male-pattern baldness, he mows his hair close to the skull. He wears a small kippa\u2014knitted, like those worn by religious Zionists and modern Orthodox, but not large and knitted, like those of more radical settlers among them.<\/p>\n
He looked grave. The previous Friday, the Prime Minister, Benjamin (Bibi) Netanyahu, had gone on three evening television shows to blast Bennett for having declared that he would refuse any order to expel Jews from a settlement. Not that Israel intends to dismantle settlements anytime soon\u2014on the contrary, construction proceeds apace, \u201cfacts on the ground\u201d accumulate\u2014but this debating point touched on a crucial matter. Bennett talks about \u201creviving\u201d Zionism through an infusion of \u201cJewish values,\u201d including a sense of the sacredness of the land, but he is also a man of the military, and it would not do, as a soldier or as a candidate, to endorse a campaign of disobedience. Finally, Bennett recanted. And yet somehow he felt wronged.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve gone through a pretty crazy weekend,\u201d Bennett told the crowd sheepishly. He reached into his pocket. He took out his iPhone and started to scroll. A banner flanking the stage read, \u201cSomething Fresh,\u201d and this moment\u2014a politician Googling for wisdom while the crowd waits patiently\u2014was part of the freshness.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019d love to quote a wonderful sentence that has been guiding me for years,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s . . . Teddy Roosevelt . . . where . . . ah, yes!\u201d<\/p>\n
Bennett looked down at his palm and read from T.R.\u2019s 1910 speech at the Sorbonne on \u201cCitizenship in a Republic,\u201d a chestnut reheated by generations of wounded, righteous politicians\u2014including Richard Nixon on the day he left the White House in disgrace.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt is not the critic who counts,\u201d he began. A few Americans sitting near me nodded and smiled. \u201cNot the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood.\u201d<\/p>\n
Bennett looked up with an expression of satisfaction.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s pretty amazing,\u201d he said. \u201cIn other words, \u2018Just do it.\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n
Bennett made his pitch in the American style\u2014autobiographically. He described how he had been compelled to enter the electoral arena after fighting in the Second Lebanon War, in 2006. \u201cWe failed,\u201d he said. \u201cTzahal\u201d\u2014the Army\u2014\u201cfailed. It was a draw at best.\u201d Israel had done too little to take the war to Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. The command structure was confused and timid, the politicians were lacking in resolve. \u201cThere was a profound problem of spirit in the desire to win,\u201d he said. \u201cEvery day at 2 or 3 P.M., I would call through the radio my commanders to suggest this or that and they would say, \u2018No, no, wait until evening, we\u2019ll talk then.\u2019 But you don\u2019t win wars by doing nothing.\u201d This was a cartoonish description of the monthlong conflict, but it was a cartoon with political utility: Bennett, who was a member of Sayeret Matkal, the most prestigious outfit in the Israel Defense Forces, projects himself as modern and rational, but also as unimpeachably tough.<\/p>\n
Although this is the first time that Bennett has run for office, he is not a political na\u00eff. Between 2006 and 2008, he worked as chief of staff for Netanyahu, who, as the leader of the Likud Party, was then in the opposition. Bennett, along with Ayelet Shaked, a secular woman from Tel Aviv who is in her mid-thirties, ran Netanyahu\u2019s affairs with the hope of returning him to the Prime Minister\u2019s office. But both left abruptly, under circumstances that they won\u2019t discuss. This being Israel, those circumstances are known to all: Bennett and Shaked ran afoul of Netanyahu\u2019s wife, Sara, who is described in the Israeli press as a combination of Mary Todd Lincoln and Nancy Reagan\u2014high-strung, paranoid, intrusive. Sara Netanyahu regarded Bennett and Shaked as suspiciously ambitious, and made their lives impossible. Shaked is now a deputy in Bennett\u2019s movement, and she told me she is convinced that he will be Prime Minister \u201cin ten or fifteen years\u2014he\u2019s made of the right stuff.\u201d<\/p>\n
Bennett and Netanyahu have many political positions in common, but they come from different ideological lineages. Netanyahu comes from the Revisionist line of Zionism\u2014the conservative, secular nationalism of Ze\u2019ev Jabotinsky, who, in opposition to David Ben-Gurion and the Labor movement, argued for territorial maximalism, a Jewish state \u201con both banks of the Jordan River.\u201d Jabotinsky died in 1940, but he was the forebear of the Greater Israel ideology of Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir and the Likud Party. Netanyahu\u2019s father, Benzion, a historian of the Spanish Inquisition, worked as Jabotinsky\u2019s secretary. When Bibi was Prime Minister the first time, in the mid-nineties, I interviewed Benzion, and his ferocious distrust of Arabs was matched only by his determination that his son resist international pressure to relinquish land. In large measure, Bibi is his father\u2019s political son. And yet, in 2009, he gave a speech at Bar-Ilan University in which he seemingly broke with Revisionist ideology and Likud politics by talking about a \u201cdemilitarized\u201d Palestinian state. Netanyahu has done almost nothing to follow through on a two-state solution, and most Likud politicians today contend that he was deeply ambivalent about the speech, which caused a serious rift with his father and within the Party. They are convinced that he did it mainly to placate Barack Obama.<\/p>\n
Bennett sees the Bar-Ilan speech as a betrayal. He has called on Netanyahu to retract it. To Bennett, there is nothing complex about the question of occupation. There is no occupation. \u201cThe land is ours\u201d: that is pretty much the end of the debate. \u201cI will do everything in my power, forever, to fight against a Palestinian state being founded in the Land of Israel,\u201d he said. \u201cI don\u2019t think there is a clear-cut solution for the Israeli-Arab conflict in this generation.\u201d During the recent assault on Gaza, Bennett was a proponent of a ground invasion and criticized Netanyahu when he limited the conflict to a week of air strikes.<\/p>\n
The lessons that Bennett draws from recent history are familiar, and not only on the right: If Israel were to allow the establishment of a Palestinian state, what is now the West Bank would quickly become a second Gaza\u2014a Hamas-led bastion of Islamic radicalism, a launch pad for rocket fire aimed at Tel Aviv and Ben Gurion Airport. If Israel were to sign a deal, Bennett told his audience in Tel Aviv, \u201cwe\u2019d get praise from the world and, two weeks later, we\u2019ll see the first demonstrations on the Green Line. And, if I were the copywriter, the signs would say, \u2018I Want Home.\u2019 \u201d The Palestinians, that is, would then push for Jaffa and Haifa, Ramle and Lod, and the rest of what they call historical Palestine. \u201cIf they could press a button and we\u2019d evaporate, they would, and vice versa,\u201d he said. Bennett\u2019s solution has become a commonplace on the right\u2014virtual annexation followed by a potential exodus of dispirited Palestinians eastward into Jordan, where Palestinians are already a majority.<\/p>\n
On occasion, Bennett will do battle in the old Israeli style. On television one night, he got into a shouting match with Yossi Beilin, an architect of the Oslo Peace Accord, in the mid-nineties, telling him that the pact with Yasir Arafat had caused the deaths of sixteen hundred Israelis in terror attacks. \u201cIt\u2019s on your hands!\u201d he charged. \u201cYou should be ashamed! You gave them guns and they shot at us!\u201d But, for the most part, that has not been his mode on the campaign trail. In Tel Aviv, Bennett was mild, absorbing, suggestive, flashing a pleasant, rabbity smile. As he took questions from the crowd, he was careful to acknowledge his general sympathy for democratic rights, his general tolerance (\u201cI say live and let live\u201d), his familiarity with gay soldiers (\u201cI could tell you stories!\u201d), but, in the end, his positions were absolute. \u201cIsrael is ours,\u201d he said. \u201cFor thirty-eight hundred years, it\u2019s ours.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Israeli elections will be held on January 22nd. Netanyahu is almost sure to keep his position. But that is not the central story of this political moment. Naftali Bennett is. His party, Habayit Hayehudi (the Jewish Home), represents the merger and reinvigoration of two older religious parties, and it is rapidly gaining ground. Many expect a third-place finish, behind Labor, which would be a remarkable achievement; second place is not inconceivable.<\/p>\n
More broadly, the story of the election is the implosion of the center-left and the vivid and growing strength of the radical right. What Bennett\u2019s rise, in particular, represents is the attempt of the settlers to cement the occupation and to establish themselves as a vanguard party, the ideological and spiritual core of the entire country. Just as a small coterie of socialist kibbutzniks dominated the ethos and the public institutions of Israel in the first decades of the state\u2019s existence, the religious nationalists, led by the settlers, intend to do so now and in the years ahead. In the liberal tribune Haaretz, the columnist Ari Shavit wrote, \u201cWhat is now happening is impossible to view as anything but the takeover by a colonial province of its mother country.\u201d<\/p>\n
The political platforms of the center-left parties are halfhearted and almost entirely domestic in their focus. The Arab world is in a state of chaotic revolt, the Palestinians are considering a third intifada\u2013\u2013and the Labor Party is running on the price of apartments and cottage cheese. The political rationale is obvious to all. Although the majority of the country supports partition and a Palestinian state, it does not trust the Palestinians and therefore has become convinced that nothing will happen for at least a generation. The narrative is, by now, ingrained. There have been countless plans for division and resolution\u2014the U.N. partition plan in 1947; the Oslo process in the mid-nineties; Ehud Barak\u2019s offers to Yasir Arafat at Camp David and Taba, in 2000 and 2001; Ariel Sharon\u2019s unilateral withdrawal from Gaza, in 2005; Ehud Olmert\u2019s offer to Mahmoud Abbas, in 2007\u2014and with what results? Wars, intifadas, terror, rocket fire, Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, hostility in the U.N. and Europe, threats of boycotts and delegitimatization. Most Israelis no longer care that the Palestinians see this stark narrative of rejectionism and terror in a very different way; there is scant recognition of the role of settlements, roadblocks, harassment, evictions, detentions, the abuses of the I.D.F., and much else.<\/p>\n
\u201cNo one is talking about the core issues,\u201d Tzipi Livni, a former Foreign Minister, told me between campaign stops in Jerusalem, because after four years of Netanyahu \u201cthere is no hope for peace.\u201d Most people, she said, \u201cthink, \u2018The Palestinians refuse every offer,\u2019 \u2018The whole world is against us anyway,\u2019 \u2018They are all anti-Semitic,\u2019 and so on. And the ideological settlers think that every day that passes without negotiations is a victory.\u201d<\/p>\n
Livni\u2019s frustration with Bennett\u2019s ascent in the polls was palpable. \u201cTo be right wing is to be strong, to be left wing is to be weak, appeasing, to be na\u00efve\u2014and \u2018We can\u2019t afford na\u00efvet\u00e9 in this region,\u2019 \u201d she said, mimicking the voice of Bennett\u2019s expanding base. \u201cHe is the new Sabra! The new Israeli!\u201d<\/p>\n
Leaders of the traditional peace camp hardly conceal their gloom. Hagit Ofran, the director of the Settlement Watch project of the once influential Peace Now movement, told me, \u201cOur fight today is not so much to persuade the Israeli public that we need two states. The biggest challenge is to ward off the despair and the indifference.\u201d<\/p>\n
Palestinians who are still in favor of a two-state solution and who have worked with Israelis over the years watch the elections with anxiety. \u201cThis is all very bad news for the Palestinians,\u201d Ghassan Khatib, the vice-president of Birzeit University, in Palestine, told me. \u201cIf Netanyahu and this new crowd come to power, there will be two casualties\u2014the Palestinian Authority and the two-state solution. The simple practical changes on the ground\u2014the settlement projects, the daily incidents of settler violence against our people\u2014just do not allow for a two-state solution. Also, the radicalization of public opinion in Israel and the radicalization of the leadership reinforce each other. And that, of course, has an influence on public opinion in Palestine. The percentage of people here who support armed struggle is going up for the first time after ten years of decline. The Palestinian majority is still in favor of a two-state solution, but hopes are fading all the time.\u201d<\/p>\n
Right-wing politicians listen to all this and smile. They are delighted. They are emboldened. Danny Danon, a Likud leader who recently suggested that, for every rocket launched by Hamas, Israel \u201cdelete\u201d one neighborhood in Gaza, said to me, \u201cI tell my colleagues on the left in the Knesset, \u2018You are an endangered species. We\u2019ll build a nature reserve for you.\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n
One clear sign that the center of gravity had shifted in Israeli politics came a couple of months ago, when, in preparation for the January elections, Netanyahu formed an alliance with Avigdor Lieberman, the leader of the Russian-\u00e9migr\u00e9 party, Yisrael Beiteinu (Israel, Our Home). Lieberman was not only Israel\u2019s Foreign Minister but its most prominent xenophobe. In Washington not long ago, I heard him say disdainfully that the Palestinians could not be expected to rule themselves until their average annual income was ten thousand dollars\u2014a level reached in Israel forty years after statehood. He also counselled the Palestinians to read Voltaire and Rousseau, which was odd advice coming from an admirer of Vladimir Putin. Lieberman is so given to voicing outrageous opinions that he is generally shielded from interviews with the international press. One other thing: he was recently indicted on corruption charges, and had to resign as Foreign Minister. None of this is helping Netanyahu\u2019s case against his fresh young opponent.<\/p>\n
Not only did Netanyahu join forces with Lieberman, whom he distrusts; he has seen his own party move far to his right. Each party puts forward a list of candidates; first on the list is the party leader. Of the top twenty names on Netanyahu\u2019s list, twelve support at least partial annexation of the West Bank. The Likud list was purged of relative moderates, like Dan Meridor, who was considered soft on the Palestinians, and Menachem Begin\u2019s son, Benny, who is considered too respectful of democratic institutions.<\/p>\n
Right-wing politicians have long railed against what they see as the dominance of leftist \u00e9lites in the media, academia, human-rights organizations, and, especially, the Supreme Court\u2014the nemesis of the far right\u2014but they do so now from an unassailable position of power. Their ethnocentrism is full-throated, their suspicion of democratic institutions unabashed. A typical case is Miri Regev, a former I.D.F. spokesman and a Likud candidate: she has called Arab members of the Knesset \u201ctraitors\u201d and undocumented African immigrants \u201ca cancer.\u201d Last year, Regev tried, and failed, to pass an annexation bill in the Knesset.<\/p>\n
A rough analogy of the national-religious camp\u2019s effect on the Likud is the Tea Party\u2019s radicalization of the Republican Party. Just as the Republican House leadership moved farther to the right as it accommodated its Tea Party freshmen, Netanyahu will have to form a cabinet that acknowledges the presence of an increasing number of radical right-wingers in his and other parties, including Bennett\u2019s. This process, however, did not begin with the elections. \u201cWe were around before the Tea Party and we are already deep within the Likud,\u201d Danny Danon told me. \u201cThis is not an episode that passes with the wind. We are here to stay.\u201d Danon is voluble in his contempt for Barack Obama and his admiration for Glenn Beck. In 2011, he invited the broadcaster to Jerusalem. \u201cIn the past three or four years,\u201d he said admiringly, \u201cBeck was very instrumental in providing good P.R. for Israel.\u201d<\/p>\n
Theodore Herzl, the founding visionary of the Jewish state, would not have anticipated the co-option of Zionism by a right-wing religious movement. Herzl was reared in a secular German-speaking home. He marked his thirteenth birthday not with a bar mitzvah but with a \u201cconfirmation.\u201d According to his biographer Amos Elon, Herzl \u201cdismissed all religion.\u201d In high school, he wrote an essay determining that \u201cclever frauds from Moses and Jesus to the Count of Saint Germain have already been exposed by the human spirit,\u201d and his opinion never much wavered. His Zionism, fired by a prescient reading of European anti-Semitism, was an extension of European nationalism. Herzl\u2019s Zionism bore no traces of religious messianism. In \u201cDer Judenstaat\u201d (\u201cThe Jewish State\u201d), his manifesto, Herzl vowed to keep the theocrats \u201cin their temples, just as we shall keep our professional Army in the barracks.\u201d<\/p>\n
Nearly all the early Zionist leaders and Israeli politicians shared a similar view. In the first two decades of Israel\u2019s history, from 1948 to 1967, Zionism was a predominantly secular form of nationalism, and a challenge to the Biblical version of Jewish history. As Moshe Halbertal, a scholar of Jewish philosophy at Hebrew University, put it to me, Zionism provided \u201can endangered people with an alternative to the state of exile and to the state of redemption.\u201d<\/p>\n
For the haredim, the ultra-Orthodox, who believe that the Jews should return to their Biblical homeland only after the appearance of the mashiach, the Messiah, Zionism was a threat, even an apostasy, which ran counter to the traditional attachment to Jewish law. Their resistance to the establishment of a Jewish state was, for the early Israeli leadership, a political problem. Even before the U.N. approved the partition of Palestine, in 1947, David Ben-Gurion, who believed that the ultra-Orthodox would become secular over the generations, quieted their objections with old-school political deals. He allowed the haredim to control religiously charged matters like marriage, adoption, and burial; he assured the rabbis that only kosher food would be served in state-run institutions, including the Army. Ultra-Orthodox communities formed small political parties, but, rather than rubbing up against the larger, corrupting world, they stayed mostly to themselves; they went to their own schools, were exempt from Army service, and immersed themselves in the study of Torah. For decades, the leaders of the state\u2014the dominant figures in government, the military, the media, culture, and academia\u2014were mainly secular. Israel has never had a religious Prime Minister. (Netanyahu works on the Sabbath, and on the rare occasion that he visits a synagogue it is to practice politics.)<\/p>\n
Religious nationalism was yet another strain. One institution that emphasized a religious, even mystical, form of Zionism was the Mercaz Harav yeshiva, a center of study in Jerusalem that revolved around the rabbinical legacy of Avraham Kook and his son Tzvi Yehuda Kook. The Kooks saw the formation of a Jewish state not as a usurpation of tradition but as athalta degeula, an active beginning of redemption. They taught a messianism with no Messiah.<\/p>\n
In May, 1967, on the eve of Israeli Independence Day, Tzvi Yehuda Kook gave a sermon before a gathering of current and former rabbinical students. He described his profound disappointment in the 1947 U.N. partition plan, and the fact that the Jews had not been awarded Biblical places like Hebron, where the Patriarchs are buried, and Shiloh, the center of Jewish worship before the building of the First Temple. \u201cI succumbed to this feeling of shock,\u201d he said. \u201cMy body torn to shreds, I had nothing to celebrate.\u201d Three weeks after his sermon, Israel defeated the armies of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan in six days, and, in doing so, gained the territories of Sinai, the West Bank of the Jordan River (known to Israeli Jews as Judea and Samaria), the Golan Heights, and all of Jerusalem. When the Israel Defense Forces took the Old City of Jerusalem from the Jordanian Army, a platoon commander sent a jeep to bring Kook to the Western Wall. \u201cWe hereby inform the people of Israel and the entire world that under heavenly command we have just returned home in the elevations of holiness and our holy city,\u201d Kook said. \u201cWe shall never move out of here.\u201d<\/p>\n
For Kook, the Kingdom of God was being established in Biblical Israel through the firepower of the I.D.F. But he and his followers at the yeshiva were not the only ones who saw the victory in miraculous and messianic terms. There was a general sense of intoxication in the country and beyond. As the Israeli scholar Ehud Sprinzak writes in his study \u201cThe Ascendance of Israel\u2019s Radical Right,\u201d 1967 marked a \u201cmental revolution,\u201d and the smashing of \u201ca twenty-year political paradigm\u201d of national vulnerability. For many, Zionism was now imbued with eschatological significance. The Six-Day War was conflated with the six days of creation. Kook\u2019s sermon, extolling the holiness of the land, was seen as a kind of premonition of the great victory. Religious Zionism, which had been marginal to Israeli politics, gained strength, not least among the first Israelis who came to build settlements in the West Bank. Almost immediately, those settlers appropriated the imagery and self-regard of their left-wing secular predecessors, the kibbutzniks\u2014idealists tilling the land.<\/p>\n
To Kook and the religious Zionist leaders who have followed him, the land captured in 1967 is sacred, and integral to the Jewish state and to Judaism itself; possession of places like Shiloh and Hebron is a harbinger of redemption, the End of Days. No U.N. resolution, no Palestinian claimant, no American President had the right to say otherwise. The war of 1973, in which Israel narrowly escaped a military defeat, intensified the messianic sense of possession. The religious Zionists developed a corps among the settlers known as Gush Emunim, the Bloc of the Faithful, which fervently opposed the idea of giving up any part of the land: Sinai to the Egyptians; the Golan to the Syrians; the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem to the Palestinians.<\/p>\n
In 1977, Menachem Begin came to power, representing, for the first time, a coalition of constituencies that resented the Labor \u00e9lite and felt excluded from the mainstream of Israeli life. Begin\u2019s support came from the poorer \u00e9migr\u00e9s from North Africa and Arab states; Jabotinskyite conservatives; the ultra-Orthodox; and religious Zionists, including the settlers. But when Begin, as part of his Camp David settlement with Anwar Sadat, returned the Sinai to Egypt and, with the help of the Army, went about dismantling the Jewish settlements there, leaders of the settler movement felt betrayed. Moshe Levinger, one of its most flamboyant extremists, threatened to carry out an act of suicidal martyrdom.<\/p>\n
As government-financed settlements thickened throughout the occupied territories, the P.L.O. carried out violent attacks, and the Palestinian question came to dominate the national argument. Meanwhile, the politics of Gush Emunim became increasingly radical, even breeding a small group of homicidal fundamentalists. In 1984, authorities uncovered plots by a settler group known as the Jewish Underground to bomb Arab buses and to blow up the mosques on the Temple Mount. Not long afterward, a Brooklyn-born rabbi, Meir Kahane, was elected to the Knesset on a poisonous political platform. Kahane was unapologetically racist\u2014Arabs, for him, were \u201ccockroaches\u201d and \u201cdogs\u201d\u2014and he was not squeamish about calling for violence. In February, 1994, five months after Yitzhak Rabin and Yasir Arafat signed the Oslo Accord, one of Kahane\u2019s followers, an Army doctor named Baruch Goldstein, murdered twenty-nine Palestinians at the Cave of the Patriarchs, in Hebron.<\/p>\n
Kahane\u2019s party was banned in 1988 and he was murdered two years later, in New York. His taste for violence may have fired Goldstein, but it did not enter the political mainstream. Yet, as Ami Pedahzur writes in \u201cThe Triumph of Israel\u2019s Radical Right,\u201d the traces of Kahane\u2019s legacy\u2014the sacralization of xenophobia\u2014are evident both in the Likud and throughout the radical right.<\/p>\n
Much of Naftali Bennett\u2019s support comes from mild-mannered religious suburbanites on both sides of the Green Line, but he has also been blessed by some of the more vehement fundamentalists on the scene. Avichai Rontzki, from 2006 to 2010 the chief rabbi of the I.D.F. and now the head of a yeshiva in the West Bank settlement of Itamar, helped Bennett form the Jewish Home Party. Rontzki has said that soldiers who show their enemies mercy will be \u201cdamned,\u201d and, after a prisoner exchange with the Palestinians that he opposed, he said that the I.D.F. should no longer arrest terrorists but, rather, \u201ckill them in their beds.\u201d Dov Lior, the chief rabbi of the settlement of Kiryat Arba and Hebron, once called Baruch Goldstein \u201cholier than all the martyrs of the Holocaust\u201d; he endorsed Bennett before moving on to a smaller, more reactionary party.<\/p>\n
Both Bennett and Ayelet Shaked, his secular partner, put some distance between themselves and the likes of Rontzki and Lior; they insist that \u201cpoliticians will make the decisions, not rabbis.\u201d But they will not denounce such voices. The pages of Haaretz routinely report incidents of rabbinical or settler racism, and even many levelheaded conservatives acknowledge that in the past decade a kind of casual anti-Arab rhetoric has infected political life. \u201cThere are fewer inhibitions now about expressing hatred for the Arabs,\u201d Yossi Klein Halevi, a scholar at the Shalom Hartman Institute, in Jerusalem, told me. \u201cThe taboos against hostility toward Arabs have been seriously lowered in these last twelve years since the second intifada. The political culture has changed.\u201d Uri Savir, a liberal and Israel\u2019s chief negotiator of the Oslo Accord, wrote in the Jerusalem Post that \u201cmost young Israelis believe that Israeli Arabs do not deserve equal rights, and many believe that their votes count less than Jewish votes\u2014a prescription for racism, not democracy.\u201d<\/p>\n
Moshe Feiglin, a settler who is sure to win a seat in the Knesset on the Likud list, is a grim and wiry man afflicted with an acute case of ideological hyperactivity. One day recently, he got himself detained by police trying to pray on the Temple Mount, in Jerusalem. (Jews, who pray below, at the Western Wall, may visit, but not pray on, the Temple Mount, which contains the Al Aqsa Mosque complex and is administered by the Muslim religious leadership.) Feiglin spent the rest of the day at the third annual Conference for the Application of Israeli Sovereignty over Judea and Samaria. The conference was crowded with members of the Knesset, including Likud\u2019s Ze\u2019ev Elkin, who declared that it was time for Israel to \u201cstop conceding and go on the offensive, step by step.\u201d All the speeches favored some form of annexation; the question was how much and how soon. Feiglin, when it was his turn, said that Israel ought to pay Palestinian families in the West Bank half a million dollars each to emigrate. His logic was, at least to him, self-evident: the state, he claimed, was already spending ten per cent of its G.N.P. \u201cto maintain the two-state solution and the Oslo Accord,\u201d what with the separation fence, the Iron Dome anti-missile system, the posting of guards at restaurants and caf\u00e9s, and other measures. Why not spend the money in a more efficient manner and permanently rid yourself of the problem?<\/p>\n
Feiglin is a decade older than Bennett, and less calculating in his manner; he doesn\u2019t pretend to be new and \u201cfresh.\u201d There is no talk of \u201cSeinfeld.\u201d He is severe, humorless, and ascetic; he has said outrageous things about Arabs (\u201cYou can\u2019t teach a monkey to speak and you can\u2019t teach an Arab to be democratic,\u201d he told this magazine in 2004), and he seems to enjoy the listener\u2019s discomfort. It makes him feel forthright and righteous. Born in Haifa, he lives in Karnei Shomron, a settlement of six thousand people, in the West Bank. His chief lieutenant, Shmuel Sackett, was born in Brooklyn, where he was a follower of Meir Kahane.<\/p>\n
In 1993, Feiglin and Sackett founded Zo Artzeinu (This Is Our Land), a coalition of religious Zionists who considered the Oslo Accord a violation of Jewish law and political sense. Feiglin organized sit-ins and other acts of civil disobedience directed against the government of Yitzhak Rabin. In August, 1995, the organization staged a national demonstration without a permit and managed to block eighty traffic intersections. Feiglin was arrested and charged with sedition; he later satisfied his six-month prison sentence with community service. His memoir of that period, \u201cWhere There Are No Men,\u201d describes Zo Artzeinu as if it were the moral and tactical equivalent of the American civil-rights movement.<\/p>\n
By the late nineties, Feiglin decided that he could exert more influence through conventional political struggle. For him, Netanyahu, who became Prime Minister in 1996, was too soft, too given to territorial compromise. He organized a Likud faction called Manhigut Yehudit (Jewish Leadership).<\/p>\n
One evening, I visited his headquarters, in a modest industrial building in Givat Shaul, a neighborhood in Jerusalem heavily populated by ultra-Orthodox and religious Zionists. Feiglin greeted me warily, but he did not hide his excitement at the likely prospect of winning a seat in the Knesset. \u201cIt\u2019s like a Rubik\u2019s Cube is being reorganized,\u201d he said. \u201cWhat happens on the left shows total ideological confusion, a loss of vision. The concept of Oslo has disappeared. On the right, what is fascinating is between Likud and Naftali Bennett. With all modesty, I am behind it. Since Oslo, since Zo Artzeinu, we developed a concept of what the right should do\u2014put a different agenda on the Israeli field and create a new layer of leadership that, instead of coming from the leftist avant-garde, comes from the right avant-garde.\u201d<\/p>\n
In Feiglin\u2019s view, secular Zionism tried to gain a measure of acceptance from its neighbors and the world community by relinquishing land. \u201cThe concept we\u2019ve started to develop is that the answer is not with the neighbors\u2014it\u2019s with us,\u201d he said. \u201cWe are not like all other nations. The Jews are different. Our goal should be to develop our special culture based on the Torah and the Prophets as a message and a symbol to the family of nations, to all of entire humanity.\u201d<\/p>\n
I asked Feiglin about some of his deliberately outrageous comments about Arab perfidy. He picked up a croissant from a platter, regarded it, and whispered a blessing. He ate awhile. At last, he said, \u201cI stick to my principles. The problem is not my principles. But I did make some mistakes along the way\u2014not with the words but with the melody.\u201d<\/p>\n
Then Feiglin accused the Likud leadership of cheating him out of votes. \u201cBut it doesn\u2019t matter\u2014I keep smiling,\u201d he said. He did not smile much.<\/p>\n
Behind his desk, there is a large photomontage of the Second Temple, which was destroyed by the Romans in 70 A.D. He would like to see a Third Temple built on the Temple Mount\u2014what the Arabs call the Haram al-Sharif. This is no longer an unusual position; at least seven people on Netanyahu\u2019s list support the construction of a Third Temple. \u201cI believe in the Bible,\u201d Feiglin said. \u201cI believe that just as most visions of the Prophets already came true against all odds\u2014the fact that the Jewish people survived from all corners of the world and came back to the Promised Land, as promised in the Bible, is the most fascinating miracle in history\u2014what still remains to be done will happen, too. At the end, the Third Temple will be built.\u201d<\/p>\n
When I asked him how, he shrugged, and said, \u201cDo you think Herzl knew how it was going to happen? Read his book. He had no idea. It all happened in a different way. All he did was plant the dream in people\u2019s mind and the rest is history.\u201d<\/p>\n
Finally, I asked Feiglin about his latest thoughts on the Israeli-Palestinian question. When I said \u201cPalestinian,\u201d it was as if I had uttered a revolting oath.<\/p>\n
\u201c \u2018Palestinians\u2019?\u201d he said. \u201cOrwell wrote his book \u2018Nineteen Eighty-Four\u2019 and there is talk there about \u2018Newspeak,\u2019 the \u2018Big Lie.\u2019 \u201d The Big Lie, I was to understand, was the very idea of a Palestinian people. \u201cDo you know about a nation without a history?\u201d he said. \u201cHow can a nation exist without history? They are Arabs. They identify with a big Arab nation, and there are many Arab tribes. Every Israeli understands that if, God forbid, Israel disappeared there would not be one Palestinian in the world, because the Palestinians\u2019 self-definition isn\u2019t for a Palestinian state but for war with the Jews. . . . The P.L.O. was established before 1967, and they never tried to create a Palestinian state in the territories when they had them. Their desire will always be to seize any territory last held by a Jew. There was never in history a group that longed to create a state that got more recognition and help from everyone, including us, and yet it is not happening. It just is not.\u201d<\/p>\n
In \u201cThe Counterlife,\u201d Philip Roth\u2019s novel of clashing and alternate identities, Nathan Zuckerman leaves his home in London to track down his brother, a New Jersey dentist who has forsaken both his family and Wendy, his highly compliant office assistant, and joined a settlement near Hebron. At a Sabbath dinner there, Nathan encounters the settlement\u2019s leader, Mordecai Lippman, a self-adoring performer \u201cas shameless as some legendary courtroom litigator cunning in the use of booming crescendo and insinuating diminuendo to sway the emotions of the jury.\u201d Lippman upbraids Zuckerman about the delusions of the Diaspora and mocks \u201call the niceys and the goodies\u201d in Tel Aviv who \u201cwant to be humane.\u201d<\/p>\n
Roth\u2019s Lippman, the fruit of a real-life encounter with Elyakim Haetzni, a Hebron-based demagogue, was once a letter-perfect depiction of settler leaders\u2014pale, austere, proudly self-dramatic men and women, who flaunted their disdain for Western weakness, Arab duplicity, and all the deluded saps who believed in the \u201cfalse god called peace,\u201d as Haetzni once put it. Haetzni did not think that his settlement, Kiryat Arba, existed to protect Tel Aviv; Tel Aviv existed to protect the holiness of Kiryat Arba. The settlements were the most authentic realization of Zionism. A figure like Haetzni reminded the journalist and historian Amos Elon of \u201cone of the French integralists of the nineteenth century, the fathers of European fascism, who believed not in God but in Catholicism quintessentially expressing the Glory of France.\u201d<\/p>\n
Naftali Bennett is the face of the next generation of religious nationalism. Its world view is much the same\u2013\u2013Haetzni agrees with Bennett\u2019s annexation plan\u2013\u2013but it is more confident and better packaged. \u201cThe crazies are no longer in the forefront,\u201d Moshe Halbertal said. \u201cThe settlement project is settled. And now it has gone from a radical avant-garde to a middle-class establishment. They are no longer about messianic fantasy.\u201d<\/p>\n
There are settlement leaders who are willing to perform their outrage and unashamedly give their support to all kinds of human-rights violations\u2014always sure to put air quotes around \u201chuman rights\u201d\u2014but the more typical, and powerful, settler leader now is someone like Dani Dayan, the chairman of the Yesha Council, the settlers\u2019 main political organization. Dayan was born in Argentina; his family came to Israel in 1971, and, until the first intifada, in 1987, he lived in Tel Aviv. He became rich in the software business. He and his wife had their wedding ceremony on the ramp to the Temple Mount, the better to do something \u201csignificant\u201d that day. They moved to Ma\u2019ale Shomron, a settlement in the West Bank, out of a sense of mission.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was the right thing to do,\u201d Dayan told me one afternoon in Jerusalem. \u201cYair Lapid\u201d\u2014a former television host who is now a politician\u2014\u201cused to ask his guests, \u2018What is Israel in your eyes?\u2019 Some said it was sitting on the promenade in Tel Aviv at sunset and looking at the sea and drinking a beer, eating a cold watermelon. And I like that, too. But for me, in this rough neighborhood where we live, the Zionist enterprise needs something deeper that includes Shiloh and Beit El. This is why we came here. . . . I\u2019m a completely secular person, even a liberal person, but I sincerely believe that without Hebron, and all it represents from a historical and cultural point of view, we are a shallow people.\u201d<\/p>\n
Dayan\u2019s \u201cliberalism\u201d is stylistic, associational. Some members of his family are on the Israeli left. And he is embarrassed by the thugs among the settlers who carry out \u201cprice tag\u201d reprisals: torching mosques, cutting down olive trees, harassing and beating up Arabs. But, ideologically, he is a clarion voice in the increasingly assured right-wing Israeli chorus that tells the Palestinians and the world that the settlers have achieved their goal, that they are the \u201cfacts on the ground\u201d that will rule out the establishment of a Palestinian state. \u201cWe\u2019re a key player\u2014maybe the key player,\u201d he said. \u201cWe are the focus. Everything is a response to what we do. The fact that we are here and develop here is the ultimate political maneuver that sets the reality. Why do we prevail? We\u2019ve reached the point of irreversibility.\u201d<\/p>\n
Dayan is confident that the settlers\u2019 level of commitment dwarfs that of any other faction. The left shows its commitment, he says, \u201cby pushing the \u2018like\u2019 button on the last editorial in Haaretz.\u201d<\/p>\n
Dayan has been critical of both Barack Obama for \u201cmisreading\u201d the Middle East\u2014the right, in general, is convinced that Obama \u201clost\u201d Egypt\u2014and Netanyahu for delivering the Bar-Ilan speech, three years ago. Now, at least, Netanyahu no longer makes any pretense of pursuing negotiations with the Palestinian Authority. Dayan is confident that Netanyahu has sensed the movement to the hard right and will not combat it. But he is always on guard. \u201cThere are mornings when I wake up and think Netanyahu is serious about a two-state solution and others when I think he is bluffing the whole world,\u201d Dayan told me. \u201cAnd I suspect the same is true with Netanyahu.\u201d<\/p>\n
Starting in the late eighties, the religious Zionists in the settlements and beyond embarked on a new strategy, one that took them from the fringes of political life to its center. In 1988, Eli Sadan, a rabbi and a disciple of Tzvi Yehuda Kook, established Bnei David, a post-high-school mechina, or religious academy, in the settlement of Eli, for students who would soon enter the Army. Sadan\u2019s aim was to begin populating the most important public institution in the country with the devout. \u201cThe I.D.F. and other Zionist institutions were created without any truly Jewish influence,\u201d Sadan once told the Jerusalem Post. \u201cAnd our goal is to change that.\u201d The result is that such academies have proliferated, and the Army\u2019s officer corps is now immensely more religious than it was.<\/p>\n
The national-religious camp has also made a concerted effort to \u201cpenetrate\u201d other national institutions and the business world. It has demographics\u2014and time\u2014on its side; the birth rate among religious families is much higher than in the secular community. \u201cThese people feel that they no longer have to worship the secular inventors of this country,\u201d Chaim Levinson, who covers the national-religious community for Haaretz, told me. \u201cNaftali Bennett represents this generation.\u201d<\/p>\n
I arranged to meet Bennett again at his home, in Ra\u2019anana. We originally agreed on nine in the morning, but the night before he changed the time to ten. I arrived from Jerusalem a few minutes early, and he answered the door but asked me to wait. He was just finishing a tutorial with a local rabbi on the weekly parsha, or Torah passage\u2014the last passage in Genesis.<\/p>\n
\u201cWander around,\u201d he said. \u201cMake yourself at home.\u201d<\/p>\n
Bennett\u2019s house is large, modern, filled with sunlight. He and his wife have four children, ranging in age from six months to seven years. There were toys and strollers scattered everywhere, and open packages of Huggies. The place didn\u2019t have the ascetic feel of a settler outpost: there was a Viking stove, a Nespresso machine, laptops, flat-screen TVs. This was the style of the bourgeois pioneer.<\/p>\n
Finally, Bennett came in. We made coffee and went out to the green back yard to talk. More toys, a barbecue. I\u2019d heard people compare Ra\u2019anana to Englewood, New Jersey\u2014prosperous, good schools, close to the city\u2014and it felt that way, but with better weather.<\/p>\n
Bennett\u2019s parents are from San Francisco and came to Israel just after the Six-Day War. They were not religious. They volunteered to work on a pig farm at a kibbutz called Dafna, in the Upper Galilee, near the Lebanese border. After a while, Bennett said, \u201cthey didn\u2019t like the socialist, communal stuff, it wasn\u2019t for them.\u201d They went to Haifa, where Bennett\u2019s father worked as a fund-raiser for the Technion, a leading university of science and engineering. Israel, though, wasn\u2019t all they imagined, and, in 1973, they returned briefly to San Francisco. The Yom Kippur War drew them back. Over the years, the family became increasingly religious, aligned with the kippot srugot, the knitted yarmulkes\u2014the national-religious camp.<\/p>\n
As a boy, Naftali looked up to warriors, above all. One hero was Yoni Netanyahu, who, in 1976, led the famous raid to free more than a hundred Israeli hostages from their Palestinian captors at the Entebbe airport, in Uganda. Yoni Netanyahu\u2014Benjamin\u2019s older brother\u2014was the only Israeli who died in the raid, and a posthumous book of his letters, which became a totemic document of Zionist fortitude and heroism, was at Bennett\u2019s bedside. (The Bennetts named their first child Yoni.) Naftali was obsessed, too, with another revered, but more problematic, commando\u2014Meir Har-Zion, who, after his sister was killed by Bedouins, in 1955, when she was hiking in Jordan, crossed into Jordan with three of his friends from the Army and killed five Bedouins from the same tribe. Har-Zion escaped a jail sentence only with the help of Ben-Gurion. \u201cThat wasn\u2019t my focus,\u201d Bennett told me. \u201cThose were different times, like the Old West, with cowboys and Indians.\u201d<\/p>\n
As a young man, Bennett went into an officer-training course, and, for years, he did not wear a kippa. But after the Rabin assassination, in 1995, he said, \u201cI put it back on. The backlash of the Rabin assassination was a backlash against all the religious\u2014blame them!\u2014which I thought was very unfair. The religious were being kicked, so I did it to be a good example.\u201d As a soldier in Sayeret Matkal, Bennett said, his job was to go behind enemy lines in Lebanon and \u201ckill as many terrorists as possible.\u201d<\/p>\n
After finishing his Army service, he studied law at Hebrew University and met Gilat. \u201cShe is from a secular house,\u201d he said, smiling. \u201cShe sort of hit on me, and the rest is history.\u201d The two lived together for a while and married a couple of years later.<\/p>\n
While still in university, Bennett, like so many other Israelis, decided to get into high tech. At first, he was a \u201cQ.A. guy\u201d\u2014quality assurance\u2014checking for bugs, \u201cas low as it gets,\u201d and then he got into software sales. In 1999, he and a few friends decided that it was time to start a business of their own. \u201cWe didn\u2019t even have an idea!\u201d They worked on a single-use credit card that would enable secure financial transactions, \u201cso if someone hacks Amazon and steals your information you\u2019re only out one purchase.\u201d<\/p>\n
Bennett and his wife lived for four months in the West Bank settlement of Beit Aryeh and then, in 2000, made their move to Manhattan to try to rouse interest in his software idea. \u201cBut it turned out we had an Indian and an Irish competitor and they kicked our ass.\u201d Then the tech bubble burst. \u201cWe had, like, three years in the company of shit,\u201d he recalled. \u201cIt was just survival. I went all over the country with my laptop.\u201d Bennett and his friends went to work refining their ideas for privacy software. Gilat, meanwhile, was working as a pastry chef. She gradually became more religious after she joined a \u201cbeginner\u2019s minyan,\u201d or service, at Kehilath Jeshurun, on East Eighty-fifth Street.<\/p>\n
Bennett\u2019s strongest attraction for the secular bourgeois is his business success. Frequently, in both the Israeli and the foreign press, it is said simply that Bennett developed anti-fraud security software for financial institutions and sold his company, Cyota, for a hundred and forty-five million dollars. An impression is left of immense wealth. But the more I asked about it the clearer it became that, after splitting the proceeds of the sale of Cyota, in 2005, with three partners and various rounds of investors, he came away with three or four million dollars before taxes. More than enough not to work for a long while and to make some investments, he said, \u201cbut not enough so the kids don\u2019t have to work.\u201d<\/p>\n
Bennett\u2019s strategy as a politician has been to appeal to the generation of religious Zionists who, like him, have entered the ranks of business, the officer corps, the media, and other mainstream institutions. He drives from one yeshiva to another, one settlement to another, speaking. Even the battle with Netanyahu over settlement evacuation helped Bennett; it eliminated his name-recognition problem.<\/p>\n
The way he sees the world, the \u201cservice ethos\u201d of Labor Zionism \u201cevaporated and dissolved,\u201d leaving behind a \u201cvacuum of values.\u201d Herzl\u2019s Zionism, which was based on creating security for an endangered people, dissipated. \u201cIt was so powerful that the first generation had this mission to re-create the state, and it worked,\u201d he said. \u201cBut only so much. My generation didn\u2019t feel an existential threat, and it was gone.\u201d What he represents, he tells his audiences, \u201cis a handover of the baton from security-based Zionism to a Jewish-based Zionism. If we don\u2019t do that, it won\u2019t work. I don\u2019t want to show off, but, among the national-religious leaders, that stuff\u2014corruption, et cetera\u2014doesn\u2019t happen. In the Army, in the settlements, whether you like it or not, there is idealism.\u201d<\/p>\n
Bennett\u2019s idealism, however, is based on annexation. The settlement project has put four hundred thousand Israelis in the West Bank; under any version of a peace plan remotely acceptable to both sides, well over a hundred thousand settlers would have to be uprooted. \u201cAnd that just is not going to happen,\u201d he insisted, yet again.<\/p>\n
I mentioned intelligence reports about growing Palestinian frustration, about the prospects of a third intifada. Bennett seemed unfazed. \u201cGenerally, Israelis care less about this issue than before,\u201d he said. \u201cA third intifada will come about only because of our setting unreasonable expectations.\u201d<\/p>\n
Very few Israelis are interested in taking moral instruction from the \u201cgoodies\u201d of the Tel Aviv left or the visiting \u201cniceys\u201d from, say, the Upper West Side. Even the majority, who acknowledge the occupation and its cruelty, and favor a Palestinian state, ask: Why should we accept reprimand and diplomatic sanction from the authoritarian regimes in China and Russia? From Bashar al-Assad in Syria, who is killing his people by the tens of thousands, or from Mohamed Morsi, in Egypt, who, in a video posted on the Muslim Brotherhood\u2019s YouTube Channel in 2010, referred to Israelis as \u201cwarmongers, the descendants of apes and pigs\u201d? From Britain and France, with their histories of colonialism and slaughter, or the United States, whose drones have, well out of view of television crews, killed scores of civilians?<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, Israeli politics continues its seemingly endless trek to the right. Every day, the Web carries the voice of another leader of the settler movement who insists that the settlers are the vanguard now, that the old verities are to be challenged, if not eliminated. Early last year, Benny Katzover, a leader in the settlement of Elon Moreh, told a Chabad paper, Beit Mashiach, \u201cI would say that today Israeli democracy has one central mission, and that is to disappear. Israeli democracy has finished its historical role, and it must be dismantled and bow before Judaism.\u201d<\/p>\n
Despite the air of defeat that clings to the left, the center-left vote will still account for around fifty of a hundred and twenty seats. A political shift in its favor is always possible. Assaf Sharon, a leader of Molad, a think tank for the \u201crenewal of Israeli democracy,\u201d told me he believes that the national-religious position that the settlements are \u201cirreversible\u201d is \u201cbullshit.\u201d Sharon had been a member of Bnei Akiva, the Zionist youth movement. Unlike the majority of Israelis, he is intimately familiar with the settlements, most recently as a demonstrator against their expansion. One afternoon at Molad\u2019s headquarters, in the German Colony, in Jerusalem, he said that the drama surrounding the evacuation of eight thousand settlers from Gaza seven years ago \u201chyped up things in our imagination, but it masked the fact that the settlement enterprise comes from the government breathing life into it. If the government were to remove the phones, the transportation, the energy, the subsidies, it would dry up. Most settlers are sensible bourgeois and will pack up their bags. There are a few thousand crazies who can make trouble, but we can deal with that.\u201d<\/p>\n
But in the world of Middle Eastern politics\u2014a world that now includes Syria in flames, Egypt in chaos, and even Jordan in a state of instability\u2014the prospects are dim for anything other than an increasingly volatile status quo. \u201cIt seems that the next Israeli government will be much more radical,\u201d Mkhaimar Abusada, a political-science professor at Al Azhar University, in Gaza, told me. \u201cWe are going to witness more settlements, a greater encirclement of East Jerusalem, and more frustration and despair. Which means we\u2019ll have one of two scenarios: either meaningless negotiations or, if the stalemate continues, a new round of violence. And, in the end, violence is not a possibility\u2014it\u2019s almost a certainty.\u201d Tzipi Livni told me that after negotiating with the Palestinians she is convinced that they have given up their claims on Haifa and Jaffa, but she acknowledges that a deal requires risks that are outweighed only by the risks of not making a deal. \u201cMaking peace will be painful,\u201d she said. \u201cIt means not just giving up land; it means you take real security risks. It\u2019s going to be bloody. We would face terror at first. We all want to live happily ever after in peace, but that won\u2019t happen at first. It will take time between the agreement and real peace, and whoever makes it will be criticized as a traitor. And, if you decide to do nothing, you can just manage the situation.\u201d The security fence, she said, provides the temporary illusion of \u201cwe are here and they are there.\u201d<\/p>\n
In the meantime, Israel\u2019s hard-liners harden further. The Palestinians grow more frustrated. Talk of a binational state increases. All parties wait for the White House, but why would an American President think that he could present his own initiative and muster enough support on all sides to succeed? Why, he asks himself, should he spend the political capital? Courage is discouraged. And so this is the moment of Naftali Bennett. I\u2019ve rarely seen a novice politician so confident, and with such reason. Each day, he is clibing in the polls, skimming off votes from the Likud and Netanyahu.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m pissing him off enormously,\u201d Bennett said, smiling. \u201cBut what matters is the day after.\u201d Bennett knows that he is very unlikely to be Prime Minister\u2014this time, anyway\u2014but he hopes for a spot in the leadership. \u201cThe best analogy is that Bibi is the bus driver with two hands on the wheel,\u201d Bennett said. \u201cI want to put a third hand on the wheel.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Article: THE PARTY FAITHFUL by David Remnick in The New Yorker. The Text: At a makeshift theatre in the port of Tel Aviv, hundreds of young immigrants from Melbourne, the Five Towns, and other points in the Anglophone diaspora gathered recently to hear from the newest phenomenon in Israeli politics, Naftali Bennett. A forty-year-old […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":49,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[259],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\n
The Rise Of Israel's Radical Right<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The settlers move to annex the West Bank\u2014and Israeli politics.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.prosebeforehos.com\/article-of-the-day\/02\/01\/rise-of-radical-right-israel\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Rise Of Israel's Radical Right\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The settlers move to annex the West Bank\u2014and Israeli politics.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.prosebeforehos.com\/article-of-the-day\/02\/01\/rise-of-radical-right-israel\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Prose Before Hos\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2013-02-01T15:00:36+00:00\" \/>\n<meta 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