From Israel to America: A Warning in Bibi Netanyahu's Comeback

Could more explicit ethno-racial populism grow the rightwing vote? It may have done so in Israel; it could also happen here.

One of New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman’s trademark aphorisms is that “Israeli political trends are often a harbinger of wider trends in Western democracies—Off Broadway to our Broadway.” Indeed, he trotted the analogy out again a month ago after Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu rode back into power in Israel on top of the most “far-far-right” governing coalition to ever form in Israeli politics, suggesting that the results were the equivalent of Donald Trump getting re-elected in 2024 after running arm in arm with people like Michael Flynn, Steve Bannon, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Enrique Tarrio of the Proud Boys. Unfortunately, Friedman didn’t really use his column to flesh out the analogy, or, equally important in my mind, ponder how events and developments in both countries might actually be acting as one system tilted towards the right.

We all live in the same theater, after all. And in many ways Israel isn’t just part of the Middle East; it’s an extension of Western power and values that some have even called America’s 51st State, considering how dependent it is on US military aid and political protection. But at the same time the tail has learned how to wag the dog, not just in terms of how much influence the Israeli government wields over Congress and statehouses through allies like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) but also through cultural practices like two decades of US-Israeli police training in “best practices” for countering terrorism.

So it’s worth noticing when a corrupt populist demagogue who is skilled at dominating the media and has seemingly mastered the art of escalating racial and ethnic tensions to his political benefit – I’m talking now of Bibi, not Trump – manages a political comeback. What I wonder is if there’s a warning in Bibi’s return for those of us currently celebrating the losses of most MAGA politicians who ran here in the 2022 midterms. Could Trump’s move to the far-far-right of American politics, signified by his recent dinner with the open antisemite Kanye West and his pal neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes, help his return to power in the same way as Bibi’s embrace of the open racism, homophobia and annexationist beliefs of his far-right coalition partners? Bear with me as I try to unpack that hypothesis.

I’m writing this on the heels of spending the Saturday, Sunday and Monday at the national conference of J Street, the liberal pro-Israel, pro-peace lobby group that has worked the last 15 years to build up space in the American political system for mainstream politicians to speak more critically about Israel’s policies in the Palestinian occupied territories. While J Street is still absurdly not welcome among the legacy organizations that make up the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations -- yes, there literally is a group with that name, and it excludes J Street while including some less powerful liberal groups like Americans for Peace Now alongside far-right groups like the Zionist Organization of America – it is regarded in both Washington and in Israel as an important and respected player. That’s especially true on the Democratic side of the aisle, where J Street has built strong relationships with a majority of House and Senate Democrats. It did not go unnoticed in Israel that the first place Anthony Blinken, Biden’s Secretary of State, chose to give a speech since the recent Israeli election was at J Street; even if Blinken’s speech said little new, his presence conveyed a warning to the incoming Netanyahu government.

From my perspective, the most important thing about J Street is how it has given progressive American Jews a comfortable and somewhat powerful political home that allows them to navigate the challenging intersection of being both Jewish and progressive in America. Before it was founded, these folks had lots of places to go where they could share their concerns about the Jewish settlement movement or the impact of the occupation on Palestinian human rights (I’m thinking of Breira, the Israel Policy Forum, New Jewish Agenda, the New Israel Fund and Tikkun magazine, for example) but none of these posed any challenge to AIPAC’s domination of the American political arena. A few lone voices don’t add up to political power; J Street does. Its members and PAC have disbursed about $20 million since its founding in 2008, nearly all to benefit Democrats, and spent roughly $400,000 a year on lobbying, according to OpenSecrets.

Bibi, Meet Bernie. Bernie, Meet Bibi.

In recent years, the broad currents of the Israel/Palestine issue have shifted for two big reasons, both leading to more polarization. The first is the rise of Bibi as Israel’s dominant leader (serving as its prime minister for 15 of the 25 years from 1996-2021) and how he has skillfully sought to twist American politics toward his hyper-nationalistic and paranoid view of the world. And the second is the rise of Bernie Sanders as the leader of the Democratic party’s progressive faction.

Bibi, for his part, has consistently tried to tilt the US into greater confrontation with Iran, which he views as an existential threat—forcing successive Democratic administrations and progressive allies to devote substantial resources to blocking the outbreak of a US-Israel war on Iran. And he and his allies in the settlement movement and AIPAC have chosen to align themselves closer and closer to the American evangelical movement, which supports Israel because it views its existence as the fulfilment of the Biblical prophecy of Armageddon, though Bibi frames the alliance more in terms of their common defense of core Western values (read: white Judeo-Christian nationalism). That alliance may seem weird, but to AIPAC as long as it helps keep billions of dollars in American military aid flowing to Israel without any strings attached, it’s good for the Jews, as we say. (It may not at all be good for secular Jews in Israel, though, as now funders and ideological entrepreneurs from the American religious right are trying to spread their gospel there, backing efforts to undermine the country’s broad consensus in favor of abortion rights, for example, and finding common cause with people like Bezalel Smotrich, the leader of the number two party in Bibi’s new governing coalition who hates feminists and gays as much as he hates Palestinians.)

On the other hand, Bernie, by running for president in 2016 and 2020 and garnering millions of votes has demonstrated that open criticism of Israel’s occupation is no longer politically risky but potentially quite palatable. Much has changed. In 1984 and 1988, Democratic presidential candidate Reverend Jesse Jackson was vilified not just because of his one-time relationship with Louis Farrakhan or his reference to New York City as “Hymietown” (for which he apologized) but for his open advocacy for Palestinian self-determination and for talks with the Palestine Liberation Organization. In the New York primary of 1988, Jackson got just 7 percent of the Jewish vote (compared to 15% overall). In 2016, Sanders—who brought up Palestinian issues several times in the lead-up to the New York primary (and who, as a progressive secular Jew was a Jackson delegate from Vermont in the 1980s)—got perhaps a third, just slightly under his statewide total of 41%.

Of course, the context changed after the Oslo Accords of 1993, which were a breakthrough in Israeli-Palestinian relations. In 1984, Jackson’s delegates offered a minority plank to the Democratic platform that called for mutual recognition between Israel and Palestine along with territorial compromise and self-determination for both peoples; it was successfully defeated by allies of AIPAC, which branded these ideas as “anti-Israel.” Then Rep. Charles Schumer argued that since the word “self-determination” also appeared in the PLO Covenant, Jackson’s minority plank called for Israel’s annihilation and “reward[ed] intransigence and terrorism.” Today, even AIPAC claims to support a two-state solution.

But as many at the J Street conference this past weekend pointed out, as the power centers of both American and Israeli politics have moved toward the right in recent years, so has AIPAC, even as most American Jews remain steadfastly liberal. The election of Justice Democrats like Representatives Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez in 2018, who have each pushed the discussion of Palestinian rights much further beyond Sanders, prompted AIPAC to step more directly into the political arena in 2020 and 2022, pouring millions into PACs targeting progressive Democrats in key primaries. As Daniel Marans of the Huffington Post put it Sunday on a panel at the J Street event, “they wanted to nip the thing in the bud.” Matt Duss, who recently stepped down as Senator Sanders’ top foreign policy adviser, went even further in his criticism of these political interventions. After noting that Mark Mellman, the founder of Democratic Majority for Israel, one of those AIPAC-aligned PACS, had said that being “pro-Israel” (and not critical) is just “good politics,” Duss said, “It’s good politics in the same way that paying off the mob is good business.”

AIPAC also endorsed more than 100 Republican House members for re-election in 2022 despite the fact that they had voted to decertify the 2020 presidential election or otherwise stood with the election denial movement. Again, as long as those aid dollars keep flowing, AIPAC reasons it’s good for the Jews. J Street has responded to all of this fairly astutely, by getting more deeply involved in lobbying for voting rights reform in America and, most visibly, by adding the word “pro-democracy” to its tagline. I’m guessing that as more American Jews realize what AIPAC is up to, more may align themselves with J Street. Keeping the aid flowing to Israel may be “good for Israel” but not necessarily OK with American Jews who worry just as much about living in a health democracy.

From Off-Broadway, A Comeback?

Now, what does all of this have to do with the emerging contours of the 2024 election in America? Consider the following. Since 2019, Israel has had five rounds of national elections. The first two were inconclusive; the third led to a power-sharing agreement between Bibi and his chief rival on the center-left, Benny Gantz; the fourth successfully pushed Bibi out of government in favor of a different power-sharing deal that ultimately fell apart but which included an Arab political party for the first time in Israeli history; and now the fifth has him returning with a unprecedented coalition embracing the most rightwing parties to ever gain a share of power in Israel.  

It would seem as though little has changed, and all that the Israeli center-left has to do to regain power is find the right anti-Bibi figure to unite around. After all, in the popular vote the parties making up Bibi’s coalition got barely 50.5% of the votes cast. But because of how Israel’s system of proportional representation doles out Knesset seats, they will have 64 out of 120. (About 300,000 votes that went to small parties on the left were effectively wasted.) So, shouldn’t “Ralab” (the slogan for “Rak Lo Bibi” or “Just No to Bibi”) be enough—in the same way that most of us probably now think that “Never Trump” will be enough for victory in 2024?

I’m not so sure. As veteran Israeli pollster Dahlia Scheindlin, who mostly works for the center-left in Israel, pointed out at the J Street conference, something deeper is going on. She estimates that with the 2022 election, the share of the Israeli electorate voting for rightwing parties has steadily risen, from somewhere in the low 60s (in terms of Knesset seats) to 72 in 2021 election and now 74 today. In this election, Bezalel Smotrich’s Religious Zionism party got half a million votes (nearly 11%); in 1994, Smotrich’s individual forbearer, Meir Kahane, got just 26,000 votes. The ballooning birth rate among ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel must explain part of this change, but I also wonder if Bibi’s decision to explicitly attack the previous Israeli government for including an Arab party in its midst had something to do with the electorate’s swing to the right too. In the same way that Barack Obama’s election made white nationalism a bigger force in America, could the inclusion of the Mahmoud Abbas’ Arab party Ra’am in the previous government have fired up the religious racist right among Israeli Jewish voters? (Efforts by the previous government to add more content about pluralism and tolerance to the public school curriculum and less about Zionism may have fueled that base’s response as well.)

What we have to remember is that there are always three parts to any electorate. There are those people who voted last time for the right, those who voted for the left, and those who didn’t vote. In America, the first two are Republicans or Democrats. In Israel, they’ve been pro-Bibi or anti-Bibi. The x-factor are the people who either get drawn into political participation or pushed away by the issues raised by the leading candidates. In 2022, Bibi and his allies clearly managed to grow their side of the pie and I’m betting their more brazen appeals to hardline Orthodox religion and anti-Palestinian racism helped.

Right now in the United States, most commentators are coalescing around the idea that Trump’s more visible embrace of QAnon’s tropes along with his recent dinner with Ye and Fuentes and his call to “terminate” the Constitution in order to restore his presidency will demonstrate to Republican primary voters that he is too unhinged to ever return to the White House. But what if instead those calls work to draw in new voters who, til now, haven’t bothered to vote because the candidates weren’t in tune with their own extreme leanings?

After all, somewhere around a fifth of Americans hold antisemitic beliefs, with some probably unaware that those beliefs are even prejudiced, according to the AntiDefamation League’s 11-point index of antisemitic attitudes. I’ve not been able to find any studies of nonvoters that asked about their views of Jews, but the Knight Foundation’s 2020 study found several indications that nonvoters may be more extremist than regular voters. For starters, nonvoters were more likely to say that undocumented immigrants with no criminal record should be arrested and deported--23% compared to 17% of voters. They also seem to be more inclined toward rightwing populist news sources: Of those who say that radio or podcasts were their primary source of news, three times as many nonvoters as voters mentioned the Rush Limbaugh (7% to 2%) or Sean Hannity shows (3% to 1%), while twice as many voters as nonvoters mentioned NPR as their most common one (30% to 15% of nonvoters). Nonvoters are also twice as likely to rely on YouTube (7% to 3%), which is not good because of how much YouTube serves as an intensifier of extremist ideas. In general, nonvoters are younger than regular voters, poorer and less educated, and more likely to say the system is rigged or corrupt. In 2020, Trump was able to grow his total vote from 2016 by 11.5 million votes; are there more out there for him to harvest?

In the coming months, all of these dynamics will be tested. None of us can predict how unexpected events may change the political scene. But it’s already clear Bibi’s new government partners want to radically disrupt the status quo on everything from how Israel manages security and settlements in the occupied territories to the independence of its judicial system and the content of curricula in its public schools. They may overreach and cause more middle-of-the-road Israelis to try to resist some of these changes in ways reminiscent of our post-2016 “resistance.” Or, their actions may trigger more calls for conditioning American aid to Israel, torquing already stressed internal relations inside Democratic coalitions in the US. As the May 2021 Gaza War showed, seemingly small events like Israel’s planned takeover of several Palestinian homes in Jerusalem can spiral rapidly into intense conflict, exposing and exacerbating tensions inside Israel itself and thousands of miles away in America. At the J Street conference, the overall mood was foreboding; one friend with deep experience in the intersectional politics of the Middle East and America said she felt we were staring “into the abyss.”

And I haven’t even mentioned what havoc Representatives Paul Gosar, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz may generate as members of the incoming House Republican Majority!

Odds and Ends

—Democrats are celebrating Senator Raphael Warnock’s win over Hershel Walker in the Georgia Senate runoff, but don’t miss Joan Walsh’s careful dissent in The Nation. Along the way to victory there were some real fractures, evidenced by Stacey Abrams’ disappearance from the Warnock push and his embrace of rapper Killer Mike, a Bernie Sanders backer who had cozied up to Republican Brian Kemp.

--On the third-party front, Daniel Lippman reports for Politico on “turmoil” inside No Labels’ $70 million effort to create a unity ticket presidential campaign in 2024. Given that it has hired journalist Mark Halperin and has made him its top paid employee, perhaps it should change its name to “No Zippers”?

-- Ben Resnik, Valeria Sosa Garnica, Oluwakemi Oso, and Kate Gage of the Cooperative Impact Lab explain how progressives made use of TikTok to recruit more young people to community organizing in 2022.

End Times

This kind of explains how I feel about American politics these days, too. Well, actually this does too!