Noam Gidron | Vox

Israel’s horrible year started long before October 7

2024-01-02T10:12:17-05:00

An Israeli flag hangs in a destroyed house on December 20, 2023, in Be’eri, Israel. | Maja Hitij/Getty Images

A year ago today, Benjamin Netanyahu’s sixth government was inaugurated with a clear majority, ushering in what Israelis hoped would be a new period of stability after more than three years of political turmoil. Reality quickly proved otherwise.

Instead, 2023 has been Israel’s annus horribilis, marked by a series of events that shook the nation to its core.

In early January, less than a month after the government was formed, Minister of Justice Yariv Levin unveiled a plan to radically reshape the foundations of Israeli democracy and concentrate power in the hands of the executive. Israelis, many of whom perceived the move as a step toward authoritarianism, took to the streets to halt the judicial overhaul, staging some of the largest mass demonstrations Israel has ever seen week after week. In July, as the Knesset (Israel’s Parliament) passed the first legislation of the overhaul, concerns over social disintegration intensified.

Then came the deadliest day in the country’s history. On October 7, Hamas terrorists infiltrated Israeli territory and killed over 1,200 people, including many civilians. In the immediate aftermath of the massacre, the Israeli state proved incapable of an immediate effective response; it was left to voluntary organizations to evacuate Israelis living next to the Gaza border. The war in Gaza that ensued is still raging, with over 20,000 Palestinians killed and over 85 percent of the population displaced, over 160 Israeli soldiers killed, and no clear path for the Israeli government to deliver on its stated goals. An annus horribilis indeed.

How has it come to this — so much damage in so little time?

As a first attempt at this — focusing on the internal dynamics of Israeli politics and without assuming an exhaustive answer — three factors are worth highlighting: populism, polarization, and the personalization of politics. The interplay of these three factors proved so dangerous since it simultaneously weakened both Israeli society and Israel’s state capacity.

High levels of populism among members of the government fueled the judicial overhaul, which intensified internal strife — emboldening Israel’s adversaries. Then, after the October 7 attack, the government’s inadequate response exposed Israel’s weakened state, a result of populist assaults on public servants in a polarized climate as well as years of political personalization in which loyalty took precedence over professional qualifications in public service appointments.

This was a uniquely bad year for Israel, worth understanding in its own right. But Israel is far from the only democratic country confronting some combination of populism, polarization, and personalization — and democracies would do well to heed this tragic tale.

Netanyahu’s coalition entered power with a decidedly populist bent

Benjamin Netanyahu returned to the office of the prime minister, a position he had previously held from 1996–1999 and 2009–2021, and within a week, it was clear that populism would be a defining feature of his tenure.

On January 4, Levin announced a plan for a judicial overhaul that aimed to dramatically reorganize the basic architecture of Israeli democracy. According to Levin, the court “has eroded trust to a dangerous low and has not brought proper governance. People we didn’t choose — decide for us. This is not democracy.” The judicial overhaul was therefore designed to reshape Israel’s delicate system of checks and balances, lifting constraints over the elected branches.

The overhaul consisted of multiple measures, including granting the government greater influence in the selection of judges and restricting the court’s ability to strike down legislation. Critics warned that these measures were designed to collectively form what legal scholar Kim Lane Scheppele termed a “Frankenstate”: a disfigured democracy crafted by a mishmash of legal arrangements adopted from other countries and patched together to ensure maximum power in the hands of the government. Soon, one of the largest mass protest movements in the history of the country emerged, with hundreds of thousands of Israelis taking to the streets.

This attack on the functioning of Israel’s state was not some aberration in Netanyahu’s government. While much of the public attention following the formation of the government went to its most radical elements — such as Itamar Ben-Gvir, previously convicted of incitement to racism and supporting a terrorist organization and now appointed as minister of national security — the judicial overhaul was central to the goals of all parts of the new coalition. It was presented not by a minister from a small fringe party, but by Levin, a minister from Netanyahu’s party, the mainstream Israeli right-wing Likud. This, however, should come as no surprise given evidence that the Likud stands out among mainstream right parties for its extreme level of populism.

For populists, politics is a never-ending struggle between the pure, unified people and the corrupt, malicious elites. Populist leaders claim that they, and only they, are the true representatives of the authentic people. Consequently, they perceive constraints on the executive branch — whether in the form of judicial review or public servants who are committed to ethical, professional service — as hurdles to be dismantled.

Clear examples of this populist script can be found in the rhetoric of elected representatives from the Likud party, commonly framing state institutions — from the military to the Bank of Israel — as an all-encompassing “deep state” at the service of corrupt elites. Former Minister of Information Galit Distel-Atbaryan tweeted that her party “will continue to free Israel from the oppression of the elites.” The minister of transportation, Miri Regev, railed against “an elite that seeks to override the will of the people.” Tali Gottlieb, a member of Parliament, stated that “the deep state has infiltrated the leadership of the Shin Bet and the IDF.”

New data confirms that extreme populism is a key feature of Israeli politics. The Chapel Hill Expert Survey measures the salience of anti-elite and anti-establishment discourse in the public communication of political parties around the world. While imperfect, this is a useful proxy to measure populism comparatively. Israel was just added to this data set, which allows us to locate Israeli parties next to their counterparts abroad. Such comparative analyses show that Likud is populist to the bone. Its levels of populism align more closely with the European populist radical right than with mainstream right parties. For instance, when compared to Germany, the Likud’s level of populism is more similar to the radical right Alternative for Germany than to the center-right Christian Democrats.

In fact, the Likud’s populism is in a similar league with that of the right-wing parties pushing for democratic backsliding in Eastern Europe: Fidesz in Hungary and PiS (Law and Justice) in Poland. In both countries, democratically elected governments sought to use legal means to hollow out democratic governance. This is the populist textbook of democratic erosion that Likud was following with its judicial overhaul: pushing a plan that, according to then-Chief Justice Hayut, would deal a “fatal blow” to Israeli democracy.

Partisan animosity in Israel is reaching a dangerous peak

Populism often fuels a vicious circle of polarization, as explained by political scientists Jennifer McCoy and Murat Somer: “Populist leaders rail against the establishment or the elites, blaming them for the plight of the people […] When opponents reciprocate with derogatory antipopulist language, the polarizing dynamic spirals.” Importantly, this polarization manifests not in policy disagreements but rather in animosity and hostility across party lines. As would be expected, the growing salience of populist discourse in Israeli politics went hand in hand with growing inter-partisan animosity.

Analyses of survey data collected in Israel reveal that by late 2022, partisan animosity had reached record levels. The Israel National Election Surveys allows us to track changes over time in affective polarization, defined as the difference between how much voters like their own party and how much they dislike political opponents. Out-party dislike has increased since Netanyahu took office in 2009, following a decline during most of the previous decade. When Netanyahu reentered the office of prime minister in 2022, affective polarization had reached its highest level since data began to be collected in the early 1990s.

While comparable data has not yet been collected since the 2022 elections, clashes over the judicial overhaul likely deepened partisan divisions. Specifically, concerns over the spillover effects of polarization and the disintegration of military units were voiced throughout the year, with some 10,000 military reservists threatening to stop volunteering for service if the government persists with the judicial overhaul.

These were real blows to Israeli society and its sense of cohesion, which was interpreted by its enemies as an opportunity to strike.

As reported in Haaretz, a senior intelligence officer warned Netanyahu that clashes over the judicial overhaul are “worsening the damage to Israeli deterrence and increasing the probability of escalation.” Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant warned in March that the internal strife is eroding Israel’s national security. In response, Netanyahu sought to fire Gallant but rescinded the dismissal in the face of mass public outrage. In July, in a Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee meeting regarding the implications of the judicial overhaul, Gallant warned that “there is harm to national resilience that may lead to harm to national security” and added that Israel’s enemies “believe, mistakenly, that they have the opportunity to take advantage of what they perceive as a weakness.” Yet the government moved forward with the judicial overhaul. And then came October 7.

A weakened state is facing a crisis

It has been almost three months since Hamas’s heinous attack that led to a full-scale war with catastrophic devastation in Gaza, and the magnitude of this catastrophe is beyond imagination. What was clear just days after the attack, however, is that Israeli civil society demonstrated outstanding solidarity. Organizations such as Brothers and Sisters in Arms, which emerged earlier this year to oppose the judicial overhaul, quickly reoriented their efforts to help survivors. They evacuated people trapped in fighting zones and provided them with food and basic amenities; shipped toys for families with kids living close to the border; and more. Such civic awakening in times of crisis is admirable, but it raises the question: Where was the state?

In short, it did not have the capacity to rise to the moment.

For populists who see themselves as the exclusive representative of the “real” people, civil servants with professional ethics and willingness to question politicians’ decisions can quickly be labeled as a “deep state” that must be dismantled. And in intensely polarized environments, civil servants raising tough questions may easily be accused of serving political opponents. The negative implications of these two factors on state capacity were further compounded by an additional feature of contemporary Israeli politics: personalization of the political system, defined as a “process in which the political weight of the individual actor in the political process increases over time, while the centrality of the political group (i.e., political party) declines.”

As political systems become increasingly personalized, individual leaders amass growing centrality and authority at the expense of collective institutions. In such a system, loyalty to the leader plays an increasingly important role in appointments to positions of power, overshadowing considerations of professional credentials and proven capacities.

This is what has happened to Israel over the last four decades.

Once again, comparative research is helpful: Researchers who compared levels of personalization in 26 established democracies in 2018 located Israel at the top of the list, together with Italy. This comparison is based on multiple indicators, such as decision-making procedures within parties and the ways media coverage centers on leaders rather than parties. The centrality of Benjamin Netanyahu in shaping Israeli politics is hard to overstate. Analyses of survey data reveal that sentiments toward Netanyahu have become the primary organizing principle in Israeli politics.

The implications of this extreme personalization for public service were dire as expected. Less than a month before the Hamas attack, public administration scholars Sharon Gilad and Ilana Shpaizman warned of the consequences of this weakening of the public service. Based on interviews and a focus group with hundreds of civil servants, they documented increased pressure from political appointees and politicians, and skilled civil servants’ intent to leave the public sector. As Haaretz reported, managers say they are facing difficulties recruiting and retaining qualified employees. Gilad and Shpaizman presciently concluded that the erosion of state capacity presents a significant threat to all Israelis. The magnitude of this threat became painfully evident when Israeli ministries were glaringly incapable of responding to the deadly October 7 attack.

What now?

For Israel, 2023 was a year in which decades happened. As the year draws to an end, Israelis are grappling with the repercussions of its unique noxious blend of populism, polarization, and personalization.

While Israel faces specific security threats, there is a lesson here that extends beyond national borders. A resilient political system is one that fosters competition across the ideological spectrum while steadfastly resisting the allure of those who undermine state capacity in the pursuit of loyalty and in their fight against imagined elites and fifth columns. The threats and vulnerabilities posed by populism, polarization, and personalization crystallize in times of crisis, when an urgent and robust response is needed but the state proves too weak to react effectively.

Democracies worldwide would be wise to heed this tragic cautionary tale.

The left shouldn’t fear nationalism. It should embrace it.

2018-02-08T08:40:04-05:00

Rep. Joe Kennedy III (D-MA), pictured with US Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) — at the 2016 Democratic convention — is among the Democrats casting the fight for DREAMers in patriotic terms. | Robyn BeckAFP/Getty Images

To some on the left, Donald Trump’s presidency, combined with disturbing developments in Europe, suggests that progressive politics are doomed by the rise of nationalism.

“Forget the nostalgia for 21st-century social democracy,” announced the liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz, channeling the views of Harvard political scientist Yascha Mounk. “Nationalism is here to stay.”

Across the Western world, center-left parties are in trouble: In Germany, Austria, France, and the Netherlands, social democrats have suffered historic electoral defeats. Right-wing populists, meanwhile, have scored a series of victories, including Trump’s election, the vote for Brexit, and the continuing erosion of liberal democratic institutions in Hungary and Poland.

But while many people take for granted an inherent contradiction between nationalism and left-wing politics, there simply isn’t one, either historically or philosophically. Throughout the 20th century, progressives mobilized for social justice most successfully when they spoke in the name of national solidarity rather than focusing exclusively on class-based interests or on abstract notions of justice. Left-wingers often cite the adage that patriotism is the last resort of the scoundrel — and with good reason. But it is important to also remember that a deep sense of national commitment underpins the egalitarian institutions we hold dear.

The historian Michael Kazin put it mildly when he wrote that patriotism “is not a popular sentiment on the contemporary left.” The influential British left-wing commentator George Monbiot has equated patriotism with racism: To give in to patriotism, he writes, is to deny the plain truth “that someone living in Kinshasa is of no less worth than someone living in Kensington.”

Yet in giving up on appeals to national solidarity, the left has forgotten the basic political argument that served it so well in the past: that out of the ties that bind together our national communities emerges a deep commitment to the well-being, welfare, and social esteem of our fellow citizens. This recognizes a basic moral intuition: We have deep and encompassing obligations to those we consider our own, based on a shared sense of membership in a community of fate — or more simply, based on our shared national identity.

National solidarity used to stand at the core of the social democratic agenda, but today the left’s intellectual energy is channeled in two alternative directions: first, toward a focus on global humanitarian concerns, and second, toward domestic class struggles, in which politics becomes a zero-sum game between conflicting economic interests. The global humanitarian perspective, however laudable its intentions (and some of its outcomes) may be, ignores the bounded sense of national “we-ness” that motivates people to invest in the welfare of others.

And the domestic class-based lens overlooks the power of solidarity among individuals in different economic circumstances. History suggests that progressives have much to gain by returning to the basic leftist theme of national solidarity.

Progressives haven’t always been allergic to nationalism

Progressives once knew how to appeal to a common sense of national purpose. Consider Sweden, the paradigmatic example of a progressive welfare state in the 20th century. As early as the 1920s, that nation’s Social Democrats focused on appeals to “the people.” As the political scientist Sheri Berman has written, “Embracing concepts such as ‘people’ and ‘nation’ that the radical right was exploiting successfully elsewhere, the [Social Democratic] SAP was able to claim the mantle of national unity and social solidarity during the chaos of the early 1930s.”

While other left-wing parties considered themselves first and foremost representatives of the working class, the organizing concept of the Swedish Social Democrats was captured by one of its slogans, “the people’s home.” “There is no more patriotic party than [the Social Democrats since] the most patriotic act is to create a land in which all feel at home,” remarked that party’s leader, as he attempted to reach out to traditionally conservative constituencies like farmers. Such rhetoric helped the Swedish Social Democrats build a broad center-left political coalition that has dominated Swedish politics since World War II.

In both the United Kingdom and the United States, too, progressive advocates gained traction when they called for social justice as an expression of “the fairness and solidarity of the national character,” in the words of Oxford historian Ben Jackson. The Beveridge Report of 1942, which laid the foundations for the British welfare state, appealed not to abstract moral principles but to “peculiarly British” convictions, in Beveridge’s own words. These convictions included “a minimum income for subsistence when wages fail for any reason: a minimum of provision for children, a minimum of health, of housing, of education.”

In the United States, the architects of the New Deal justified their attacks on the excessive power of the rich not only as measures designed to benefit the poor, but in the name of the nation as a whole — an attempt to create “a safer, happier, more American America,” in the words of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1936. In his efforts to reconfigure political institutions in favor of the less well-off, FDR famously embraced the hatred of the rich. But he did so first and foremost not in the name of sectorial interests but rather because increasing taxation of the superrich was, in his own words, “the American thing to do.”

In all of these cases, national solidarity was not just rhetorical but also embedded in a specific type of political institution. Social policies that served people from all walks of life, such as the National Health Service in the UK and Social Security in the US, both reflected and reinforced national solidarity, aligning instead of dividing the interests of low-income and middle-class voters. The shift of the center left in the 1990s toward the privatization of risk and toward means-tested welfare programs, which stigmatized and singled out those in need of assistance, has likely eroded such sense of cross-class solidarity.

The left can reframe nationalism and gain support for its policies

There is strong reason to believe that today, just as in the past, progressives could and should once again aim to build diverse electoral coalitions based on national solidarity.

While it has become common on the left to associate nationalism with conservatism, Harvard sociologist Bart Bonikowski has found that a progressive interpretation of nationalism is more prevalent than many may imagine. In contrast to the common approach of considering people as being more or less nationalist, Bonikowski distinguishes between different types of national identities. Analyzing data collected in 34 countries (including the US), he demonstrates that around half of the population in many Western countries fits within what he calls the “liberal national” type.

This group is characterized by both strong national pride and an inclusive vision of the national community. This group expresses a high degree of pride in the nation-state (expressed in devotion to national institutions ranging from sports teams to democratic bodies), and perceives membership in the national community as based on subjective feeling of belonging. Such a perspective opens the door for the successful integration of minorities.

In the United States, building on open-ended interviews with 49 individuals across the United States, the political scientist Vanessa Williamson has shown that many Americans, on both sides of the partisan divide, regard paying their taxes as an expression of patriotic duty. (One of Williamson’s interviewees, a young Ohio Republican, described paying taxes as a responsibility to “the Founding Fathers.”)

Perhaps more counterintuitively, a recent study of American public opinion also demonstrated that “priming of American identity shifted citizens’ opinions toward more inclusive, rather than restrictive, immigration-related policy stances.” In a panel study of attitudes toward Trump’s Muslim ban, a group of political scientists surveyed the same 311 people before and after the announcement of this executive order. They found that opposition to the Muslim ban increased particularly among people who identified strongly with America.

They explain this surprising finding by changes in the media environment: Intensive media coverage in which the Muslim ban was painted as “un-American” led to a progressive shift in opinion among people who identified strongly with America.

Some Democrats are appealing to national solidarity

Today, as in the past, progressive appeals to national solidarity can resonate with a broad share of the electorate. Center-left parties have yet to fully embrace this strategy, but several politicians offer glimpses of what a move in this direction might look like. On the question of immigration, Rep. Joe Kennedy III tweeted: “It is time to do what history tells us time and again is right. To care for each other and to be kind to each other. To all #Dreamers, we hear you, we see you, and you are Americans.” Such appeals to a national sense of decency may more deeply resonate with voters than, say, arguments that DACA “has boosted [the] economy.”

And on the question of class, former Vice President Joe Biden argued that paying higher taxes was “patriotic” while insisting that “the wealthy are as patriotic as the poor.” That remark drew criticism from the left, but Biden is right that a renewed emphasis on patriotism holds the potential to build bridges across classes rather than dividing Americans as Trump’s rhetoric does.

An emphasis on national solidarity need not, and should not, paper over ideological differences between left and right, nor can it speak to every alienated voter who has defected from the left. But it may well speak to many of them, while also attracting voters currently sitting on the sidelines who feel, not without reason, that leftist elites look down on them and their old-fashioned patriotism.

It is important to note that embracing an inclusive sense of national pride does not in any way entail adopting the rhetoric or policies of the populist right. Aside from being morally bankrupt, there is no reason to assume that moving closer to the populist right on issues such as immigration would increase support for the left. Much more likely, such a move would play into the hands of the conservative and nativist parties.

Dyed-in-the-wool xenophobes are likely to prefer the real thing over watered-down versions of nativism, and in any case, the populist right “can always respond to any matching of its offer by simply upping the ante,” as two political scientists in Britain recently put it. A progressive appeal to national solidarity should be seen as an exhortation to renew our moral obligations to others within our national community, not as a call for xenophobia.

Lastly, what about the globalist perspective? Isn’t Monbiot, cited above, 100 percent right that a person living far away from us is of no less worth than a person living next to us — and could benefit more from our resources than our poor and lower-middle-class neighbors? And if so, how can we build an intellectually honest progressive agenda based on national solidarity?

Posing the question in such a way is misleading. The debate, after all, is not about the worth of people but about the special commitments we owe to particular people. The philosopher Will Kymlicka, of Canada’s Queens University, provides the following example:

[I]f someone has a heart attack in front of us on the street, we have a humanitarian obligation to assist, whether they are tourists or citizens, but in the case of citizens, we also have an obligation to identify and address factors (such as economic insecurity) that make some people much more vulnerable to heart attacks than others. We typically do not think we have a comparable obligation with respect to tourists.

Humanitarian commitments are aimed at relieving suffering and therefore expand across borders; egalitarian institutions such as the welfare state reflect distinctive visions of social justice and are therefore local and bounded. Of course, healthy center-left parties should accommodate activists with different priorities and engage in an ongoing conversation about the weight attached to these different commitments.

But my broader point is that national solidarity is not a threat to progressives but, as others have already noted, a potential resource — and one the center left ignores at its peril. Unlike abstract appeals to global humanitarian concerns, it rests on the solid foundations of strong national attachments. Unlike narrow class-based appeals, it opens the door to broad electoral coalitions. The progressive challenge of our time lies not in dismissing national pride but in harnessing national solidarity in order to create a fairer, more just society.

Noam Gidron is a fellow at the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance at Princeton. Next year, he will join the faculty of the political science department at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Find him on Twitter @NoamGidron.

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