Beyond culture and economy: Israel’s security-driven populism

ABSTRACT

Despite being largely overlooked in the literature, Israel provides a rare example of what a full decade of twenty-first century populism in power looks like. Based on an examination of rhetoric and policymaking between 2009 and 2019, this article brings the writing on the subject up to date and highlights the unique traits of Israeli populism. In so doing it establishes that Israeli populism has been mainstreamed to a remarkable extent and currently encompasses almost all right-wing parties in the country’s legislature. Moreover, it shows that the Israeli case embodies a variety of populism which has yet to be acknowledged in the literature – neither economic nor cultural in character, but rather based on national security issues. The concept of ‘security-driven populism’, introduced here, could prove useful to researchers studying other populist regimes that do not fit neatly into the ‘culture versus economy’ debate, which has dominated the field for years.

KEYWORDS:

• Populism
• national security
• securitisation
• populist discourse
• Netanyahu
• Israel

Acknowledgements

Earlier versions of this article were presented at the 2017 IEPN (Israeli European Policy Network) conference in Barcelona; the Graduate Seminar of NYU’s Taub Center for Israel Studies in New York City; the 2018 CEU Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology Graduate Conference in Budapest; and the 8th EAIS annual conference in Charles University, Prague. The authors also gratefully acknowledge the useful feedback given by Avishay Ben Sasson-Gordis, Noam Gidron, Matt Hitchens, Abby Innes, David Ost, Ayala Panievsky, Assaf Sharon, Jonathan White, Ronald Zweig, and the two anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Farther back, the Israeli politician most commonly described by scholars as a populist is Menachem Begin (Sprinzak, 1989; Keren, 1995; Filc, 1996). This timeframe, however, is beyond the scope of the article. Moreover, we would argue that Begin – whose populism was defined chiefly by its anti-elitism and communication style – would not be considered one by contemporary theoretical standards.

2 For most of the decade this was the name of the party closely affiliated with the settler movement. In 2019, the party split and eventually reunited. In that year’s two election cycles, its members ran as part of The Union of Right-Wing Parties, The New Right, and Yamina.

3 We have excluded the two Ultra-Orthodox parties – Shas and United Torah (UT) – from the populist triad, even though they are members of the right-wing bloc. The UT, a sectorial religious-fundamentalist party, is not considered populist under any understanding of the term. As for Shas, some scholars argue that it promotes moral-religious conservatism rather than populism (Hirsch-Hoefler et al., 2010). Others, who do think it populist, disagree about the type of populism it promotes – with some defining it as inclusionary populism, related to the Mizrahi-Ashkenazi tension (Filc, 2010, p. 93), and others defining it as exclusionary populism, focused on attacking minorities like refugees and the LGBTQ community (Pedahzur, 2012, pp. 193–194). Either way, Shas’s politics lacks the main attribute shared by all triad members: a security-driven populism, mobilised against the Jewish left. In sum, if one thinks Shas is not populist, our claim about the pervasiveness of populism still stands, since the majority of Israel’s right-wing actors are populist nevertheless. If one thinks Shas is indeed populist, our claim is strengthened, but we would argue that its populism is different in character – and less influential – than the rest of the triad, and therefore less relevant for defining the general characteristics of Israel’s current populist turn.

4 The 2010s should be regarded as a new phase in a long process of delegitimisation which started in the early 1970s, following the emergence of the public debate about the territories occupied by Israel in the 1967 War (Sprinzak, 1973, 1999; Pedahzur et al., 2000). A major turning point in this process was the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995 by a national-religious Jewish radical.

5 Israel is used here as a paradigmatic case of security-driven populism, but other case studies could benefit from the application of this concept. For example, Turkey, where Recep Tayyip Erdoğan often exploits anxieties arising from the conflict with the Kurdish separatist movement (Aytaç and Elçi, 2019; Rogenhofer, 2018) and India, where Narendra Modi frequently uses anxieties related to the conflict with Pakistan and the tensions between Hindus and Muslims within India (Gudavarthy, 2018; Kinnvall, 2019).

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Notes on contributors

Yonatan Levi

Yonatan Levi is a PhD candidate at the European Institute, London School of Economics and Political Science. He researches the generational politics of millennials in Israel and the United States. His research interests also include populism, social movements and contemporary Israeli politics. His writing has appeared in The Guardian and Haaretz.

Shai Agmon

Shai Agmon is a PhD candidate at the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford. His research focuses on the institutional limits of markets, legal philosophy, liberalism and contemporary Israeli Politics. His work has appeared in Politics, Philosophy & Economics and The Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy.