The Israeli right’s inferiority complex
Battered in its infancy, it cannot acknowledge its own extraordinary success.
Despite last Thursday’s massive rally in support of the Netanyahu government’s judicial reform proposals, it looks increasingly likely that the Israeli right will lose this battle, given that polls show a solid majority of Israelis are opposed to fundamental aspects of the reforms.
This makes the right’s decision to double down a strange one. At best, the public is not clamoring for reform, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his coalition could easily have avoided this upheaval by concentrating on more important matters.
Yet the right chose this fight, and it is worth asking why. Clearly, it was not due to political considerations. The most likely explanation is a certain mentality that pervades the right or at least its most fervent supporters. Put simply, the Israeli right suffers from a massive inferiority complex.
This complex is rooted firmly in Israeli history. As it never stops telling people, the right was scorned by the Labor-dominated governments of Israel’s early years, its members were prevented from reaching high positions in the IDF and the bureaucracy, and its leader Menachem Begin was so ostracized that David Ben-Gurion would not speak his name in the Knesset.
One would think that this would have changed in 1977, when Begin and his Likud Party won that year’s election and ended Labor’s monopoly on Israeli politics and society.
But it did not. Many on the right still hold tenaciously to their ancient resentments. This has been much in evidence during the debate over the judicial reforms. While some on the right have sought to compromise with opponents, and a few have even joined the protests, a great deal of the right has reacted with profound self-pity and rage.
Their claim is that the protests are nothing but a scam and the protesters corrupt hypocrites. Opposition to the reforms is seen as a conspiracy by agents of Israel’s leftist “deep state” who seek to overturn the will of Israeli voters in order to maintain despotic power. The opposition’s ultimate aim, the ultras believe, is to overthrow the government and replace it with a leftist tyranny.
Most of this is quite clearly nonsense. There is a case to be made for judicial reform, and the right has made it. The majority of the Israeli people do not want it, or at least do not want it in its current form. The right believed there was a consensus in their favor and they were wrong. There is nothing ignoble about this, and the obvious answer is to reach some kind of compromise, which is now being attempted under the auspices of President Isaac Herzog.
Why, then, the hysterical conspiracy theories, the total rejection of the possibility that opponents of reform might be acting in good faith?
This question goes to the heart of the ethos of today’s Israeli right, because, contrary to that ethos, the right has been an extraordinary success story. Indeed, it not only escaped its early marginalization but established itself as the natural party of government.
More importantly, however, the right has also gotten more or less everything it wanted.
The Israeli right rose to power on the basis of certain principles from which it has rarely wavered: It wanted to break the Labor Party’s domination of Israeli politics and it did. It wanted to liberalize the Israeli economy. The economy is liberalized and quite successfully so. It wanted to retain an undivided Jerusalem and control over Judea and Samaria with limited autonomy for the Palestinians. Jerusalem remains undivided and the de facto status of Judea and Samaria is precisely what the right envisioned. It sought to foster and expand Jewish settlement in the disputed territories and, despite setbacks such as the Sinai and Gaza withdrawals, it has.
Given these immense accomplishments, culminating in Netanyahu’s long reign, the right’s continuing resentment is a mystery. From where comes their conviction that, despite everything, they are still marginalized and persecuted by forces of collusion and conspiracy?
The answer is likely rooted, as it usually is, in childhood. In other countries, the right is an essentially traditionalist and conservative force. The Israeli right, in contrast, was a dissident movement. For decades, it was indeed marginalized and scorned by the powers-that-be in the Zionist movement and then the State of Israel.
In the face of this primal trauma, the 1977 victory and the successes that followed might as well never have happened. The battering the right suffered in its infancy has left scars too deep to be effaced by a thriving adulthood.
This is tragic because it has prevented the Israeli right from reaching maturity. It does not understand that it now holds the commanding heights of power and, in a democratic nation, the dominant party must also be a mature one. It must understand that it has responsibilities not only to its supporters but to society as a whole. It commands a consensus and is obligated to preserve and nurture it.
Due to its inferiority complex and the resentments that come with it, much of the Israeli right has proven unable to do this. It has fallen, instead, into hubris and overreach. It has gone beyond what the Israeli consensus is prepared to tolerate.
The combative ethos born of the right’s history of struggle is not monolithic. There are many on the right who understand the reality of its success and the obligations that come with it. They have indicated that they are prepared for compromise and mutual concessions.
If they do not prevail, and the right ultimately succumbs to its neuroses, it will not be pretty. For the good of Israeli society, we should hope this does not happen. If it does, however, those on the right who are unwilling to let go of their resentments and accept their own success will have no one to blame but themselves.
Had no idea this aspect was in play. But where do you see the hard right signaling they're ready to govern maturely?