Right-wing youth set the course for Israel

Seven 18-year-old Jewish Israelis, friends since childhood, play online on mobile phones and smoke secretly on the artificial grass of a social center.

They are and are from Rehovot, the city of 150,000 inhabitants southeast of Tel Aviv that pollsters focus on because their election results usually coincide with the Jewish vote at the state level.

The seven define themselves as right-wingers, and the question seems strange to them, as if there were no other possible answer.

In this neighborhood, Kiriat Moshe, 89% of the ballots went to right-wing parties, half to Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud, in last Tuesday's elections.

Lior was one of the 209,000 new voters who decided five of the 120 seats in Parliament, where 82 deputies are now between the center-right and its most radical extreme.

He opted for Religious Zionism, the anti-Arab ultranationalist discourse formation that negotiates this Sunday, as the third force in the Knesset, its entry into the coalition that will return Netanyahu to power.

He does not call her by his name, but by that of his famous number two, Itamar Ben Gvir, the radical settler who calls for capital punishment for anyone who throws a Molotov cocktail and the deportation of "disloyal" citizens, such as several Arab deputies.

― Why did you vote for him?

― Because he wants to kill the terrorists.

And because if there's trouble in Nablus, send Kfir, Duvdevan or whoever is needed, he says, referring to a brigade and a military unit in the occupied territory of the West Bank.

And so that he throws out that Arab... what is his name?

"Um El Fahem [an Arab city in Israel]," replies a friend who voted for Netanyahu's conservative party, Likud.

"Ahmed Tibi," corrects another, called Ofir.

- That!

The one who wants to divide Jerusalem so that it is not only ours.

Ofir has not voted.

"Politics is the last thing that matters to me in life," she justifies.

If he did, he would also have leaned towards Ben Gvir because he "is the only one who speaks clearly and doesn't say nonsense like the rest of the politicians."

Lior, Ofir and their friends are no exception, but the norm.

70% of Jewish Israelis between the ages of 18 and 24 define themselves as right-wing, above the national average, in which these positions have been growing for two decades.

In the late 1990s, Jewish Israelis who defined themselves on the right and those on the left were tied at 40%.

Today, they are 62% and 12%.

Nor is Kiriat Moshe an exception.

It is not an ideological settlement in the West Bank, the spearhead of religious nationalism that nurtures figures like Ben Gvir, but a poor, crime-associated neighborhood full of crumbling buildings awaiting demolition.

55% of its 10,000 inhabitants are Ethiopian Jews shipped to Israel in the 1980s.

As if it were a

of the history of Israel, it was built on the site that in the 1950s housed a transit camp for Jews from North Africa and the Middle East and survivors of the Holocaust, built on the ruins of Zarnuqa, one of the more than 500 Palestinian villages destroyed in the

(

, as the creation of the State of Israel has gone down in history for them).

Here, it seems that the center and the left directly gave up the battle.

You only see posters, stickers and ballots thrown on the ground from right-wing parties, such as the ultra-orthodox Sephardic Shas (“Proud to be Jews”), Likud (“A strong right for four years”) or Religious Zionism (“Your security is on the right”).

The messages show how voting in Israel has a clear identity element and the left-right division differs from the usual one.

Here it depends mainly on the position towards the Palestinians, with the right hand more in favor of the heavy hand, to maintain the military occupation and to promote settlements.

Other elements, such as economic policies or the relationship between the State and religion, have less weight.

The religion-right equation is almost automatic, although the right transcends divisions of origin and belief to also include a third of the seculars, such as those disenchanted with the left or originating from the former USSR as much in favor of force towards the Palestinians as of food not

.

And, in this new generation, the main breadwinners of the conservative vote - ultra-Orthodox, religious nationalists and traditionalists - are overrepresented because they have far more children than families of the center or left.

Ultra-Orthodox and religious nationalists, for example, make up a quarter of the population, but almost half in the 18-25 age bracket, Dahlia Scheindlin, a political analyst specializing in public opinion, explains by phone.

And, by pure statistics, they will be more and more.

The ultra-Orthodox, who have almost seven children on average and vote right at 99%, will go from almost 13% of the population to 32% in 2065, according to calculations by the Central Statistics Office.

Even without them, as the data analysis company Midgam verified last July, 46% of young people between the ages of 18 and 25 define themselves as right-wing and 16% as center-right.

Socialization

Demography only explains part of the phenomenon.

Scheindlin recalls that Jewish youth have moved to the right of the media since the birth of Israel in 1948, due to "enthusiasm for the romantic nationalism of a country permanently at war", and that the trend has deepened this century not only because of the population structure, but also by discourse.

"Those who are 25 years old today have been socialized into the idea that the Palestinians only want to kill Jews and that the Army must be allowed to act, that is, only in military solutions to the conflict," he underlines.

Or Anabi, a researcher at the Israel Institute for Democracy who follows the growth of the right, points to a mix of influences all moving in the same direction.

On the one hand, the home, where the sense of vote is usually maintained generation after generation.

On the other, education.

Israel has three parallel models for the Jewish population: the ultra-Orthodox, the state-secular, and the state-religious.

And the latter "has invested much more in the ideological issue than the state-secular, which has been less concerned with defending democratic values."

At the end of secondary school, military service also arrives, three years for boys and two for girls.

As it is mandatory, except for the Palestinian minority and the ultra-Orthodox, it exposes the new adults to political sensitivities different from those of their environment, but reinforces "the vision of the Arab as an enemy," says Anabi.

Scheindlin points out that there is "no significant evidence" that it generates an ideological change.

Anabi also points out a paradox.

Logic would dictate that the generation that has not had to mobilize against the creation of a Palestinian state (because the issue barely figures in public debate) or lived through the suicide bombings on buses and cafeterias of the Second Intifada (2000-2005) had more focused postures today.

“However, not talking about peace has reinforced the

among the younger generation and led to hatred towards [Israel's] Arab citizens,” not just those in Gaza and the West Bank, he notes.

Shlomo Fischer, a sociologist at the Jewish People's Policy Institute, a Jerusalem-based think tank, offers another view.

He describes the right-wing youth vote as a punch to the table against a left still perceived as the elite that controls academic and media discourse, despite the fact that the right has governed for much of the last five decades.

And he points to the “failure of Oslo” as the main reason, referring to the peace agreements signed by Israelis and Palestinians in 1993. “It is a generation that has not grown up hoping for peace, but has seen how the process has failed. .

It has grown up in the general belief that there is no such thing as a partner for peace,” he notes.

A good example is the withdrawal of soldiers and settlers from Gaza in 2005.

The disappearance of Meretz, a symbol of the debacle of the left

Zehava Gal-On, leader of the Meretz party, votes in the elections on November 1 in Tel Aviv. Nir Keidar / Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

The greatest symbol of the defeat of the left in these elections is the disappearance from Parliament, for the first time since its birth in 1992, of Meretz, the left-wing Zionist party that champions peace with the Palestinians, the separation between state and religion, the defense of the environment and LGTBI rights.

“It is a disaster for Meretz, for the country and a personal disaster for me”, admitted its veteran leader, Zehava Gal-On, in a video to his followers after confirming that the party remained at 3.14% of the votes , to 3,800 ballots of 3.25% that opens the doors of the Knesset.

Meretz, who entered the Executive in 2021 after two decades in opposition, came to have 12 seats.

He was a key government partner for Labor Prime Minister Isaac Rabin to push through the Oslo Accords.

Ridiculed by the right as the party of a secular white elite who sip coffee in Tel Aviv on

while reading the

newspaper , Meretz has featured big names like Yossi Beilin, Shulamit Aloni, Amnon Rubinstein and Yossi Sarid.

Labor, which has lost three deputies and remains at the minimum (four), is already the only Jewish formation in Parliament to the left of the centrist Yesh Atid.

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