Shownotes Transcript
On October 5th, 1995, tens of thousands of Israelis crowded the streets of Jerusalem.
They began in Midtown and marched towards the doors of the Knesset, where Israel's parliament meets. It's not Mr. Rabin that we knew in the past. Entirely different man.
The former defense minister Ariel Sharon was there along with the rest of the demonstrators to protest Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin who negotiated and signed the Oslo Accords, a peace deal with Palestinians. A peace deal these demonstrators viewed as a national betrayal. A weak man, a man that gave up not only
the basic element of Zionism and gave up to a terrorist organization. -It was a very dangerous and radical moment. There was, you know, a palpable sense of violence. -This is Sarah Yael Hirshhorn. She's a historian and visiting professor at the University of Haifa and fellow at the Jewish People Policy Institute. -Israel is at the brink of a civil war. -The Oslo deal was very controversial in Israel.
Because it would have required concessions, like withdrawing Israeli security forces from the West Bank and Gaza, and transferring authority over occupied territories to Palestinian control. Concessions many saw as opening the door to a Palestinian state. The country's conservative party, Likud, opposed it immediately, and other right-wing parties agreed. Their anger towards Prime Minister Rabin came out in shocking ways.
They chanted, in blood and fire, we will expel Rabin. They carried massive signs with disturbing images of Rabin on them. You have photographs of Rabin, you know, that have been doctored so that he appears to either be in a Nazi uniform or looking like Arafat, you know, with a kefir around his head and, you know, in the kind of fatigues.
This is Natasha Roth-Roland. She's a historian and researcher at Diaspora Alliance, an international organization that combats anti-Semitism. There is an equivalency that is being drawn by the Israeli right between Nazis and Palestinians, which has long predated that and continues to this day.
When demonstrators reached Jerusalem's Zion Square, politicians and activists spoke to them from a makeshift stage on the third floor balcony of a hotel. One of those speakers was a rising politician named Benjamin Netanyahu. I say to the Israeli government,
I'm saying this to the government of Israel, which is bowing down to this man. He does give this speech from the balcony of a Jerusalem hotel overlooking Zion Square, where all of this incredibly inciting language against Rabin is taking place. In the speech, Netanyahu called Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat a bloody man.
The crowd cheered. He accused Yitzhak Rabin's government of bowing down to Arafat. And then he said something ominous. We are here because we will never allow Jerusalem to be divided anew.
In other words, Netanyahu was saying we will not allow Rabin to turn over East Jerusalem to Palestinian rule as part of the Oslo Accords. The crowd chanted Netanyahu's nickname, Bibi, as he worked them into a fervor with his fiery language.
It seems, you know, it's a kind of incitement to violence. An incitement that Netanyahu has denied. It was a major moment in Israeli history. It's the time of, you know, sort of Benjamin Netanyahu's arrival on the political stage in a certain way, but also his understanding of appealing to the logic of the mob or the logic of the crowd.
About one month after that demonstration in Jerusalem, a rally was held in Israel's second largest city, Tel Aviv, in support of the Oslo Accords. The keynote speaker was Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. I want to thank each and every person here taking a stand against violence and for peace.
This is the last speech Rabin would ever give.
Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin has been killed. Rabin was shot to death as he was leaving a peace rally in Tel Aviv. An eyewitness to the shooting said Rabin was coming down a set of stairs when three shots rang out. The eyewitness said Rabin doubled over, holding his stomach, and fell to the ground. He was said to be covered in blood. Rabin is assassinated.
by a young man called Egal Amir. Egal Amir. An Israeli Jew, a man in his 20s. It's like the JFK moment for Israel. Where were you when Rabin was assassinated? And, you know, where were you on the political spectrum when Rabin was assassinated? Yitzhak Rabin's widow blamed Netanyahu and other right-wing leaders for stoking the flames of violence that took her husband's life.
Some read it as the future assassin of Yitzhak Rabin sees this as almost a coded message to himself to act on some kind of moral or God-given imperative to assassinate the prime minister. Netanyahu doesn't really take responsibility. The Israeli right doesn't take responsibility. There's a lot of prevarication about who said what and who was really responsible for Rabin's murder.
Benjamin Netanyahu later said he did not see any posters of Rabin wearing a Nazi uniform or a kafiyah, and that he never intended to inspire his killing. But one thing was clear: Rabin's assassination showed how deep the anger and rage towards the peace deal with Palestinians was among the right wing of Israel's politics.
The fact that this assassination was perpetrated not by a Palestinian terrorist or someone sent from the Arab world to do a hit on the Israeli prime minister, but by a fellow Jew, it was totally shocking to a country and ripped the country apart. I miss this brave man with whom I had signed the peace of the brave. He was a man who can respect his parole denier.
This is the voice of Yasser Arafat, the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization, or PLO, reflecting on Yitzhak Rabin, the man who he'd signed the Oslo Accords with in 1993 and 1995, the man he accepted a Nobel Peace Prize with in 1994. Although the deal was criticized as imperfect by some on both sides, it did represent hope and a path forward, a measure of basic respect.
But the right-wing in Israel who called Rabin a Nazi and a traitor did not see it this way. They saw a peace deal as surrender. People really felt that there were possibilities in the air that there was going to be a real peace with Israelis and Palestinians. People were legitimately, you know, enthusiastic and hopeful and that it's gone.
It is something that's really difficult to make people understand, but it's really important, you know, context for everything that's happened since 1995. The assassination of Yitzhak Rabin was a major turning point for a right-wing movement in Israel that had been growing for decades. A movement that uses a religious framework to define the state and its borders that has aggressively resisted a two-state solution with Palestinians.
For most of its history, Israel was dominated by left-leaning secular politicians. But today, the right is in power through the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The government that is waging a war in Gaza, which, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, has killed over 30,000 people, a significant number of those being children.
The war is in response to the October 7th, 2023 Hamas-led attack that, according to Israeli authorities, killed over 1,200 Israelis, with an additional 250 being taken hostage. So where did the right-wing movement in Israel come from? How did it start? And how did it make it to the seat of power? I'm Ramtin Arablui, and we will explore those questions on this episode of ThruLine from NPR.
This is David Childs from Salt Lake City, and you're listening to ThruLine from NPR.
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This message comes from NPR sponsor Sony Pictures Classics presenting Kneecap, a new comedy about three friends who start a rap group that creates a movement, starring the group Kneecap as themselves and Michael Fassbender, now playing nationwide only in theaters. Part one, Never Again. In 1967, after years of tension with its Arab neighbors, Israel launched a daring simultaneous preemptive strike on Syria and Egypt.
Israel emerged victorious after only six days and in the process gained control over Gaza and the West Bank. The Six-Day War shocked the Arab world and completely changed the geopolitical reality of the Middle East for decades. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic Ocean in the U.S., the student protest and civil rights movements were at their height.
In 1968 in New York, in the midst of this tidal wave of radical politics, a new organization formed for the rights of Jewish people in the U.S. and abroad. The group was called the Jewish Defense League, or JDL, and it had a particular interest in the plight of Jews in the Soviet Union, who were often mistreated and had few places to worship safely. Hey!
The JDL popularized the phrase, never again, referring to the Holocaust. It became their rallying cry. The idea is to kind of represent Jews as, you know, a people that can defend themselves. This is Natasha Roth Roland again. And not like a people who quote unquote went like sheep to the slaughter in the Holocaust. The JDL's founder and leader was a 35-year-old rabbi from Brooklyn.
Mayor Kahane. We will do exactly what we have been doing until every Jew within the USSR who wants to go free will be free. He draws heavily from black power and thinking about, you know, Jewish power in the United States and how that should function. Sarah Yael Horschorn again. And he becomes kind of a cult figure in New York, you know, with his own Jewish activist seed.
Marik Kahane was born in Brooklyn in 1932 in a tight-knit Jewish family. His father was a rabbi.
The idea of Zionism, that Jews should have their homeland in Palestine, was a part of his life from a young age. But his family had a particular interpretation of Zionism that would shape his future. He grows up in a revisionist Zionist home in America. Revisionist Zionism is the belief that Israel should exist as an exclusively Jewish state on both sides of the Jordan River.
That would mean Israel's official borders include the West Bank and Gaza Strip, which are internationally recognized Palestinian lands. As a teenager, Kahane became a militant activist after several Brooklyn synagogues were graffitied with swastikas. In his teenage years, he joined an organization called Betar. Betar emulated fascism.
movements that were around it in the interwar period in Europe, you know, when fascism really sprung up. And when I say emulated, I mean in terms of their aesthetics, you know, they wore brown shirts, you know, they kind of glorified militarism and youth and violence, very, very anti-left, anti-socialist. And they, you know, they kind of pioneered this vision of greater Israel going in beyond the West Bank and kind of into the rest of the Middle East, you
So he subscribes to that ideology. Those who commit violence against Jews within their borders can fully expect, and rightly so, violence in return.
The Jewish Defense League kind of graduates, if you will, into terrorism. They start attacking Soviet targets in New York and Arab targets in New York because of anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union against Jews and because of, obviously, the Israel-Palestine conflict as well. Three members of the militant Jewish Defense League, including Mayor Kahane, pleaded guilty today to charges of conspiring to build explosives and transport them across state lines.
Kahana admitted to the court he directed the making of bombs because he wanted to illustrate what effects bombs have.
Seeing the writing on the wall, in 1971, Kahane fled to Israel. He's essentially outrunning his legal troubles in New York. It was just four years after the Six-Day War, a time where Israel was unofficially expanding its borders, with its citizens moving into the occupied West Bank and Gaza, building communities, towns, suburbs, settlements.
He arrives in Israel at a time when the religious far right in the country is really taking off because of that. Because there's this perception that this victory in the Six-Day War and the fact that Israelis were able to go back to these incredibly important religious sites that were scattered throughout the West Bank.
from, you know, Hebron to parts of East Jerusalem. Kahane continued his activism in Israel, but he also formed his own political party. He establishes a political party called Kach. Kach. Which means Das, which has basically a pretty openly fascist political manifesto that it campaigns on. I've always said...
that Western democracy is incompatible with Zionism. He wants a theocracy. Basically, he wants complete segregation between Jews and Arabs from separate beaches, separate schools. He wants to criminalize sexual and romantic relationships between Jews and Palestinians. The tragedy of Jewish girls. 4,000 Jewish women today married to Muslims.
The prostitutes of Israel are overwhelmingly Jewish and the pimps are overwhelmingly Arabs. And this is the Jewish state? So they stood for Jewish militancy and deriding the secular Zionist tradition for its lack of militancy and even for, you know, inadequately representing the true spirit of Judaism. No guilt.
The country is ours, every inch of it, every centimeter of it. No guilt. It's our country. It's not theirs. There is no Palestine, no Palestinians. There never was, there never will be. They're ours. They let them go live in Jordan. In the 1970s, Kahane's ideas were seen as extreme by most Israelis. The Koch party was not able to win any seats in the Knesset.
See, since 1948, Israeli politics had been dominated by the secular left-leaning Labor Party, the exact people Kahane opposed. But in 1977, a political earthquake would happen in Israel that would alter the country's political landscape forever.
Last night, the conservative Likud party, headed by Menachem Begin, swept to victory. Begin defeated Shimon Peres and his Labour Party, which has dominated Israeli politics for 29 years.
So 1977 was without doubt, within Israeli politics, a pivotal milestone year. This is Amjad Eraki. He's a senior editor at Plus 972 magazine and a Palestinian citizen of Israel, currently based in London. But it was also very much the beginning of what ended up becoming a constant shift towards the Zionist right.
What sets the opposition apart was first Menachem Begin's legacy as the kind of heir apparent of a kind of Zionism that saw Israel in eternal war with its enemies in the region and the necessity to take a very hawkish stance.
This is how Menachem Begin's Likud Party 1977 platform begins.
The right of the Jewish people to the land of Israel is eternal and indisputable and is linked with the right to security and peace. Therefore, Judea and Samaria, which is the biblical name for the West Bank that's used by right-wing Israelis who claim the territories, will not be handed to any foreign administration. Between the sea and the Jordan, there will only be Israeli sovereignty.
Begin adamantly opposes the return of the occupied West Bank to Arab control. Begin found support for this hardline platform by appealing to revisionist Zionists, many of whom were settlers, and to the Mizrahi Jews, Israelis whose families originally came from the Middle East and North Africa, a group who'd long felt oppressed by Israeli society and excluded from its politics.
These were Jews who came from Arab lands and then saw the enmity of the Arab countries, and many of them were very attracted to hawkish ideas about the way Zionism should oppose Arab nationalism and Arab power because they, frankly, had fled the Arab world because of that and saw Begin's party as being a place where maybe they belonged. So Begin was able to mobilize them, and it really made a huge difference in Israeli politics.
With this major victory in 1977, the Likud party had given voice to right-wing views that had long been on the outside looking in. There was a shift in terms of how these parties talked about what to do with the Palestinians in their midst. Particularly the Likud had a much more direct way of talking about settlement. This is what the 1977 Likud party platform says about settlements.
Settlement, both urban and rural, in all parts of the land of Israel, is the focal point of the Zionist effort to redeem the country, to maintain vital security areas, and serves as a reservoir of strength and inspiration for the renewal of the pioneering spirit.
Right-wing religious settlers take it upon themselves to really push deeper and deeper into the West Bank and to settle areas that the Labour government initially wouldn't. Generally, because of Menachem Begin's hawkish orientation and belief that people...
Peace with the Arab world was not going to come about soon. And in any case, it would be valuable, you know, down the road, perhaps to trade land for peace. Begin himself is able to institutionalize these ideas in ways that hadn't been part of the Israeli agenda before. The emergence of a right wing government was seen by many in the revisionist Zionist community as a major victory.
But Mayor Kahane was skeptical. He continued to push his extreme views. And in 1979, when Begin signed a peace deal with Egypt and started to entertain compromises with the Palestinians, Kahane felt the Likud government had betrayed the country. The question of the Arabs is something which no party, neither left nor right, neither a Rabin nor a Begin is willing to deal with this greatest of all problems. The Arabs are not equal citizens here.
In the early 1980s is the same time that Mayor Kahane is really, you know, trying to find his footing is the time where religious settlers decide that the government isn't doing enough and in fact betraying the cause of the settler movement to further the expansionist and hawkish causes in even the aspiration to, you know, make Israel into more of a theocratic state.
Menachem Begin, for his part, considered Kahane dangerous, calling him a crazy man. And Kahane was actually jailed for six months for his alleged plan to put bombs on buses in Hebron in 1980. If it is necessary to save Jewish lives, to kill Arabs, I wouldn't hesitate for a moment, not for a moment.
Still, Kahane didn't stop. He got out of prison and kept running for office. And in 1984, one year after an aging Begin left office, Kahane finally won a seat in the Knesset, Israel's parliament, by taking a page out of Begin's own playbook.
He, like Begin, turns to other disenfranchised groups, immigrants who haven't found an outlet in party politics and were looking to maybe associate with something that was a little bit more radical. And I think for American listeners, it's helpful to think about this in comparison with the Trump phenomenon. And so you have this very disaffected group that Kahane, even though he himself is not Mizrahi, he's able to tap into that sense of grievance.
and says to them basically you have a role to play in this country the authorities have excluded you the state looks down on you society looks down on you but i'm here to tell you that you are important you have a role to play and in my movement i will make sure that you get to experience that level of belonging and importance in this national religious project
Kahana transforms the Israeli political scene, bringing this Jewish militancy message and xenophobic attitude towards the Arab community and even aspirations for a Jewish theological state into Israeli party politics as kind of a one-man show in the Knesset in 1984. Kahana had finally started to gain some popular support. He was on the rise. But right in the middle of it all, his party, Kach, was banned from elections by a vote in the Knesset.
The ostensible reason for this is because he was running on an anti-democratic and racist platform. But actually the parties that initiated Kach's ban on the right, including the Kud, they were worried that he was going to cannibalize their share of votes. So they kind of removed him as a threat. The founder of the Jewish Defense League was assassinated in New York City last night. Mayor Kahane had just finished speaking to a Zionist group in a midtown Manhattan hotel when he was gunned down.
Two years later, in 1990, Mayor Kahane was murdered by an Egyptian-American man. But neither his death nor the outlawing of the Kach party could stop the spread of his ideas. Kahane's ideology came to be known as "Kahanism," and he'd already inspired the next generation of leaders, like a teenage activist who was in the crowd at that rally against Rabin in 1995.
Coming up, how Itamar Ben-Gavir, Israel's current minister of national security, carried the Qohana's torch into the future. Hi, this is Adrienne Stutler calling from Morgantown, West Virginia, and you're listening to ThruLine from NPR. Hey, it's Ramteen again.
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I say in the name of this great people, we are here because we will never allow to divide Jerusalem again.
It is 1995. We are back at that rally in Jerusalem where Benjamin Netanyahu gave a fiery speech against Yitzhak Rabin and the Oslo Accords. The rally that some point to as inciting the violence that led to Rabin's assassination. In the crowd was a 19-year-old man, an activist who would go on to become one of Israel's most powerful politicians. His name, Itamar Ben-Gavir.
He really first came to infamy in 1995 during protests against the Oslo Accords. And during one of these protests, Israeli right-wing activists yanked the ornament off the hood of Rabin's car. And there is a television interview of Itamar Ben-Gvir holding this ornament.
up to the camera and saying, you know, if we can get to Rabin's car, we can also get to Rabin. That video of Ben-Gavir holding up Rabin's hood ornament thrust him into the public eye. A few weeks later, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated by a far-right extremist. Irimar Ben-Gavir was born in the suburbs of Jerusalem in 1976, a year before Menachem Begin's political earthquake.
Ben-Gavir's parents were Mizrahi Jews with Kurdish and Iraqi ancestry. He grew up in a conservative household that supported both the Likud and labor parties. His early activism was tied to the settlement movement, a movement that was going through its own internal tensions.
Should the aspiration be where people are going to live in bougie settlements and that satisfy, you know, the requirements of living in the whole land of Israel while still having a shopping mall down the street? Or is this a fringe movement that is, you know, engaged in essentially open warfare against a state that isn't doing enough to make Israel into a more of a theocratic state?
It was also the moment when tensions between Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories were about to erupt. Fighting began after four workers from the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip were killed when their car collided with an Israeli army truck.
In December of 1987, the First Intifada, or Palestinian uprising, began. Palestinian violence seems motivated by despair. It was not just the buildup of frustration among West Bankers and Gazans at the lack of political progress or the lack of social services. The First Intifada was fueled by Palestinian frustrations against Israel's occupation and the expansion of settlements. It lasted almost six years.
It's when Hamas, the current ruling government in Gaza, was born and was marked by sporadic attacks on Israeli targets. This was also when Idemar Ben-Gavir became radicalized and joined with the Qah Party and the Qahanas movement.
Itamar Ben-Gavir's views were so extreme so early on that they kept him out of Israel's mandatory military service. He would rack up a ton of arrests. He's been indicted over 50 times and was found guilty of carrying a sign that said, expel the Arab enemy. He has been convicted of inciting racism and supporting a terrorist organization. And a lot of this was happening during the second intifada that began in 2000.
The second Intifada was, you know, a terrible time in Israel where buses were blowing up, you know, on every street corner. You never knew when you got on a bus, is today going to be the day that, you know, you're on your way to work or school or, you know, to visit a friend and a bus is going to blow up? As the cycle of violence intensified, and after defending himself so many times in court, Ben-Gavir decided to go to law school.
His first part of his career was defending settler terrorists. Then he runs for the Knesset. All this time, you know, he is bringing with him this legacy as a youth activist, deeply involved in kahanism and radical politics in the settlements. And he was just always seen as this random, as this random fanatic in many respects. This is Amjad Iraqi again. But the scene slowly started to evolve that allowed him to not only become legitimate,
Allow them to be seen as someone who actually has rational thought, as someone whose political ideas actually have a rational place in our spectrum. This is Ben-Gavir in a 1994 interview saying, I think if settlements are dismantled in the West Bank and Gaza, blood will spill.
And he ends up at the head of a party called Otzma Yehudit, which means Jewish Power. Jewish Power is a far-right party that advocates for deportation of Palestinians. It's a descendant of the Kach Party. Ben-Gavir has led the Jewish Power Party since 2019. Until recently, he kept a picture in his living room of Baruch Goldstein, an American-Israeli settler who massacred 29 Palestinians in Hebron in the 90s. I love you, Hebron.
Today, everyone also understands that running away brings war, that if we don't want to be there again, we have to return home and rule the territory, and indeed propose a moral, logical, and advantageous solution encouraging immigration and the death penalty for terrorists.
There's been increasing violence and an increasing inability to reach any kind of resolution. Has that opened up the door for the message, an extreme message like the one from Kahana or Ben-Gavir or many other right-wing Zionists to find a place in the mainstream discourse? Yes, definitely. We can really think about it as the post-Oslo generation, right?
After the Oslo Accords, what it essentially did was it hermetically sealed off many, many Palestinians from meeting Israelis just in the course of day-to-day life. And so the only encounters that you really had were between Palestinians of the West Bank and Israeli soldiers or Israeli settlers. What you have is two populations that are kind of sealed off from one another.
It's hard to really communicate the extent of just the everyday grinding violence that the occupation demands. And it's everything from extreme levels of surveillance to checkpoints to segregation to structural violence, keeping Palestinians penned in in ever smaller areas of land.
You have a wholesale internalization of the idea that this kind of violence is not only normal, is not only acceptable, but is actually justifiable and is righteous. You should not feel bad for accepting this kind of violence or instituting this kind of violence because actually when you do so, you are doing it for love of your people and love of your country. That message is going to resonate.
Coming up, Itamar Ben-Gavir brings Kahanism into the highest levels of government after the prime minister comes calling. This is Margo Vanden Helder from San Francisco, California, and you're listening to ThruLine from NPR.
This message comes from NPR sponsor Mattress Firm. How do you sleep at night? Upgrade to the rest you deserve with Mattress Firm's premium selection of top brand mattresses. Get matched at Mattress Firm's semi-annual sale and clearance and sleep at night. Waylon, how much do you think it would cost to buy one of those big digital billboards in Times Square to promote our show? The indicator from Planet Money and Big Lights. In this economy?
I mean, you're probably right. But this question is the exact kind of thing that we find answers to on our show. We take one big economic idea, make it understandable and, you know, even fun. That's the indicator from Planet Money and NPR. Part three, the rise of Netanyahu. Do the Palestinians have a right to a separate state? No, I don't think they do. But I think that it's quite instructive.
that the Palestinians who are invoking the right of self-determination, which is an attribute for separate nations, themselves are the ones who define themselves as part of the Arab nation. This is a 28-year-old Benjamin Netanyahu on a TV debate show called The Advocates. It was 1978. And back then he went by the name Ben Netai. Mr. Netai is a graduate of MIT. He is an Israeli.
And he is a man who has written widely on this question before the House tonight. That question was: Should the United States support self-determination for Palestinians in a Middle East peace settlement? Here was Netanyahu's answer. I think the United States should oppose the creation of a Palestinian state for several reasons. The first one being that it is unjust
to demand the creation of a 22nd Arab state and a second Palestinian state at the expense of the only Jewish state. Even in his 20s, Netanyahu emerged as an effective spokesman for conservative Israeli politics in the U.S., including the mention of a second Palestinian state, since many right-wing Israelis argue that Jordan already exists as a Palestinian state.
Netanyahu's role as a conservative spokesman may not be a surprise when you consider the world and the family he was born into. Benjamin Netanyahu had a
been known to Israeli politics because his father was a key figure in the revisionist Zionist movement. He was not well accepted by Israeli, you know, Israeli labor government leaders or by Israeli socialist society and always been sort of on the margins of both an academic career and a political trajectory. Benjamin Netanyahu was born in Tel Aviv in 1948, just a year after Israel's creation.
But when he was a teenager, his family moved to Pennsylvania when his father took a job there as a professor. He had much of his education in the United States. And that's important because it gave him a particular kind of political approach that has proved very, very successful in Israel. And he also speaks very good English.
which is really, really considered a boon in Israel. And not just for speaking to the outside world, but it's just kind of, there's like a cachet that comes with it. He returned to Israel after high school to join the military. He eventually became a special forces soldier and saw combat action in the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
After the war, he returned to the U.S. And reinvents himself as kind of a political commentator and security expert and other guises, I guess. He served several posts in the U.S. for the Israeli government, including at the Israeli embassy.
They're really fine-tuned the message that he likes to deliver to the outside world about why Israeli politics is the way it is and why Israel has to treat the Palestinians the way that it does, which is that Israel is this kind of last resort.
of quote-unquote Western civilization and that it's the last line of defense between Europe and the Middle East. Netanyahu returned to Israel with deep connections in the U.S. and a renewed sense of purpose. He jumped straight into politics, getting involved with the conservative Likud party. He climbs the ladder in Likud and he wins the chair of the party in the mid-1990s.
Netanyahu, who is always very savvy to the pulse of the Israeli public, you know, really understands that the 1990s is a moment where Israel is at the brink of a civil war. I tell her in the name of this great story, we are here because we will never be allowed to divide Jerusalem again.
And so when he delivers his rousing speech at that 1995 rally in Jerusalem against Oslo and Yitzhak Rabin, he has his own political ambitions in mind. This is something that he knows will draw a political base toward him, will help a right-wing political base consolidate around him. Netanyahu was right. It worked.
and sets about campaigning for prime minister at the elections that follow Rabin's assassination. And by the way, in his campaigns for the prime ministership, he actually enlists the support of American Jewish political advisors who were advising various GOP candidates. So there's this kind of
importing of American political tactics into Israel, which are very much about the individual. It's about the personality. And, you know, Netanyahu kind of leans into that. He ran on a platform of economic reform and promised to oppose a Palestinian state. And he was able to tap into the anger against the Oslo Accords to bring out the vote.
He becomes prime minister, despite the role that he played in the incitement campaign as, you know, one of its most high-profile figures. While a lot of Netanyahu's political success was due to his own shrewd strategy, he also benefited from the failures of the Labor Party-led negotiations with Palestinians. As the promise of Oslo faded away and the Second Intifada loomed, suicide bombings and violence were a regular occurrence on the streets of Israel.
For a lot of Israelis, it almost like disproved the Zionist left thesis. This is writer Amjad Araki again. The idea of giving Palestinians more rights, potentially a Palestinian state, the Oslo process in general, the narrative is that you tried to give Palestinians their rights and their statehood, and what we actually got was suicide bombings. That's the logic. And it's not to minimize, I think, the social and political trauma that was experienced by Jewish Israelis during that time, but the answer that was provided to that was to say, like, actually the right-wingers were right.
But Israelis got tired of Netanyahu's hawkish posture, a sluggish economy, and a peace process that had ground to a halt. He was being accused by many on the right of being too centrist. So in 1999, he lost his re-election bid. It was a crushing defeat for Netanyahu. That's why I'm announcing today that I intend to break away from the movement of the Likud.
In the time he was out of office and out of the public eye, he seems to have figured something out. If he were going to make a political comeback, he'd need to move further right.
And 10 years later… In Israel, conservative Benjamin Netanyahu was sworn in as prime minister last night. Today, he returns to the office he held a decade ago. In 2009, he recaptured the prime ministership. And again in 2015, when he was challenged for re-election, he pushed his messaging further to the right.
His surprising and crushing victory, the product of an 11th hour push for right-wing votes, promising there would be no Palestinian state on his watch. The right regime is in danger. The Arab voters are coming in huge amounts to the polls. But unlike the U.S., Israel has a parliamentary system, which means even if your party wins an election, you still have to form alliances with other parties to create a majority in order to be a ruling government.
Because of his inflammatory rhetoric, it was going to be hard for Netanyahu to create that government with mainstream parties who were turned off by his strategy. So he looks towards, you know, parties to his right and decides that, you know, the kind of government that he wants to form is an ultra-nationalist and ultra-Orthodox coalition because he doesn't want to have a national unity government. And he certainly doesn't want to partner, you know, with leftist parties.
Netanyahu is starting to get into a lot of legal and thus political trouble because he has corruption and bribery charges racking up. And so
The country keeps going to elections as Netanyahu sort of tries to outrun these charges and tries to remain in power. He certainly doesn't want to be in government with anybody who would might, you know, might want to replace him and put him in prison. So these are his options. And, you know, he he acquiesces to this situation. Netanyahu, to survive, has courted the most right wing parties in the country.
And one of the people he has cut a deal with is a politician who was also at that anti-Rabin protest back in 1995, Itamar Ben-Gavir. And in the next election, which was back at the end of 2022,
The combined slate that he runs on with another far-right party called religious Zionism pulls in 14 seats. Ben-Gurion gets into the Israeli government, and he basically gets to play kingmaker because of the number of seats that he's pulled in. Netanyahu, you know, he is crucial to Netanyahu's coalition at this point. And so he gets appointed as national security minister, which is a new position which puts him in charge of Israel.
all the police on both sides of the Green Line. The Green Line refers to the pre-1967 border between Israel and the West Bank. And nobody's held power over both sets of police in that way before. And so they're all interconnected. Everyone thought they had something to gain. And this is what allows what was once a kind of seemingly random, thuggish activist slash lawyer to become someone who has an entire ministry designed around him.
who is now sitting in major meetings of the government, who is now prodding the prime minister and the defense ministry and the military that you're not going hard enough. Natasha Roth-Roland says Ben-Gavir went from a pariah to a popular figure in Israel, especially with young people.
He voices what they see as things that they may not be allowed to say themselves. You know, he kind of, he voices the id of the nation in a way, in much the same way that Trump did. And what kind of views was he expressing? Just unabashed racism toward Palestinians. Understanding every Palestinian essentially as a terrorist. Supporting the death penalty for quote unquote terrorists, which in this case is simply a dog whistle for Palestinians. Yeah.
supporting mass expulsion of Palestinians, terrorizing Palestinians who are simply going about their daily lives, basically implementing Kahane's vision in any way that they are able to.
Netanyahu has basically been in power since 2009. And with each coalition that he had, he enabled more and more far-right people to come into the Likud, to come into these coalitions and to be accepted into the political sphere. And Netanyahu definitely helped to facilitate that. Amjad Araki says that over the last 15 years or so of Netanyahu's prime ministership,
The longest in the country's history, by the way. His attempts to survive politically haven't just had an impact on the Knesset, but also on Israeli public opinion. Bibi's tenure was really a lesson for Israelis that actually you don't have to play, that if you kind of just keep pushing the envelope, you'll find that there are actually no consequences. So why wouldn't you just keep going more right wing? Why wouldn't you keep saying more racist and explicit things? There
They're so unafraid to say things that three decades ago, they would have had to think many times before they could say so. But Netanyahu and his Likud coalition overplayed their political hand in 2023 when they proposed a law that would eliminate the oversight power of the Israeli Supreme Court.
Israelis woke up today to their three largest newspapers carrying a black front page. The black pages were ads that protesters took out calling it a dark day for democracy in Israel. This move to weaken the judiciary was met with intense protests throughout Israel.
Until now, the Supreme Court in Israel has had the right to reject some government actions it did not consider reasonable. So what happens now that the Knesset stripped that power away? People of all ages are protesting in Israel. Doctors and lawyers are among those objecting to the parliament removing a check on its power.
You know, I think if you actually ask the average Israeli on the street, like what are the three major, you know, platforms of the, you know, of the judicial reform plan? Most people weren't necessarily interested in the, you know, technical details of what, you know, was going to happen with basic laws or overrides and all these kinds of things. But they did see this as being a my values against your values, you know, secular versus religious. In
interest in some kind of future negotiation of the Palestinians versus hardline, you know, or even violence towards, you know, Palestinian civilian communities. You know, do you want peace or do you want Itamar Ben-Gavir? It often, you know, sort of got framed along those terms. Although Israel's right wing had won the day politically, there were still many Israelis who were deeply uncomfortable with the direction the country was going.
enough to fill the streets with protests. But Natasha Roth-Roland and Amjad Araki argue that there were still many voices missing.
the most telling thing about them was that they were not protests that involved Palestinians. And the reason for that is that what Israelis were protesting against was not the huge decades upon decades upon decades long oppression of Palestinians or the unjust conditions in the West Bank.
or anything like that. They were simply protesting by and large against what they saw as the potential curtailment of their own rights as Jews in a Jewish state. It's not a battle for democracy. It is a battle to maintain at least a little bit more of an image or to try to reclaim a bit more of an image that we're a democracy, that for Jewish Israelis to convince themselves because they realize that maybe we took it a bit too far. But Palestinian citizens know full on
No matter who was the head of the coalition, no matter who the judges were in the court, that actually the state always pursued the same objectives against Palestinians. Sarah Yael Hirshhorn says the divisions on Israel's left and right are fundamental and got to a dangerous point last summer.
Really felt like Israel was on the brink of a kind of civil war and people were really worried. And it was starting to happen towards the end of the judicial reform process as things were starting to get a little violent. You know, it was becoming increasingly scary because no one really knew, you know, how this was going to play out. You know, October 7th, in some ways,
you know, just ended this whole debate because Israel, you know, immediately came together because of this tragedy, but also the necessity of the war effort to unify as a country. But some of these divisions are still simmering under the surface. And that's it for this week's show. I'm Randa Abdel-Fattah. I'm Ramteen Arablui, and you've been listening to ThruLine from NPR.
This episode was produced by me. And me and...
Thanks to Johanna Sturgey, Cara West, Tony Cavan, James Heider, Jerome Sokolovsky, Edith Chapin, and Colin Campbell.
And finally, if you have an idea or like something you heard on the show, please write us at ThruLine at NPR.org. Thanks for listening. And before you go, check out NPR's Embedded podcast. They have a two-part series out now highlighting NPR's reporting in Israel and Gaza. Jerusalem correspondent Daniel Estrin reflects on getting nuanced, complex voices from multiple sides of this highly volatile story.
And Morning Edition host Leila Fadl brings us the voice diaries of a young woman trying to flee to safety in Gaza. Check out the two-part series, Field Notes, in Embedded now, wherever you get your podcasts.
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