How messianic settlers occupied Israel, threatening Arabs and secular democracy

The success of the Religious Zionism Party in last week's election - and the resulting costs to democracy - can be traced to compromises with messianic settlers dating back 50 years.

For decades, the international community has been wary that Israel would formally annex the West Bank and put an end to the possibility of a two-state solution with the Palestinians.

But practically no-one abroad foresaw that through an election, Jewish supremacism fuelled by settlers from that occupied territory would start to take over Israel.

Yet that is much of what happened on November 1, when the Religious Zionism list headed by Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir gained 14 seats in the Knesset to become Israel's third largest party and emerge as the senior partner for Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud in coalition negotiations that are poised to create the most right-wing, anti-Arab and anti-democratic government in Israeli history.

The election caps a process in which Israel's occupation of Palestinians in the West Bank is coming home to roost, spreading the anti-democratic norms and racism of messianic settlers and their allies throughout Israeli society.

Three months ago, Israeli troops entered Tuwani village south of Hebron in the middle of the night and restricted Palestinians to their homes so that dozens of settlers could hold Tisha B'Av prayers in a garden they claim housed an ancient synagogue, according to Palestinian eyewitnesses.

A few weeks later, troops were back in the middle of the night for education about Jewish heritage. The apparent message to Palestinians: you may live here now, but the land belongs to us.

That is nearly identical to the message Ben-Gvir hammered home during the campaign: “We will show the Arabs who the ‘master’ is.”

Six of the far-Right candidates voted into the Knesset are settlers, including Smotrich and Ben-Gvir. These extremists are already backers of a West Bank regime characterised by violence, lawlessness, land theft and racism. It would be naïve to think that in key government positions they won't continue to spread their values through the larger Israeli polity.

Even before this election, I increasingly sensed that something had gone seriously wrong in Israel on the level of human values. The old explanations about terrorism and security threats rang increasingly hollow in the face of what I saw with my own eyes. I wondered how Israel's public could disregard the army's conducting live fire training exercises in and around Palestinian villages as if no one lived there. 

Why did Israeli military correspondents not report on this? It is now hard to imagine that these same journalists will seriously investigate potentially even graver abuses that may ensue from this government on both sides of the barely visible Green Line that demarcates pre-‘67 Israel and the occupied territories.

Contrary to what some commentators have claimed, the election results represent continuity rather than an aberration. The current crisis did not begin last spring, when the "change" coalition lost its majority, or in May 2021 when appalling intercommunal violence shook Israel's mixed cities.

On a longer view, the crisis is not the fault of Merav Michaeli, the head of the Labour party or Sami Abu Shehadeh, head of the Balad party, both of whom were blamed for running alone rather than combining with other parties

Rather, it can be traced back to 1968, when one of the first groups of messianic settlers illegally took over the Palestinian-owned Park Hotel in Hebron and was rewarded by the Labour party government with the establishment of the Kiryat Arba settlement.

That set a pattern for the settlers, who would become known as Gush Emunim (the bloc of the faithful), to illegally settle in more and more parts of the West Bank with increasing backing from both Left and Right governments.

Today, people in Israel who value democracy are paying a heavy price for their leaders backing these Jewish messianists over the years. Disconsolate Israelis bemoan that their country is poised to become like Viktor Orban's Hungary, with less free speech, courts that are not independent and incitement against minorities. But in Israel, with religious fervour spearheading racism towards Arabs, the local version of illiberalism seems more Middle Eastern than anything else.

"What is different about Israel is the strong messianist element," Leslie Susser, former diplomatic editor of the Jerusalem Report told The Jewish Independent. "It's not only religious, it's religious-messianic, which means that all kinds of acts that democracies wouldn't tolerate are seen as legitimate because they are in the name of bringing the messiah closer."

Gush Emunim veteran leader Daniella Weiss rejoiced at Religious Zionism’s victory. "I am Smotrich, I am very Smotrich, " she told me. The Right's victory, she hopes, will pave the way for legalisation of 40 wildcat settlement outposts and the establishment of new settlements, all of which, in her view, will bring closer the messianic age.

In the Gush's view, their actions - settling biblically resonant hilltops - are God's will, part of a process that began with the establishment of Israel statehood in 1948 and reinforced by the seemingly miraculous victory in 1967. Through building settlements, promoting religious values, controlling all the land of Israel and subjugating Arabs, people such as Weiss and Smotrich believe the messianic age can be attained and the third temple can be rebuilt.

The ideology, seen by critics as a kind of mutation of Judaism because land is worshipped instead of God, turns the takeover of land into a religious imperative and rules out any political rights for the Palestinians.

The Kahanist variation of this worldview, which inspired Itamar Ben-Gvir, goes further, saying Arabs must be expelled en masse from the land of Israel.

Israeli governments of both the Left and Right have supported the messianists, viewing them as the successors of the pioneers who helped create Israel. They established a growing presence in the army and government.

And according to Menachem Klein, an emeritus professor of political science at Bar Ilan University, they convinced themselves that it was their mission to lead. "It was in their dream to take over the state," he told The Jewish Independent. "They argued that secular Labour Zionism had finished its role and now it was their turn to lead the society and state."

This mission encountered a hurdle when Yitzhak Rabin, elected prime minister in 1992, agreed to Palestinian self-rule as part of a drive to make Israel a western democracy rather than a state with biblical borders occupying another people.

Rabin sought to marginalise the messianists, depicting their settlements as a security liability and a drain on taxpayers’ money. He was killed by a supporter of the settlers, another milestone on the road to today's crisis.

In recent years the settlers have amassed so much power, with backing from the army and government, that their leaders became the de facto rulers of large swathes of the West Bank. In the northern West Bank it was Yossi Dagan, head of the Shomron Regional Council, and in the south Yochai Damri, head of the Mount Hebron Regional Council. Dagan bussed hundreds of settlers on election day into the mixed city of Lod, where they went door to door encouraging people to vote.

Damri, in a January interview with The Jewish Independent, explained that he and other settlers are living the legacy of the Patriarch Abraham and that it is God's will that they live in and develop the biblically resonant landscape. Arabs, however, should have their homes demolished and be imprisoned since they are trespassing on state land, he said. "There are small communities that must be taken apart."

The destruction may be far bigger than that. It seems that also to be dismantled to enable the coming of the messianic age are Israel's democratic institutions. The messianic settlers and their allies are not only against Arabs, they are "anti-secular democracy", Susser says.

"They are against the secular nature and egalitarian nature of democracy. They will move to undermine both those aspects of Israel. They will seek to strengthen the Jewish supremacist aspect of a new Israeli polity clearly defining Jews as masters of the land.

"Israeli democracy is under threat as it has never been before."

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