The mainstreaming of Israeli extremism

When Benjamin Netanyahu returned as Israel’s prime minister in December 2022, leading a coalition that included far-right nationalist parties, the administration of American President Joe Biden took an unprecedented diplomatic stance: it kept the Israeli government at arm’s length. President Biden notably refrained from inviting Netanyahu for a meeting at the White House through most of 2023, while senior administration officials avoided engagement with key coalition members — National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who lead the Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power) and the Religious Zionism parties. The administration's distance stemmed largely from concerns over the coalition’s proposed judicial overhaul, which critics warned was anti-democratic and would severely undermine the independence of its courts. In July 2023, Biden himself publicly characterized the Netanyahu coalition “one of the most extreme” he had ever encountered. It was not until September 2023 that Biden and Netanyahu finally met in person, though not at the White House, but on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly.

After Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, assault — which killed about 1,200 people in Israel, mostly civilians, and took 250 hostages, inflicting enormous trauma on Israeli society — Biden effectively set aside his previous reservations about Netanyahu’s government. But the “extreme” elements he perceived in the Israeli government did not disappear. In fact, they burgeoned, as became apparent in Israel’s military and political response toward Gaza and the region: senior officials used genocidal rhetoric; military operations often did not discriminate between combatants and civilians; settlement expansion and settler violence in the West Bank proceeded with implicit and sometimes explicit government backing; and its broader campaign against the Palestinian national struggle intensified, including by systematically restricting humanitarian aid to the point of starvation and effectively banning the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). The scale and intensity of Israel’s operations cast serious doubt on its contention that these steps were strictly intended to prevent future attacks and dismantle Hamas rule. Institutionalized malfeasance has also manifested at lower official levels, as demonstrated in the summer of 2024 at the Sde Teiman military detention facility. There, military police trying to arrest officers suspected of torturing a Palestinian detainee from Gaza met resistance from guards supported by a boisterous right-wing crowd that had breached the base’s perimeter. The group included serving Knesset members, who attempted to obstruct the arrests.

The “extremism” of the Israeli government, as Biden referred to it, encompasses two entwined trends in Israeli political culture. The first is the rise and mainstreaming of the ideological settler movement and far-right nationalism, which envisions Jewish sovereignty from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, a blanket rejection of Palestinian aspirations for self-determination. This maximalist vision has become hegemonic in Israeli political discourse, with politicians competing to stake out even more hardline positions and meaningful dissent pushed to the margins. The second trend is Israel’s growing authoritarian tendencies, manifested in systematic efforts to reshape state institutions. These include the judicial overhaul stripping courts of their independence, dismantling traditional checks and balances, incitement against Israel’s attorney general, the politicization of law enforcement, and repressive legislation targeting the media and freedom of protest with the potential to make electoral change more difficult. As democratic institutions are weakened, the government faces fewer barriers to implementing its expansionist territorial agenda, while the mainstreaming of far-right ideology helps justify the erosion of democratic safeguards.

Yet the vast majority of Israelis fail to recognize the connection between these trends, as do most policymakers in the United States. While hundreds of thousands of Israelis mobilized to protest the government’s assault on the judiciary and liberal institutions and its handling of hostage negotiations, these same citizens have supported not just the wars in Gaza and Lebanon but the way the army has fought them. According to a May Pew Research poll, only 4 percent of Israeli Jews found the country’s response excessive. This selective opposition largely reflects both deeply ingrained security fears, particularly after the Oct. 7 attack, and the Israeli media's failure to meaningfully cover either the war’s catastrophic impact on Palestinians or its corrosive effect on Israeli democracy itself. The erosion of democratic norms and rule of law does not stop at the vanishing Green Line (the 1949 Armistice line ending the Arab-Israeli war that demarcated Israel’s borders). It flows both ways across it, accelerating democratic collapse at home and catastrophic violence with impunity against Palestinians.

Israel’s rightward drift

Israel’s rightward shift toward extremism has been underway for the last 25 years, accelerating after the collapse of the 2000 Camp David summit and Second Intifada (2000-05), and Israel’s withdrawal of settlers from Gaza in 2005. Those two events helped shape Israeli public discourse, cementing a belief in the narrative that when Israel offered substantial territorial concessions (most of the West Bank and the entire Gaza Strip), Palestinians chose violence and rejection. The years of rocket attacks from Gaza following the 2005 withdrawal have further hardened Israeli views, though Palestinians emphasize that continued occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem and the siege on Gaza have been key drivers of ongoing conflict.

Netanyahu has been in power for the better part of that transformative period, brokering increasingly illiberal coalitions since 2009. He used inflammatory rhetoric as a tool in his electoral campaigns, targeting both Palestinian citizens of Israel and leftist Jewish Israelis; on election day in 2015, he warned that “Arabs were coming out in droves” and that “left-wing NGOs are bringing them in buses.” During his tenure, the Knesset passed a series of anti-democratic legislation, among them the 2011 Nakba Law, enabling the finance minister to withdraw funding from institutions commemorating the mass displacement and expulsion of Palestinians in 1948 known as the Nakba, Arabic for “catastrophe”; the anti-boycott law, which makes the call for a boycott of Israel or its settlements a civil offense; the anti-non-governmental organization (NGO) law, which imposes onerous restrictions on the funding of human rights groups deemed hostile by the government; and the 2018 Jewish Nation State Law, which prioritizes Israel’s Jewish character over democratic principles, codifying the systematic discrimination of Palestinian citizens.

This political path has paralleled Israel’s deepening control over the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, where over 750,000 Israeli settlers now reside. The extent of this entrenchment was evident even before Oct. 7. The year 2022 was the deadliest in two decades for Palestinians in the West Bank, with the vast majority of perpetrators going unpunished. The deaths were primarily the result of Israeli raids, but settler violence has become an increasingly potent and widespread complement to Israeli military actions that harm, dispossess, and displace Palestinians from their homes, passively and actively encouraged by the state. Settlement expansion accelerated further in 2023, with authorities approving a record-breaking 13,000 housing units.

The election of the current far-right government in late 2022 represents the culmination of this rightward shift. It has brought openly anti-Arab racism and a “Greater Israel” ideology into the mainstream. Netanyahu’s coalition agreement explicitly declares, “Jewish people have an exclusive and indisputable right to all parts of the Land of Israel. The government will promote and develop settlements in all parts of the Land of Israel.” Bezalel Smotrich, a far-right settler with a clear and calculated plan to get rid of or disenfranchise all Palestinians from Greater Israel, is now de facto governor of the West Bank, working to shift Israel’s military occupation to civilian control. Meanwhile Itamar Ben-Gvir, who openly admires the late Meir Kahane, whose Kach party was outlawed as a terrorist group in 1998, has transformed from political pariah into a popular national security minister overseeing Israel’s police on both sides of the Green Line. As Labor Party Member of Knesset Gilad Kariv recently warned, “Kahanism has entered into the mainstream of Israeli politics and the legitimacy of this ideology is gaining among large segments of Israel’s body politic.”

The Oct. 7 attack marked the deadliest assault in Israeli history, and Israel’s response has been unprecedented in scale. Its military campaign has destroyed Gaza and killed over 44,000 people, mostly civilians, with thousands more unaccounted for under rubble, prompting numerous experts and scholars to declare Israel to be committing genocide, including most recently, Amnesty International. While Israel challenges this death toll, which comes from Gaza’s Hamas-led government, and maintains it takes precautions to protect civilians while targeting Hamas, the devastation is undeniable. Gaza has been rendered uninhabitable through systematic destruction of homes, hospitals, and vital infrastructure, compounded by severe restrictions on humanitarian aid. These actions have led the International Criminal Court (ICC) to issue arrest warrants for Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant on charges of crimes against humanity.

Throughout the war, the Biden administration has expressed concern about and opposition to certain Israeli actions. It pushed for Israel to reduce the scope of its invasion of the southern city of Rafah, consistently pressed Israel to allow more humanitarian aid into Gaza, and rejected both territorial reduction in Gaza and displacement of its population. Yet these very measures have not only been enacted but accelerated in northern Gaza, more than a year into the war, in what a former defense minister under Netanyahu, Moshe Ya’alon, recently described as “ethnic cleansing.” While Israeli officials claim these measures are necessary to prevent Hamas from rebuilding its military capacity, their actions align with growing calls for direct Israeli control and settlement reconstruction in Gaza, positions now advocated not only by the settler far right, but by Netanyahu’s Likud party members as well, who convened summits to advance such plans in January and October 2024. As an Israeli reporter observed in early November, “The army has begun the stage of cleansing the northern Strip while it prepares to hold onto the area for a long time to come.” Defense Minister Israel Katz said on Dec. 17 that Israel would maintain “full security control” over Gaza, akin to its control of the West Bank. The fact that Gallant’s opposition to reoccupying Gaza stands as an outlier reveals how thoroughly extremism has been normalized in Israeli politics.

This systematic assault on Palestinian institutions extends far beyond the governing coalition. When the Knesset voted in July to oppose Palestinian statehood, it drew overwhelming support from all Jewish parties in parliament (68 members were in favor; the 9 against were all Arab lawmakers). Similarly, recent legislation effectively banning UNRWA from operating in Israel and the occupied territories passed by striking margins (92 to 0 and 87 to 9), despite the critical role the agency plays in providing Palestinian health and education services. While Israeli officials cite evidence of a small percentage of UNRWA staff involvement in the Oct. 7 attacks to justify these measures, the near-unanimous support reveals broader political alignment. Israel has engaged in a longstanding campaign to discredit and dismantle the organization, perceiving it as a symbol of international commitment to helping Palestinians one day return to the lands that they were forced to vacate 76 years ago, something Israel sees as an existential threat. The military leadership has also embraced this approach, implementing parallel strategies in both Palestine and Lebanon: mass displacement, systematic destruction of border communities, and operations resulting in high civilian casualties, even though Israel’s strategic calculations differ in the two theatres.

The Israeli public continues to compartmentalize opposition to Netanyahu and his coalition from its support for aggressive military action against Palestinians. Even as they condemn the prime minister for prolonging the war for political survival, most Israelis broadly support the actions of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) in Gaza. For example, a solid majority (61 percent) of Jewish Israelis believe the ICC's issuing of arrest warrants is rooted in anti-Israeli bias, and not because Israel is actually engaged in crimes, according to an Israeli Democracy Institute poll from late November. It is also noteworthy that a small majority of Jewish Israelis (52 percent) oppose settlement in Gaza, but a larger number of them favor Israeli military rule in Gaza (49 percent) than oppose it (42 percent). This stance reflects both the deep trauma caused by the events of Oct. 7 and longer-standing security fears. When international bodies like the ICC allege war crimes and crimes against humanity, and the International Court of Justice (ICJ) advisory opinion states that Israel’s actions in occupied territory amount to systematic discrimination and are a violation of international law, most Israelis respond not by reconsidering their positions but by rejecting these institutions’ legitimacy. While the Israeli defense establishment has clashed with Netanyahu over a hostage deal and post-Hamas governance plans for Gaza, there remains broad consensus among Israeli political and military leaders, as well as the public, about continuing military operations across the region, especially after the successes against Hezbollah and Iran in recent weeks. Netanyahu’s continued grip on power speaks not just to his political survival skills, but to how deeply his positions still resonate with much of the Israeli public.   

The path ahead

Netanyahu is now, arguably, in the strongest political position he has been in since Oct. 7. Under his direction, Israel has killed key regional adversaries — including Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah and Hamas political bureau head Yahya Sinwar (as well as his predecessor Ismail Haniyeh) — and significantly damaged Iran’s air defense systems. Israel also just took out most of Syria’s military assets in a matter of days after the fall of Bashar al-Assad's regime. Netanyahu’s Likud party has regained popularity in the polls, and he has stabilized his coalition by adding four more seats from New Hope, a party led by Gideon Sa’ar, a hawkish Likud defector who is Israel’s new foreign minister.

Netanyahu’s most significant power play came with the firing of his defense minister, Yoav Gallant, strategically timed on US election night when global attention was diverted. While he called for and oversaw Israel’s siege on Gaza, Gallant often stood alone in the Israeli cabinet advocating for a hostage/prisoner exchange deal and cease-fire, repeatedly criticized Netanyahu’s lack of day-after planning for Gaza, and opposed the coalition’s continued military service exemptions for ultra-Orthodox Jews. His replacement with Israel Katz, a loyalist in Likud, effectively makes Netanyahu the de facto defense minister, a shift that could further erode the independence of military decision-making.

Facing few domestic constraints or external pressure, Netanyahu is positioned to remain in power for his full term, until the next scheduled election in October 2026. This comes as he has begun testifying in court on charges of bribery, fraud, and breach of trust, while new investigations have been opened against employees in his office. These include a major security breach in which classified military information was leaked to two foreign media outlets. The leaked documents served to legitimize his position on refusing a hostage deal, leading critics to accuse him of compromising a primary war objective to serve political interests.

The combination of the Biden administration’s acquiescence and Donald Trump’s election has left the Israeli leadership feeling both vindicated and further emboldened. A majority of Israelis supported the new American president-elect, with 72 percent of Jewish Israelis believing Trump is better for Israel. Growing Israeli extremism likely will accelerate during a second Trump term. Yet ironically, it is worth recalling that even Trump’s first-term “Deal of the Century” was too moderate for the Israeli settler leaders now in power, due to their blanket opposition to any Palestinian state, no matter how fragmented and unviable. 

The Israeli far right’s agenda, if implemented, portends even more extreme measures: the expulsion of some or most Palestinians from Gaza, what some Israeli far-right ministers call “voluntary transfer”; the building of new Israeli settlements there; intensified violence and displacement of Palestinians from Area C of the West Bank, which has already seen the displacement of 57 Palestinian communities since Oct. 7, alongside blanket legalization of all Israeli settler outposts; and accelerated de facto annexation of the West Bank, potentially leading to formal annexation of large sections. Even without these moves, the IDF itself, most conspicuously in Gaza, but also systematically evident in the West Bank, has become a more radical institution whose rules of conduct and engagement have severely deteriorated. The Netzah Yehuda battalion, notorious for its brazen violence against Palestinians, including the death of American-Palestinian Omar Assad in 2022 in the West Bank, is one example. There is also the penetration of a messianic, religious-nationalist minority in the army that Israeli scholar of civil-military relations Yagil Levy describes as trying to reshape the IDF to free it of any shackles of international law or ethical codes.

Netanyahu’s appointment of Yechiel Leiter — a settler with Kahanist ties and once a member of the Jewish Defense League, a US-designated terror group, who strongly advocates West Bank annexation and dismantling the Palestinian Authority — as Israel’s US ambassador appears intended to signal openly that West Bank annexation is in the cards. How much this is about gaining leverage in potential future Trump-brokered normalization talks with Saudi Arabia is unclear, particularly given that, at least for now, Riyadh insists on visible concessions to the Palestinians, something Netanyahu’s far-right coalition partners reject outright. Given the close, often organic, ties between Israeli and American politics, this mainstreaming of Kahanism in Israeli politics also helps to normalize the ideology in American politics, in effect creating a new “center” that is even further to the right, thus pulling Republicans (and by extension many Democrats) to take (or at least tolerate) ever more extreme positions. This also leaves intact American tax-exempt charities that support settlements and extremists in Israel, such as the Central Fund of Israel. Biden’s executive order (EO) in February 2024 that facilitated the sanctioning of settlers and groups supporting the settlement enterprise laid the groundwork for such groups’ operations to be inhibited if they fail to comply. But with Trump’s election, the EO is likely to be swiftly annulled.

The year since Oct. 7, 2023, has drastically altered both the Israel-Palestine conflict and the region’s political landscape. Israel has been mired in a multifront war of attrition that will have lasting consequences for its military and economy with no clear path to resolution, despite the recent cease-fire in Lebanon. It currently has troops positioned in Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria, in addition to its occupation of the West Bank. Yet one reality is certain: Israel’s far right has caused irreparable damage to the Palestinian people and to Israeli democracy, and right now, its vision prevails.

Despite openly criticizing Netanyahu for undermining democratic norms, his vision for Israeli-Palestinian peace, and in some cases his conduct of the Gaza war, the Biden administration has provided his government with broad backing. This, despite evidence that Israel employed artificial intelligence to target thousands of Gazans with little oversight, used Palestinians as human shields, tortured and abused Palestinians in detention facilities inside Israel, used starvation as a weapon of war, and created conditions in which, as one Israeli reservist who just served for 86 days in Gaza put it when describing the open-fire regulations, it is safer to be a dog than a Palestinian in Gaza. Biden’s approach has reflected less a misunderstanding of Israeli far-right extremism than an unwillingness to confront its implications, particularly given the impunity granted by US support.

While the trauma of Oct. 7 helps explain this retreat from principle, the result has been to enable the very outcomes the administration claimed to oppose — chief among them the huge civilian death toll, continued restrictions on humanitarian supplies to Gaza’s population, and Israel’s fragmentation and assumption of control over Gaza’s territory. Trump’s return promises something more dangerous still: a US administration that appears to share the Israeli far right’s hostility to Palestinian rights and international norms. For those Democrats and others still committed to a rules-based order as well as a just and lasting settlement in Israel-Palestine, the least that could be done now is to push back against Israeli policies becoming even more normative in US politics, acknowledge the inherent connection between the mainstreaming of Israel’s far-right expansionist agenda and the dismantling of democratic safeguards, and recognize that they have been a part of the problem by failing to hold Israel to account for its role in perpetuating the conflict.

 

Mairav Zonszein is a journalist and commentator who has covered Israeli politics, the Israel-Palestine conflict, and US foreign policy for over a decade. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New York Review of Books, Foreign Policy, The Columbia Journalism Review, and more. She is currently senior analyst on Israel with the International Crisis Group.

Photo by Gali Tibbon/AFP via Getty Images