They were once relegated to the margins of Israeli political life, even excluded from the Knesset. Two Jewish supremacist parties, Ha-Tzionut ha-datit (“ Sreligious ionism”), led by Bezalel Smotrich (Smotrycz) and Otzma yehudit (“Jewish power” ), led by Itamar Ben-Gvir, are running as an electoral cartel and are credited by the most recent polls with between 13 and 14 seats (out of 120) in the next Knesset, i.e. a tripling of their scores compared to the March 2021 elections. Their weight will be all the more decisive since Binyamin Netanyahu’s Likud will not be able to govern without these two parties.
These formations are faithful to the program of the former Kakh party (Hebrew word which means “Thus”) of the Israeli-American rabbi Meïr Kahane, assassinated in 1990 by a Palestinian militant. A party that advocated the deportation of Arabs to Jordan, the restoration of a Hebrew monarchy and the imposition of halakhathe ancient Judaic religious law.
Deportation or not?
“Ben-Gvir was born into a Jewish family of Iraqi origin under the name of Ben Ḥânin, a Hebrew surname in Ben-Gvir as soon as his parents immigrated to Israel”points out the American Jewish weekly Tablet. “The latter has not given up on any point of Meïr Kahane’s program, except that, formally, he no longer advocates the deportation of Arabs from Israel and the West Bank to Jordan, but ‘only’ that of ‘terrorists’ Arabs”says Armin Rosen in Tablet.
For the weekly, the alliance between Bezalel Smotrich (Smotrycz) and Itamar Ben-Gvir was not easy. “Smotrich [Smotrycz] is the incarnation of a far-right religious and especially Ashkenazi Zionism”, that is, Jews from Eastern Europe.
Ben-Gvir, he, “embodies a Mizraḥi ultranationalism [oriental, issu du monde arabo-musulman] but is less observant on religious issues, the war against the Arabs being his primary objective”.
The West Bank, an electoral reservoir
Like his sidekick Smotrich (Smotrycz), Ben-Gvir can count on an unprecedented pool of voices, “that constituted by those tens of thousands of young Israeli Jews born in recent decades in the settlements of Judea and Samaria [Cisjordanie] or in the illegal outposts, i.e. never having known the Green Line [ligne de démarcation entre Israël et la Cisjordanie annexée par la Jordanie entre 1949 et 1967]”.
And Armin Rosen to conclude with dark words. “The idea that the State of Israel should be the embodiment of a Jewish mission dictated by God or by our Patriarchs was once the domain of the Kahanists. This is no longer the case today.”
“A significant portion of Israelis now view Israel’s power, prosperity and regional integration as a sign no longer of superiority, but of sclerosis and powerlessness.”