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Israel’s Independence Day Marks a 75-Year Odyssey From Left to Right
The Jewish state has lived up to its miraculous creation, but not in the way its founders expected.
By Elliot Kaufman
How did Israel, a liberal cause at its founding 75 years ago, become right-wing? You could begin the tale in 1935, when a Jewish state was still far from assured. Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the father of right-wing Zionism, despised by the socialist mainstream, made a promise and a threat to David Ben-Gurion, the Labor Zionist leader of Palestine’s Jewish community:
“I can vouch for there being a type of Zionist who doesn’t care what kind of society our ‘state’ will have; I’m that person. If I were to know that the only way to a state was via socialism, or even that this would hasten it by a generation, I’d welcome it. More than that: Give me a religiously Orthodox state in which I would be forced to eat gefilte fish all day long (but only if there were no other way), and I’ll take it. . . . In the will I leave my son, I’ll tell him to start a revolution, but on the envelope, I’ll write, ‘To be opened only five years after a Jewish state is established.’ ”
That Jabotinsky’s heirs kept his promise and threat allows us to trace the nation’s journey from left to right as the world’s most successful postcolonial state.
In 1944 right-wing Zionists revolted against the British, the colonial power blocking desperate European Jews from immigrating to Palestine. Ben-Gurion, focused on a postwar settlement, opposed the revolt. His forces betrayed hundreds of members of the Zionist underground to the British. This turned Jew against Jew and could have easily spiraled into civil war. But it didn’t. “There will not be a fratricidal war,” said Menachem Begin, successor to Jabotinsky. “Perhaps our blood will be shed, but we will not shed the blood of others.”
A worn-down Britain withdrew from Palestine in 1948, and Ben-Gurion declared Israeli independence. Rather than create an Arab state alongside it, as the United Nations had envisioned, five Arab armies invaded Israel immediately. The Irgun, Begin’s paramilitary, sought to smuggle in weapons to resupply Jerusalem during the fighting. Ben-Gurion knew, however, that a state with private armies would be a tinderbox. He suppressed Israel’s far-left military faction and ordered his new Israel Defense Forces to fire on the Irgun’s weapons ship, setting it ablaze. Again, Begin refused to retaliate: “It is forbidden for brother to raise a hand against brother.”
East Jerusalem, with Judaism’s holiest sites, fell to Jordan, which expelled every last Jew. Yet Israel emerged with one army under a single command, loyal to the state. This unity, achieved via the ruthlessness of the moderates and the restraint of the extremists, allowed the country to develop the social solidarity to hold off repeated invasions, integrate hundreds of thousands of refugees, liberate Jerusalem and stand firm against terrorism—all while flourishing as a democracy.
Labor Zionists, secular and Ashkenazi, governed Israel for its first 29 years. But Jabotinsky’s envelope had been opened. The “Second Israel,” led by traditional Mizrahi Jews expelled from Arab lands, powered Begin’s 1977 election victory, known as ha’mahapakh, the upheaval. The right would push for a more-Jewish state and attempt to break the power of the left-wing Ashkenazi bastions, from kibbutzim to state corporations, unions and, most recently, the Supreme Court.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose father had been Jabotinsky’s secretary, led free-market reforms in the 1990s and 2000s, unleashing a dynamic Israeli economy with a gross domestic product per capita exceeding Britain’s. In 2020 Mr. Netanyahu secured the Abraham Accords, a diplomatic flanking maneuver that junked the liberal consensus on a moribund peace process. Now, as the country shakes, he leads a once-unthinkable all-right-wing government into uncharted territory.
One man who foresaw Israel’s transformation was political theorist Leo Strauss, a Jabotinskyite in his youth. In 1956 he wrote to the editors of National Review with a then-outrageous argument: Zionism was conservative. When “the moral spine of the Jews was in danger of being broken” with false promises of European emancipation, he wrote, Zionism had held Jews to their Jewishness. “Zionism was the attempt to restore that inner freedom, that simple dignity, of which only people who remember their heritage and are loyal to their fate, are capable.” It “helped to stem the tide of ‘progressive’ leveling of venerable, ancestral differences; it fulfilled a conservative function.”
Even a purely political Zionism, he explained in a 1962 speech, was bound to raise deeper questions of culture: How should citizens of a Jewish state live? A serious cultural Zionism, in turn, had to conclude that Jewish culture’s most profound sources and purposes are religious. The logic of Zionism, he said, leads to Judaism.
Welcome to Israel, the new global center of Jewish life and learning. Israel has experienced a religious and cultural renaissance, leaving the old socialist Sparta in the dust. Scripture is woven into hit songs and novels, lives of piety the stuff of TV dramas. Birthrates remain elevated among all types of Jews. The “national-religious” lead a settlement movement to return Jews to Judea and Samaria, the biblical heartland from which Jordan had expelled them. These Jews, piling into the officer corps, may one day lead the army.
Meanwhile, Israel’s Labor Party, discredited by the waves of Palestinian terrorism that answered Israeli peace offers, has been reduced to four Knesset seats out of 120. Only foreign pressure and an increasingly aggressive Supreme Court, protected from ideological change by its unique selection mechanism, preserves the left’s power.
Israel’s opposition is now center-left and center-right, led by new parties with little vision beyond stymieing Mr. Netanyahu and his religious allies. They can be formidable, however, when the right forgets that favorable demographic trends for the future don’t settle disputes today. The judicial-reform fight has proved that. But here, too, is a confirmation of change—even the opposition to the right has shifted rightward, dropped all talk of surrendering territory and draped itself in the flag.
India, founded a year before Israel, provides a parallel. Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s secularist first prime minister, stopped short of crushing religion, even making certain concessions to help legitimate the new state his party would dominate for decades. Like Ben-Gurion, he was confident that traditional religion would wither away with progress.
Over time, however, some Israeli Jews and many Indian Hindus sought deeper meaning for their states. Had they won sovereignty merely to modernize along British lines? Looking for a different source of values and solidarity, both nations have seen a conscious return to religion, in many cases yielding not at all traditional national-religious fusions with great vitality and expectations.
The outcomes in Israel and India may be as different as Judaism and Hinduism, but the challenge for the right is the same: to marshal the best in its tradition to revise what is no longer sustainable from the old regime. The worry is that it will marshal the worst to squander its national inheritance.
Once upon a time in Israel, the left-wing majority knew how to lead and the right-wing minority knew when to hold fire. The combination produced a state worthy of its miraculous creation. Now, as Israel’s third generation beckons, the roles are reversed and neither side is content. The right struggles to consolidate control; will its flailing only tighten the no longer subtle restraints on its power? The left convinces itself that the greatest danger to Israel is the majority of its fellow citizens; will it ever accede, like Jabotinsky and Begin did for a time, to a different kind of Jewish state?
Only Mr. Netanyahu keeps his eyes fixed on Iran rather than internal squabbles. Increasingly it seems that he must solidify the state and redeem the revolution or be devoured in its wake.
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Be careful what you wish for because it could happen and the consequences might turn into a surprise. Why? Because Biden now has a record - not a good one. Voters know more about him as a person. Turns out he is a prickly sort, not your "Uncle" maybe even a treasonous crook and quite "pissy fanny."
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Biden Is Desperately Seeking Trump
Will the GOP again give Democrats the nominee they covet?
By The Editorial Board
President Biden’s re-election announcement video on Tuesday was unusual, if not surprising. The early scenes are less about Mr. Biden’s record, and the sunny uplands of second-term hope, than they are about Donald Trump: images of the Jan. 6 riot, Trump signs, and a reference to “MAGA extremists.
Joe Biden Is Running in 2024 to 'Finish the Job'
The video betrays a little too obviously what Democrats and the press know but don’t like to admit in public: Mr. Biden desperately wants a rematch with Donald Trump. He doesn’t want to run on his own record. He wants to run one more time by stoking fear about what might happen if the former President returns to the Oval Office.
Mr. Biden won in 2020 by campaigning largely as the anti-Trump—a reassuring old hand you wouldn’t have to think about every day—and he figures he can do it again. The campaign strategy of putting Mr. Trump front and center worked to minimize Democratic losses in 2022. And the party is rolling it out again as Democratic prosecutors line up to keep Mr. Trump center stage with real and potential criminal indictments designed to stretch from here to Election Day.
It might work if Republican voters decide to let Democrats and the press choose their presidential nominee. But it’s also risky for the country given Mr. Biden’s 80 years, his decline in physical and mental acuity, and the known unknowns that might transpire in the next 19 months. We wrote Saturday about the selfishness of running again, given his decline, on a promise he knows he can’t keep to serve until he is 86 years old.
There is also his record in office: unprecedented federal spending that contributed to the worst inflation in 40 years, declining real incomes, worsening culture wars, and growing disorder and declining U.S. influence in the world. His approval rating is down where Mr. Trump’s was at this point in his Presidency.
A political poser is why no one serious in the Democratic Party is stepping up to challenge Mr. Biden given his age and record. One likely reason is that Democrats, especially on the left, are happy flying under the cover of Joe from Scranton with a history of political moderation before he became President. They’ve arguably achieved more of their progressive policy goals under Mr. Biden than they did in two terms with Barack Obama.
Another reason is the fear, bordering on panic, that they might be stuck with the demonstrably poor political talent of Vice President Kamala Harris as their nominee if Mr. Biden bows out. It’s a rational worry, yet Democrats also aren’t being honest about the likelihood that she could become President if Mr. Biden wins a second term.
The possibility that Mr. Biden’s decline could accelerate is real, as is the chance that he wouldn’t serve out his second term. Democrats will deny it, but a vote for Mr. Biden in 2024 is in a practical sense a vote for Ms. Harris as President as well. Resigning the office in his second term may even be part of Mr. Biden’s private calculation. That way Ms. Harris would become America’s first female President and could run in 2028 as an incumbent.
All of this explains why Mr. Biden is counting on Republicans to nominate Mr. Trump. The former President will be 78 years old in 2024, which would remove any age and generational advantage for the GOP. He might be able to defeat Mr. Biden if there’s a deep recession, a widening global conflict that involves the U.S., or a marked decline in Mr. Biden that even the White House and media can’t cover up.
But no one motivates Democrats to vote more than Mr. Trump, who also divides Republicans and has lost support among independents and suburban voters since his 2016 victory. Since that lone triumph, he has been an electoral loser for Republicans.
That’s why Mr. Biden is aching for GOP voters to take the Democratic and media bait and nominate the opponent he covets.
And:
Henninger disagrees:
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President Biden won’t negotiate, doesn’t do press conferences, does only canned events, can’t maintain focus, has minimal factual grasp and his foreign-policy activity is totally ceremonial. So naturally he’s running for a second term. With the total support of the Democratic Party in Congress.
Mr. Biden likely wouldn’t be running if his opponent were any of five or so Republicans not named Trump. A presidential debate next Tuesday evening against any of them would be a catastrophe for the incumbent.
Most Americans of any age or party affiliation don’t want Mr. Biden to run again. But the odds are strong—affirmed by the midterm election results—that even more voters don’t want Donald Trump to be president again.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s pseudo-indictment of Mr. Trump worked like clockwork. Annoyed Republicans increased their support for a Trump nomination, reassuring Democrats they could pull off the improbable re-election of their 80-something candidate.
The standard political model holds that politicians do what they gotta do to become the party in power. But even that pragmatic standard assumes the party’s path will be diverted by the interests of the person who has made it to the top of the presidential greasy pole. Not this time.
I’ve come to think of Joe Biden not so much as the commander in chief as the maître d’ in chief, master of the happy handshake. What needs explaining is the current disconnection between professional Democrats and most everyone else over the idea of continuing Mr. Biden’s official-greeter presidency. What do they see that normal people don’t?
Last year, professional Democrats seemed in sync with noncareer Democrats discomfited by the implications of the world’s most powerful man’s constant gaffes. Articles appeared suggesting primary challenges to Mr. Biden might come from prominent party governors—California’s Gavin Newsom, Illinois’s J.B. Pritzker or Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan.
Then almost overnight, the party seemed to embrace the idea of a second Biden term. Yes, the close midterm results were a triggering event, and the prospect of a Trump rerun helped. But I think the Democrats realized they had backed into a system that suits them to a T—the non compos presidential model of American politics.
Not a joke. Since at least Woodrow Wilson’s presidency, progressives have tried, with success, to make the states subject to the authority of administered bureaucracies in Washington. “Inside the Beltway” is a phrase mentioned frequently here, but during the first Biden term Washington has become more like a black hole, with the entire country being pulled into its gravitational force field.
Their control of the bureaucratic levers today is unprecedented. Unless you are a reader of the editorials in this newspaper, you would have virtually no idea of the relentless mandating activity of the people running this administration’s departments and agencies. A significant piece in these pages days ago by Phil Gramm and Pat Toomey summarized the scale of this juggernaut. If you missed it, read it
As noted, even a progressive Newsom or Pritzker presidency would just get in the way of the comprehensive agenda now being executed by progressive academics and former congressional staffers allied with Sen. Elizabeth Warren. They are, for instance, writing expansive interpretations of the implementation rules for the $400 billion of climate subsidies Congress just passed.
The suggestion that Mr. Biden should avoid the curse of second-term failure is about him personally. It’s irrelevant to what the activists running the agencies could do daily. The EPA’s just-announced 2027 deadline for tailpipe emissions may be unachievable, but so what? The marching order is a done deal. There would be more of that in a second term.
A beside-the-point president is the best thing that has ever happened to the progressive centralization project. That is why Washington’s Democrats would embrace a Kamala Harris succession. A tip of the hat, incidentally, to departing Biden domestic adviser Susan Rice, the former Obama operative who surely has helped design this passive presidency model.
The greatest peril is foreign policy, whose execution requires presidential leadership. Kissinger needed Nixon, Shultz needed Reagan, and Acheson had Truman. Antony Blinken is on his own, and it shows, as allies like Saudi Arabia and France flirt with China. The U.S. needs to increase spending on national security beyond 3% of gross domestic product. No matter what happens in the world, these Democrats won’t do that.
The cliché happens to be true: It’s early. The Hunter anvil hangs over Mr. Biden, along with a fragile economy and tense world. All kinds of stuff hangs over Mr. Trump. We are in a familiar phase, with opinion polls representing reality. They show Mr. Trump with a big nomination lead, thus the coverage has defaulted the election to a Biden-Trump grudge match. Like the Bragg indictment, that advantages the incumbent’s sleepwalk to re-election.
To paraphrase Dirty Harry, Republicans staring down this barrel have to be asking themselves one question: Do you think Donald Trump will run from here until November 2024 saying the 2020 election was rigged and stolen? If he does—and of course he will—you lose.
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There are many dangerous people wanting to destroy our nation. This is just a hand full, who have enormous wealth/power, who deserve to be on that list.
Larry Fink - ESG anti-capitalist Wants corporations to support, with stock holder money, all kind of radical, insane social programs like BLM, CRT etc. and is intensely anti-fossil energy Runs trillions of dollars through BlackRock.
Soros - anti-law and order- finances campaigns of radical D.A"s who refuse to enforce laws.
Anthony Fauci - Former Chief Medical Adviser to president causing schools to close and refuses to admit horrendous mistakes he made. Highest paid government official.
Randi Weingarten - Anti-Democratic education unionist. Liar, socialist very pro CRT. Disregarded health science, received enormous sums of money to restart schools and used same for unintended purposes including raising salaries of balking teachers.
Hans Schwab - founder of Davos. Hugely pro large government. Opposes freedom of the individual and republic form of government. Uses illogical green concepts to cause our nation to be energy dependent, our manufacturing ability non-competitive so as to destroy America's ability to commercially compete.
Mike Bloomberg - multi-billionaire who uses money to support vastly liberal causes and opposed to Justice Thomas.
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