Haviv Rettig Gur is an Israel explainer — one of the best. An Israeli himself, he has been a student of his country and its politics for some time. He is the senior analyst of the Times of Israel. And he is my latest guest on Q&A, here. My listeners have heard him before. When something happens in Israel — you want to hear from HRG.
Israel has had another election — its fifth in 43 months, as HRG tells us. Benjamin Netanyahu is back again, for his sixth tour as prime minister. He was out of power for 17 months. In that time, there were two other prime ministers.
As HRG says, Israel now leads the world in elections — the frequency of. The Israelis have surpassed even the Italians.
Netanyahu is a brilliant politician and tactician, as HRG says. You may not trust him as far as you can throw him — but he out-wilies the wiliest. He has now cobbled together a coalition that includes people who have been against him for a long time. Is it a conservative coalition? A right-wing coalition?
HRG is very sharp on this question, as on others. Netanyahu himself is an American-style conservative, at least as conservatism in America was long understood: lean government, a free economy, etc. His coalition partners are a different kettle of fish.
Of particular interest, in this new coalition, is Itamar Ben-Gvir, who has been on the margins of Israeli politics for decades. He comes out of the Kahane movement, an extremist movement, one shunned by even the right edge of Likud. (As HRG says in our podcast, Yitzhar Shamir used to leave the Knesset when Meir Kahane rose to speak.) There are two oft-cited facts about Ben-Gvir: that he threatened the life of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, shortly before Rabin was assassinated; and that he long kept a portrait of Baruch Goldstein on the wall. (Goldstein was the man who murdered 29 Palestinians, at prayer in a mosque, in 1994.)
Has Ben-Gvir moderated? That is a tricky question, probably not answerable with certainty.
Can this question be answered with certainty? Is Benjamin Netanyahu corrupt? Or is he the victim of media and “elites” who hate him and are out to get him? The answer, or possible answer, is rather complicated, and Haviv Rettig Gur is at home with complications.
He also has interesting things to say about the nature, the very essence, of Israeli politics. That nature, or essence, is tribal, he says. It has been that way since the beginning — the beginning of modern Israel, in the late 1940s. You have different tribes sending representatives to the Knesset, to work out a modus vivendi. This has worked in Israel for almost 75 years now.
Will it continue to work? (Big question.)
In the minds of many foreigners, says HRG, Israel is a Western country, whose political system resembles that of the United States and the European democracies. Not so, he says. The Israeli system is more akin to that of other Middle Eastern countries.
Who came to Israel? HRG asks. People from czarist Russia; from Egypt, Morocco, and other Arab countries; from Iran. This peopling determined the nature of Israeli politics. And that nature is not as “liberal,” or “Western,” as many people believe.
Let’s talk Mahmoud Abbas. Haviv and I do. Abbas has been head of the PLO since 2004. Frankly, I thought he was old then — a functionary near the end of his career, whose job it was to be a placeholder. He is still on that job, almost 20 years later (age 86).
Other topics? Iran. How do you keep that country from going nuclear? Then the Ukraine war. What role does that war play in Israeli politics? Then antisemitism — antisemitism in the United States, in particular, and, more in particular, the cases of two celebrities: Kanye and Kyrie (no last names necessary).
Anyone curious about Israel, and its chaotic, or chaotic-seeming, politics, will enjoy and benefit from hearing Haviv Rettig Gur. Again, our latest podcast is here.