For readers outside Israel, the words “right” and “left” can be misleading when applied to Israeli politics. In Europe or the United States, those labels are usually organised around taxation, welfare, labour, immigration, race, religion and the size of government. Israel has versions of these debates, but they do not structure its party system in the same way.
For decades, the Israeli divide has centred on a different set of questions: the Palestinians, territory, security, settlements, the meaning of Zionism and the tension between the Jewish character of the state and its democratic institutions. Economic and social policy still matter, but they often cut across the camps rather than defining them. A politician can favour state intervention in the economy and still be treated as firmly right-wing; another can be socially liberal and remain inside the nationalist camp.
Historically, the divide had a stronger economic and institutional dimension. The Israeli left was identified with Labor Zionism and the bodies that built the state: the Histadrut, the kibbutz movement, state-led development and a relatively collectivist model of growth. The right, rooted in the Revisionist tradition and later organised around Likud, challenged Labor’s long dominance and placed greater emphasis on Jewish historical claims to the land, a more nationalist idea of sovereignty and, over time, a more market-friendly economic outlook.
That divide did not disappear, but it ceased to be the defining one. After 1967, and more clearly after Oslo in the 1990s, Israeli politics increasingly centred on the territories and the Palestinians living in them. The left became associated with territorial compromise, negotiations and the claim that some form of separation from the Palestinians was needed if Israel was to remain both Jewish and democratic.
The right became associated with opposition to a Palestinian state, support for settlement and the claim that withdrawal would produce new security threats rather than settle the conflict. The second Intifada did more than any single economic debate to weaken the left among Jewish voters. For many, the violence of the early 2000s was read as proof that the Oslo Accords had failed, or at least that concessions did not reliably produce peace.
The withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005, Hamas’s takeover and the rounds of fighting that followed hardened that reading. The October 7, 2023 attacks did not create the shift. It accelerated a movement already under way, making security and Jewish identity even more central than they had been in the years after Oslo.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
