Polarization and the Hidden Israeli Center

For all their differences, the American and Israeli political systems appear to be sharing a moment: heightened levels of political division, leaders facing legal woes, accelerating demographic changes, and polarizing social and traditional media. Similar crises plague Great Britain, France, Italy, and Spain, among other democracies. Everywhere there is a powerful sense that the political center has eroded, making space for only the most extreme voices.

The paradox is that the number of voters who feel politically homeless is so great that one would think they’d have the numbers to build their own political home together. In an April 2024 survey conducted in collaboration with political strategist Moshe Klughaft and a leading Israeli polling service, Midgam, 70 percent of Israelis agreed with the following statement:

Even more astonishing is that, with the exception of one party (the “Religious Zionist” party of Bezalel Smotrich), this statement received support from the majority of voters from every political party. Only 24 percent of respondents disagreed. Moreover, a majority of Israelis across political and religious lines generally agree when it comes to the most pressing political issues of the day: Support for Haredi military conscription; opposition to the annexation of Judea, Samaria, and Gaza; opposition to a Palestinian state; support for more inclusive Judaism and liberalization in the relationship of religion and state, to name a few.

Why is the current political atmosphere so toxic if most voters wish it were otherwise? And why does there appear to be so much contention specifically over the issues on which there is broad agreement? How has the political system failed to reflect the sentiments of the electorate?

Major shifts in demography and technology have put enormous pressure on democratic and semi-democratic societies throughout the world. The sense of disintegration and political homelessness is the electorate’s reaction to that pressure. The significant difference between Israel and other modern democracies is that in Israel the crisis of polarization and extremism translates into an existential and immediate security danger. It weakens the internal strength of society and conveys weakness to Israel’s enemies, as we saw on October 7.

For this reason, the need to understand and address the crisis in Israel is all the more urgent.

In a famous 2015 speech, Israeli President Reuven Rivlin described Israel as a country divided into four tribes: the secular, religious, and Haredi tribes — all Jewish — and the Arab tribe. In practice, every Israeli can name at least twice as many tribes as this. Politically, the country is even more fractured. Israeli-Arabs, about 20 percent of the population, are represented by at least four different parties. The ultra-Orthodox, about 15 percent, are represented by three. The political center and the left are each represented by at least two. The Right, the majority of the electorate, has four. Why so many? One emphasizes the Russian speakers in Israel, one appeals more to the religious Right, one to the traditional Right, and one to the secular.

One would think that such a multiparty system would offer flexibility to produce shifting and trans-tribal coalitions, as was often the case in the past. So why does unity elude us now, leaving many with the sense of political homelessness?

The issue is what I call the “bloc paradigm.” Despite the multiplicity of parties, the government operates as two warring families in which the rich diversity of opinion is subsumed underneath absolute polarization. What is the point of having such a diversity of parties if they are actually arranged in two rival blocs, cast in concrete, and every move from bloc to bloc is an act of defection and betrayal? As far as the Israeli voter is concerned, he votes for the party that most closely represents his worldview and identity. It can be argued that his interest is to negotiate with all the other parties, to compromise a little, in order to achieve the best result from his point of view. However, in practice he is voting either for the Montagues or the Capulets.

The blocs today are the Bibi bloc and the Anyone-but-Bibi bloc. The Bibi bloc includes roughly three groups: the Haredim, the religious, and the Likud. The Anyone-but-Bibi bloc also contains roughly three groups: the anti-Bibi Right, the secular center and the Left, and the Arabs. These blocs are not ideologically coherent. In the Bibi bloc, for example, between the Haredim, the religious, and the Likud, there are huge gaps on fundamental questions in Israeli society, such as the question of Haredi participation in the economy and military. In the Anyone-but-Bibi bloc, there are huge differences in how the Zionist parties of the Right, the center, and the Arabs view the very nature of the state.

One can chart the development of the bloc paradigm through the political career of Netanyahu himself. When he entered politics, Bibi preferred diverse coalitions with liberal partners from the center and the Left. As his political path took a populist turn and attracted legal scrutiny, his room for maneuver narrowed his political family to the point that he was not only its patriarch but its defining feature. A similar narrative could be told about Trump’s political path from being a Democrat to completely redefining the Republican party as his own.

How do the blocs still function despite the essential differences among the groups that make them up? The answer: by turning pathology into ideology, a narrative that glues the group into a binding bloc. Part of their narrative is positive (“We are the bloc that is committed to Judaism” versus “We are the bloc committed to liberal democracy”). But most of their narrative is negative (“If one of us leaves this bloc, Israel will fall into the hands of the Left and the Arabs” versus “If one of us agrees to sit with Netanyahu, Israel will become a dark dictatorship”). These are ideological narratives designed to cement the political blocs and ensure their survival.

The problem is that they have built families that most of the electorate doesn’t feel at home in, where the marginal positions of the crazy uncle are granted disproportionate weight. A case in point is the fact that, despite being less than 10 percent of the Israeli public, the ideologically hard-line settler movement holds the power to make or break the government and manages to elevate the question of settlement-building in Judea and Samaria, and even restoring settlements in Gaza, to the level of a national priority.

Another danger inherent in the bloc paradigm is the internal division it sows. The paradigm’s logic of social “divide and rule” tramples and dismantles any sense of national and cross-bloc solidarity. The bloc paradigm is destroying the basic infrastructures on which Israeli society is built. It melts down national cohesion for the sake of bloc cohesion, creating a binary discourse that prevents the formation of alternative coalitions, the essence of which is cooperation and innovation in the areas where most Israelis agree, including Haredi enlistment, a state commission of inquiry investigating the failures of October 7, and well-balanced judicial reform. Any bill or initiative will be immediately categorized as “with us” or “against us” and die in the endless melee among the blocs. This is perhaps the most obvious manifestation of the collapse of the Israeli center: the loss of the national compass. In the past, the majority of the electorate had confidence in the ruling parties’ sense of responsibility for safeguarding the interests of the state over the interests of the ruling parties. The result of the collapse is a political system that, even at the signal of war, is not capable of cooperation and transparency. Note how much of the immediate response on October 7 and the days that followed relied on individual patriots rather than government institutions.

Israel needs a new paradigm, and this one will emerge from the center of the political map. The idea of the center is not to reach a compromise between the two existing blocs, but to form a new, broad Israeli bloc that has both existing blocs represented in it. Mainly, it is a paradigm that has a new Israeli narrative, updated and relevant to most Israelis, which will be an alternative to the sense of political homelessness produced by the bloc paradigm. In this new paradigm, there are winners on both sides. The losers are the extremists.

In order to prove that this is not a dream but a practical plan, one need only observe the 16 parties that exist in the Israeli Knesset today. Although each political party is identified with a “tribe,” some of them represent the moderate and pragmatic part of that group, whereas others represent a separatist or more ideological segment. For example, of the three Haredi parties, two have more separatist positions while the third represents voters more integrated into Israeli society — professionally, economically, and in the army. The same can be said of the political Left, the center, the Right, and the Arabs — almost every group in Israel has a more moderate political expression and a more extreme political expression.

In this sense, the moderates (or pragmatists) in most groups share more common ground than not. A cold analysis of the public’s positions reveals that it is possible to reach understandings that will be acceptable to the majority of moderate Israelis — the voters of both blocs — on almost all important issues in the fields of foreign affairs and security, religion and state, society and economy.

Some may point to the 2021 “change government” of Yair Lapid and Naftali Bennett and rightly ask why that government was so short-lived and why it failed to deliver the change it promised. Didn’t this exhibit the kind of broad-minded, centrist solution to Israel’s political impasse? Unfortunately, no. For all of its accomplishments, not the least of which was inspiring millions of Israelis to imagine a different kind of politics, the change government failed to break the bloc paradigm because it was a prime example of it. The coalition came about largely as an Anyone-but-Bibi tactic. It was clear to the voters of both blocs that the motivation for the establishment of the change government was the removal of Netanyahu — not the creation of a new political paradigm. The fact that the Likud, which had received the most votes in the election, was excluded from the governing coalition led many Israeli voters to question it. It therefore exacerbated the sense of political homelessness. Even Naftali Bennett’s political defection from the Bibi bloc was seen by many right-wing voters as an act of treason rather than as the paradigmatic revolution we need.

The time for that revolution is now. As the war in Gaza has been cast as a second war of independence, the new paradigm signals the birth of a new Israeli politics, a recommitment to Israel’s founding ethos as a Jewish and democratic state governed by principles of collaboration, representation, and ideological inclusion. A fitting name for this new paradigm is the Zionist Covenant.

At the heart of the Zionist Covenant is the reconstruction of an Israeli super identity that stretches from the Left to the Right as it once did. This is a challenging task, which seems impossible to many today: to break the bloc paradigm and replace it with one that brings together constituencies on opposite sides of the barrier to create an identity and political alternative that transcends it. But if we are to find our way out of this crisis, there is no other choice.

The order of the hour is to unite the pragmatic Zionist tribes — religious, traditional, and secular — who serve in the army, into a single coalition committed to a Jewish, Zionist, democratic, and liberal state. These tribes form the backbone of the state and, like a literal backbone, constitute Israel’s ideological center. Unlike a political center, the ideological center is defined by the understanding that for Israel to succeed in its Jewish democratic mission, it cannot choose between Right and Left, Middle Eastern and European, conservatism and liberalism, or between traditionalism and modernity. It must find ways, methods, and means to reflect and allow for the tensions inherent in its nature, include and reflect the diverse range of political positions across the spectrum as a matter of moral devotion to one’s fellow citizens.

It is not about the creation of one party, but the creation of a covenant among different parties that, despite their differences, commit to the strength, vibrancy, and necessary diversity of the country. Such a covenant will naturally be a home for some parties and not for others. But this is how we solve the problem of political homelessness: building a home on the basis of, and with those who share, the country’s founding ethos, fundamental values, and practical lines. The Zionist Covenant invites all parties to join it — even the non-Zionist parties — on the understanding that its commitments are to the values rather than to specific parties or leaders. Not all of the parties will be able to identify with or accept the basic lines, but that will be a demonstration of their lack of commitment to the shared home. Such homelessness is a chosen one, unlike the forced political homelessness of the bloc paradigm.

This cannot be a top-down process. Before the Zionist Covenant can be a political home for the ideological center, it must be built as a civil home from the ground up. In the 1980s and 1990s, political liberalism gained traction in Israel, leading to a flourishing of new ideas focused on human and civil rights. Numerous organizations and funding bodies emerged to address previously marginalized issues such as women’s rights, LGBTQ+ rights, minority rights, and more. Civil grassroots developments in the past two decades can largely be seen as a robust and substantive response to these efforts from the Right, taking on a particular intensity since Israel’s disengagement from Gaza in 2005: Funders and organizations such as the Tikvah Fund, the Kohelet Policy Forum, Sella Meir Publishing, Channel 14, and the Jewish Statesmanship Center have successfully pushed back on many initiatives of the Left, drawing inspiration and experience from American conservative and libertarian thought.

Both movements began on civil ground before making their marks on the judicial and political level. Through various grassroots initiatives, they cultivated their political bases first. Their collision, which we saw throughout 2023 and in the protests over a hostage deal, has shaken the country and disrupted its balance.

Israel needs an ecosystem of centrist organizations, like those of the Left and Right, to restore the balance, recenter the Overton window, and develop the civil Zionist Covenant before it can effect lasting political change.

Thankfully, this process has already begun. At the height of the judicial reform protests, the aptly named Jerusalem-based group Ha’Bait Ha’Meshutaf (the Shared Home) was one of the only groups that brought together opponents from the Left and Right, secular and religious. Its animating principle was not an Israel for one side or the other, but one shared by all who are willing to invest in its common good.

In recent years, several other organizations have emerged in response to the crisis as well. The Fourth Quarter Movement seeks to ensure Israel’s thriving from age 75 to 100 by bringing together Israelis who “hold firm ideological positions” but “recognize the need for a shared society with those holding differing views.” Other organizations include the Tachlith Institute, the Next Generation Foundation, and my own organization, the One Hundred Initiative. Thanks to the new Centrist Forum convened by the Maimonides Fund, 20 organizations committed to a shared but multifaceted vision for Israel are finally strategizing with one another.

But in order to ensure lasting and enduring shifts toward the center in Israel’s civil, commercial, judicial, and political sectors, we must also look to the next generation. Any Israeli parent with a son or daughter in today’s IDF — I am one myself — takes inspiration and hope in the fortitude and determination of Israel’s future leaders.

As a country we need to invest in their investment in ideological centrism. Not to convince them to agree on everything, but to condition them against polarization, to see their peers as fellow builders of their shared home, regardless of their differences of opinion. This is where the Mixed Preparatory Schools Forum comes in. Every year, approximately 5,700 young people are enrolled in Israel’s 105 mechinot, year-long pre-military leadership academies “to help young Israelis prepare for meaningful army service” and “to train leaders for civil society after the army.” Although some of the mechinot are religious and some are secular, 31 of them are mixed and serve 1,500 pre-army students every year.

These students represent great potential for a less polarized Israeli future. For years, the mixed mechinot operated independently of one another, a kind of fluid and voiceless no-man’s-land between the secular and religious schools. This despite the fact that they graduate more students than either of the other two. The Mixed Preparatory Schools Forum seeks to leverage this human capital, turning these mechinot into laboratories of secular-religious partnership, Jewish-democratic Zionism, and social activism — as a public ideology. The Forum will facilitate graduates’ continued work in these areas as they progress through the military and their careers to drive the social and political life of Israel toward the Zionist Covenant. Graduates will become activists, not for one side or another, but activists against polarization. These pioneers of Israel’s shared future will be the architects of the joint narrative and future voter base of the centrist coalition.

The idea behind all of these initiatives is to tap into the diversity of Israeli experience and perspectives, and to have that diversity reflected in Israeli governance. What’s clear from their emergence is that the energy of the center exists. It can be the engine that drives Israel out of its profound political impasse. Practically speaking, the paradigm of the Zionist Covenant requires creating avenues for leadership at all ages and professional levels: young and old, managers and educators, journalists and politicians, businessmen and activists. Needless to say, it must include people from across the political spectrum reflecting all citizens who want to share this home.