Abstract
The present paper analyses the process of radicalization of the Likud party. The Likud party is the biggest party in Israel and has been a leading member of coalition governments for much of the last four decades and thus part of the political mainstream. However, the Likud, which arrived to government as an inclusive populist party in 1977, has undergone a process of radicalization in the last 15 years, radical in its rejection of the ideas of liberty and equality which are central to the Enlightenment tradition, in its rejection of human rights as both central to any political community and as universal, and in the xenophobia which always goes along with nativism—a central feature of radical right populism.
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Notes
- 1.
My choice to define radical right populism against liberal democracy is a descriptive rather than a normative approach. Since liberal democracy is the dominant way of implementing democratic ideas and right-wing populist parties want to challenge this order, it is against such domination that they can be considered radical. As the editors mention in their Introduction, radicalism today is defined as a departure from liberal democratic standards.
- 2.
- 3.
Fascist and neofascist movements differ from radical right populism in that fascism does not rely on the interplay of the different meanings of the word ‘people’. Instead, it reduces this notion to its organic, ethno-cultural meaning, and considers that the elite best represents the organic nature of the people.
- 4.
Cas Mudde defines nativism as ‘an ideology , which holds that states should be inhabited exclusively by members of the native group (‘the nation’) and that non-native elements (persons and ideas) are fundamentally threatening to the homogeneous nation-state’ (Mudde 2007: 19).
- 5.
While inclusion and exclusion take place in three different dimensions, this paper focuses only on the symbolic dimension.
- 6.
The party platform depicts a vision for Israeli society as a ‘pyramid with three levels. The base is security , namely, national, personal, economic, and educational security ; the middle layer, the Jewish nature of the state of Israel and the connection with the Jewish people in the Diaspora; and the vertex, an efficient government regime’(Yisrael Beytenu, http://www.beytenu.org/the-vision-of-yisrael-beytenu-israel-our-home-2/, homepage).
- 7.
Israel has never been a liberal democracy because the ethno-national nature of the citizenship regime and the prolonged occupation of the Palestinian territories have increasingly eroded the democratic system. Still, Lieberman’s party represented a radical upheaval of this system.
- 8.
Lieberman was among the first to support Binyamin Netanyahu in 1988, shortly after the latter returned from the USA and vied for a place in Likud’s list for Parliament. When Netanyahu was elected head of Likud in 1992, he appointed Lieberman (until then a relatively obscure Likud activist) as the party’s director-general. When Netanyahu became prime minister in 1996, Lieberman was appointed chief of staff. In 1999 he left Likud and created Yisrael Beytenu .
- 9.
Survey conducted by the author and Udi Lebel in 2003.
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Filc, D. (2018). Political Radicalization in Israel: From a Populist Habitus to Radical Right Populism in Government. In: Steiner, K., Önnerfors, A. (eds) Expressions of Radicalization. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65566-6_5
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