I'm trying to understand the rise of the religious right in Israel. It takes me back to my roots.

Ben Gvir was once an extreme pariah. After yesterday's election, clearly that is a thing of the past.

When people ask me where I’m from originally and I say, “Brooklyn”, I usually have to follow up with, “Not THAT Brooklyn.” Not the hipster Park Slope where one may bump into Matt Damon or Michelle Williams over pumpkin spice lattes and rainbow pride bagels. No, no. I’m from Orthodox Brooklyn. Where the streets are lined with shops featuring human-hair wig stylists, kosher phones, and tznius clothes. Where flyers advertise Orthodox candidates for local elections, shiurim about hilkhos Shabbos, and diets and gyms that are targeted for women only. THAT Brooklyn. A long beard and black hat meant only one thing, and real estate prices rose in proximity to the nearest shul. The other Brooklyn, the one that so many people people pine for today, didn’t exist when I was growing up in Flatbush in the 70s and 80s. Who would have dreamed that our borough would one day become this, you know, cool….

I moved to Israel in 1993, so it’s been a while. But some days, I feel like the Brooklyn of my youth has followed me to Israel. Today is one of those days.

****

There are certain things I sometimes miss about Flatbush.

Sundays at the flea market shopping for $1 earrings.

School plays.

Riding my bicycle down Ocean Parkway — a flat street with no massive Middle Eastern hills — to the boardwalk on Coney Island.

Coney Island. The roller coaster. The Ferris wheel. When my spouse and I got engaged a million years ago.

The pizza….. Oh, I know, there is some great pizza in Israel. But there is a certain smell…. There is a pizza place in the flea market in Jaffa that smells like the pizza places of Avenue J. (I know, I know, it’s probably all the oil.) It doesn’t matter. Every time I pass by, I think for a minute that I’m back in Brooklyn.

So, yeah, Brooklyn. In some ways, it’s deep in my soul.

And then there are things I don’t miss. Things I walked away from, actively discarded and don’t want back in my life. I have written about parts of that journey in various forums over the years.

And yet…… there are times when I am reminded of where I come from. Not in the aroma of pizza. But in the way that I wish I could keep in the past.

Like today. Today, I have been flown back to Flatbush of the 1970s and 80s. The Orthodox Brooklyn of my youth is weighing on me like an oil drill, pressing into my brain, digging deep into my core trying to pull out things that I wish would stay buried deep.

*****

I have had other days like this.

Like the day Baruch Goldstein massacred Muslim worshipers in cold blood. Just like that. Because he believed it was the right or good thing to do.

Days like that.

Because, well, Baruch Goldstein and I shared an alma mater. We both graduated the Yeshivah of Flatbush. We came from the same place. He did his thing and I do mine. But he did his thing because he thought he was being a good Jewish boy. We had the same education, and for him, that education led him to do that thing. The same education that I had. That is a lot to hold.

And today? Why is this all flying around my head today?

Well, Yeshivah of Flatbush had another famous/infamous graduate. The late Meir Kahana.

And Meir Kahana is a central feature of today’s news, whether people realize it or not. The man who just secured some 15 mandates in yesterday’s election, Ben Gvir, is a protege of Meir Kahana.

Side note to Flatbush people: I realize there are some amazing people who graduated from our school as well, ones with different life paths and ideologies. A supreme court justice in Israel. A famous chef. A celebrity fashion designer. And lots of lovely people doing normal everyday things, like doctors and writers and working parents and good friends. All of that is true. And I see you.

But today, when the country just gave a huge mandate to Ben Gvir, the man who considers Meir Kahana his ideological guru — whose complete dehumanization of non-Jewish people in this land is a core aspect of his violent ethos, who took a gun to a protest and pulled it out and pointed it at the protesters and then complained about how violent everyone else was — on a day like today, I’m looking back at where I come from, and I have some big questions. Big ones.

Because we come from the same place.

*****

Ben Gvir’s radical, righting religious ideology cannot be overstated. His posse believes in turning Israel into a halakhic state. He is more radical than the most radical right groups in Europe with policy plans such as deporting “disloyal” citizens. Think about that for a second. His willingness to destroy democracy on the mantle of a racist, violent, homophobic, and misogynistic platform of religiously-induced hatred is even more extreme than in the some of the scariest political climates around the world. Here, in Israel. Ben Gvir.

Israel just handed him 15 mandates. Give or take. That is an insanely large chunk of the Israeli public that thinks that these are acceptable ideas. That racist, homophobic, violent fascism is defensible and justifiable. Israel effectively just put the world view of Meir Kahana into power. Big time.

Ben Gvir was once a pariah. Only four elections ago, he was considered not a legitimate or acceptable candidate. His extremism was too much even for other right-wingers.

Something has changed.

******

In Flatbush in the 1970s and 80s, Kahanists were a visible, audible presence. JDL, the Jewish Defense League, the arm of Kahana’s racist, violent, Jew-centric nationalist movement, showed up everywhere. To Soviet Jewry rallies. To the Salute to Israel Parade. Wherever Jews gathered to do a Jewy thing, the Kahanists were there.

But sort of on the side.

Sort of.

You know, we knew that they were a bit, shall we say, extreme. They were angry. Wild. Aggressive. Trouble-makers. We kind of knew to stay away from them. More or less. But maybe not really.

They were always there, part of the community, if even a fringe. We were connected even as we tried to pretend we weren’t. They were like the crazy uncle you still invited to Thanksgiving. You pretended he was all talk but mostly harmless. Or at least you hoped so.

While we had this love-hate relationship with Kahanists — with people who claimed to represent all of us but had means and tactics that we weren’t sure were right — that message was even murkier in school. In our 9th grade class in Zionism with Yotav Eliach, we heard some almost-Kahanaish ideas. Jewish Nationalism. Jewish Pride. Jewish chosenness. Jewish victimhood. We were being actively trained in all the core pillars of Religious Zionist ideology and rhetoric. We graduated with a full script about Deir Yassin even though we had no idea where that was. We were tested in how to prove that Palestinians were lying about everything even though we had never met a Palestinian in our lives or ever read anything written by a Palestinian unless it was to prove they were lying. We were fully indoctrinated into the Jews-first ideology.

All of this was intricately wrapped up in religious ideas and bits of Jewish history. We need the land of Israel because they tried to kill us in the Holocaust and everywhere else, and anyway God promised it to us. All of this was presented as a kind of all-encompassing truth about everything, about who we were.

I encountered these ideas at key moments in my life. In college, active in Columbia Students for Israel, studying AIPAC guides to debating Israel, arguing on campus and everywhere else. These were the years when Bibi was UN ambassador and considered the greatest orator about Israel. He lived for that moniker, and we ate it up. He is still doing all that today, only he’s even more clever and manipulative about it. He’s nothing if not rhetorically clever.

I encountered this years later when I took a job at NGO Monitor as a content writer. What did that entail? I had very clear instructions. My job was to read articles by or about Palestinians, and prove that they were lying. That was literally my entire job. No matter what any Palestinian activist was saying, I had to write text debunking it. Like that.

I was trained in gaslighting the entire Palestinian people. Well-trained.

*****

Meanwhile, throughout this indoctrination, we had nothing in our surroundings suggesting that we could question any of these ideas, and everyone believed the same things.

I thought of this when I was doing my doctoral research. One of the teachers I interviewed described how in her religious girls’ high school in Israel, there would often be flyers handed out that read, “PROTEST TONIGHT 6PM” — and it wouldn’t even say what the protest was for. It was fully assumed that everyone would be of only one political opinion.

My kids described similar atmospheres in their religious settings. My son once told me that there wasn’t a single person in his yeshivah who wasn’t right wing.

In many army units, by the way, it’s the same thing. In combat units in particular, it’s not uncommon for everyone to be right wing.

That’s what Zionism was like in Flatbush. There wasn’t any kind of real debate. There was only one view of everything. Which, to sum up, is this:

We are right and the Palestinians are wrong. They are lying. They don’t exist. We matter, God gave us the land, and we are constantly under attack for that. And so we have to fight back. To protect ourselves. To protect the Jews. Never again. Am yisrael chai.

Against this backdrop, Meir Kahana and the JDL aren’t conceived as really wrong. They may have some aggressive tactics. They may seem a little extreme, even crazy at times. But really, they’re part of the same collective. We’re all on the same team.

It’s always been a fine line for the Zionist community. This isn’t new. Kahana, as we know, went to Israel, built a movement, continued with his ideas, and became a Knesset member.

Back then, Israeli legislators tried to keep him out. In fact, the famous Israeli law that says that Knesset members cannot have dual passports was meant to keep Kahana out. (He gave up his American passport instead).

Kahana was ultimately deemed by most of Israel as too extreme to be legitimate.

*****

Until Ben Gvir.

When Ben Gvir began spreading his Kahanist ideas, he was also deemed as too extreme to be legitimate, even in the religious Zionist community. Even for Likud. Four elections ago — way back in 2019 (!) — he was not seen as a respectable partner. His violence, his calls for transfer of Palestinians and leftists, his endless provocation, were seen as too much.

But something changed since then.

All these elections later, Israelis voted for him in droves. Why?

What changed? Only one thing.

What changed between last election and this one is that we had a non-right-wing government for the first time in ages. With an actual Arab party in the coalition.

What this did is, it created a new, live target for the radical right. They had something visceral to fight against: Arabs in power.

And the religious right came out swinging.

Their own leader — or, former leader — Naftali Bennett was actually the prime minister. Their guy was THE prime minister! But that wasn’t enough. Throughout his tenure, his OWN PEOPLE, his OWN MKs, never let up in their efforts to undermine him.

And why did they undermine him?

For one main reason: Because he was willing to sit with Arabs.

******

I keep thinking about this. And about my socialization into Religious Zionism. I believe that to understand the impact of this, we have to consider the history of Religious Zionist culture and education.

Because what happened today is not a result of some random trend that began last week. This has to do with the deeper roots of the culture, including the way I was brought up in Flatbush.

Meir Kahana was always cast as kind of extreme, but not entirely wrong. The underlying message that the Jewish people are up against this band of enemies and that we need to fight back with whatever we’ve got was not really disputed.

And then comes the really big question: Who exactly is the enemy?

Moreover, in homogeneous settings like religious schools and combat units, it is very easy to cast the one who is not there as the enemy.

Arabs, leftists, non-Orthodox Jews — they are all blended with one brush as the enemy. It’s so easy when none of them are even in the room.

And also when they sometimes “look” different. That makes it easy to demonize and otherize entire groups of people.

*****

Let’s consider for a moment how this played out in American politics. For years, Rush Limbaugh and Roger Ailes were filling the airways with fear-mongering about liberals, African-Americans, feminists, immigrants, Muslims — anyone threatening the white male hegemony. They were all blended into an amorphous enemy threatening America and Men.

But for a long time, they were just talking — or in Rush’s case, yelling — planting the ideas into their listeners’ ears.

It wasn’t until Obama became president that something changed. That is, there was a visible, visceral threat, someone with a different appearance to the white male listening population that they could point to. This “other” had power. It was very easy to paint that as fear. Someone different, who had been cast as other/enemy (Black, liberal, academic, with a Black woman for a wife….) now had POWER.

Remember this?

That was how Trump built his base. Birtherism, which cast Obama as the ultimate scary outsider, gave Trump his script, and he used it to scare his people.

******

I believe something very similar just happened in Israel.

For many years, religious Zionist leaders crafted a swath of enemies through incessant. Liberals, non-Jews, non-Orthodox Jews, secular Israelis, Meretz, and most of all Palestinians — all became one vague blob of Unwanted Other. This also included a lot of God language, about the Jews being special and chosen, about God giving us Israel, about Divine orders of things. A lot of Holocaust language was also invoked, about making up for lost babies, about the world hating Jews, about anti-Semitism. Sometimes these ideas overlapped — like when I learned in school the passage in the Gemara: Halakha, esav sonei et yakov — it is set in law that the descendants of Esau hate the descendants of Jacob, meaning that Palestinians and Nazis all want to destroy the Jews and Israel. As if that is all fact. We learned all that, over and over, in a zillion ways. And there was no way to debate or discuss. It just was.

And so here’s the thing: Even though Kahanists were always extreme in their violent solutions, and even though many people on the right and in religious Zionism tried to disassociate from Kahanisms for a long time, the subtleties eventually because too insignificant to manage. The underlying ideology of Kahanism did not actually clash with most of what has been going on in the religious Zionist world or right wing politics in Israel in general.

Like pre-Trump America, the hate was sown into the rhetoric of Zionist and religious Zionist ideology for decades. But it wasn’t until Bennett brought Arabs into the coalition that the sleeping bear woke up. Arabs AND liberals. All in one package. It was a gift to Ben Gvir. He finally had a visible target.

The effect of having a government with Arabs was like a dog whistle for the religious right. Much like the impact of Obama on the Tea Party and then on the trump world, having Arabs in government became an easy target for the right. They finally had something to swing at.

And it worked. His camp finally had an enemy. And they came out and beat it down.

*****

It is hard to ignore the underlying racism in today’s election. It’s hard to ignore the ways in which Bennett’s party revolted against him for doing the unthinking for them and sitting with Arabs and leftists. I have posited that his experience was so traumatic for him that it led him to leave the political scene altogether. He did not adequately estimate how deeply all that hatred had been sown. He became the enemy, too, the enemy of his own people, which he didn’t see coming. Maybe this is because Bennett, for all his right wing fear-mongering, has often demonstrated a softer side on social issues, often seeing people as human beings even when his religious Zionist told him not to (eg the LGBT community and liberal American groups.) Maybe he was genuinely unprepared for how intractable the racism in his camp is.

And now, by the way, it seems that his former partner Ayelet Shaked is learning the same lesson. Pundit are widely reporting that the reason she got almost no votes is because she joined the coalition with the Arab parties in the last election. Literally being punished for that. And her former constituents have now run to Ben Gvir. We’ll show ‘em!

I know that my religious Zionist friends will take offense at my characterization of the camp as deeply racist. I know because for the days before the election when I was pleading with them not to vote for Ben Gvir because he is a racist, sexist, homophobic, violence fascist, my religious Zionist friends took offense. I was reprimanded by many people for “name-calling”, that I would never get anyone to think my way by being mean. They said I need to “understand” the Ben Gvir voters. I need to “listen” to their “real concerns”.

But here’s the thing. I have been listening. My whole life, I’ve been listening. This is the world I come from.

And more. Since 2016, I’ve been very active in media, social media, and political activism in many different realms. I’ve had innumerable conversations with people who have radically different political opinions to me. (If you really want to watch me suffer, search for one of the television clips with me on a news program opposite right-wing trump-supporting Israelis. It was not fun for me, but maybe watching will be fun for you.)

I have spent what feels like a lifetime in these conversations. This is the world I come from, and it is where many of my friends and family members still reside. I am the outlier here, not them.

And my conclusion from all these exchanges is this: People are willing to use a lot of excuses to mask their support for some very bad ideas.

The fact is, anyone supporting Ben Gvir is basically okay with his ideas. They always have “reasons”. People will give you all kinds of fearful reasons why they support the maniacal, fascist insane candidate. They will talk about crime, or about freedom, or about how liberals are self-hating Jews.

“Own the libs” doesn’t sound inherently racist. Until you start to ask what’s behind it.

What is all this hatred of liberals about?

In America, it is clearly about race.

And in Israel, it is clearly about Arabs.

It’s the fear in people’s eyes when they consider the idea of having to share power with people who they think deserve to have less power.

But it’s just code. It’s all language to disguise the deep-seated fear of the “other” — whether blacks or Palestinians.

*****

I would like to suggest one more thought to consider, as uncomfortable as it is. Why is it that 80% of the American Orthodox community are Trump supporters?

They will tell you it’s about Trump’s stance on Israel. But we know that’s a red herring. Because Orthodox Trump supporters are not just about Israel. They are all in, hook line and sinker. I have had really frustrating conversations with Orthodox Trump supporters who are suddenly climate deniers, gun-owning supporters, and radically anti abortion, even though these are very un-Jewish positions and have nothing to do with Israel. And in fact, one of the biggest trumpist social media influencers, ‘Own the libs’ turned out to be a Lubavich woman.

How on earth did we get here?

This isn’t about Israel. This is about embracing the whole trump thing.

I have a theory about this that is untested and unproven but based entirely on my own personal experiences. I think that the kind of hatred and anti-otherness that trump spews is very comfortable for the Orthodox community. The fearful insularity that has come to justify an entire stance and ethos vis a vis the world is very familiar to those practicing Orthodox culture. It has so many the same vibes. Especially the ones people don’t want to readily see or admit.

*****

Maybe Kahanism was never really illegitimate. Maybe this has always been part of religious Zionism — the religious Zionism of my youth and of Israel 2022. Maybe it just needed an excuse to be pulled out.

*****

So what now?

Honestly, I don’t know. Israeli culture is deeply in need of cultural change. I’m sad beyond description that so many people think Ben Gvir is okay. And now, with those ideas dominating media, educational, and political hubs, I don’t know how to push back. I really don’t know.

Ultimately, change will only come when individuals make the decision to let go of fear, conformity, and groupthink and instead embrace courage, compassion, humanity, and truth instead. This is a process that takes place one person at a time.

This is what I did at a key moment in my life, when I had that job at NGO Monitor. After a few weeks of practicing gaslighting — of saying that every Palestinian who speaks is lying — I opened up my mouth at the staff meeting. I said, “Why can’t we let them have their own narrative?” All eyes were on me, like deer in headlights.

I left the job days later. I was done with all that.

That was a pivotal moment in my life, in which I started to really question and talk back to all of this.

We have a choice. When we are up against our culture, we are allowed to think for ourselves. Even when it’s hard.

It is a choice. And at this point, all I can is hope that people come to realize for themselves that they do not want to be on the side of violent racism but on the side of humanity.

####