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UNIDENTIFIED PEOPLE: (Chanting in non-English language).
RAMTIN ARABLOUEI, HOST:
On October 5, 1995, tens of thousands of Israelis crowded the streets of Jerusalem. They began in Midtown and marched towards the doors of the Knesset, where Israel's parliament meets.
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ARIEL SHARON: It's not Mr. Rabin that we knew in the past. Entirely different man.
ARABLOUEI: The former defense minister, Ariel Sharon, was there, along with the rest of the demonstrators, to protest Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who negotiated and signed the Oslo Accords, a peace deal with Palestinians. A peace deal these demonstrators viewed as a national betrayal.
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SHARON: A weak man. a man that gave up, not only the basic elements of Zionism, and gave up to a terrorist organization.
SARA YAEL HIRSCHHORN: Was a very dangerous and radical moment. There was, you know, a palpable sense of violence.
ARABLOUEI: This is Sara Yael Hirschhorn. She's a historian and visiting professor at the University of Haifa and fellow at the Jewish People Policy Institute.
HIRSCHHORN: Israel is at the brink of a civil war.
ARABLOUEI: The Oslo deal was very controversial in Israel because it would have required concessions, like withdrawing Israeli security forces from the West Bank in Gaza, and transferring authority over occupied territories to Palestinian control, concessions many saw as opening the door to a Palestinian state. The country's conservative party, Likud, opposed it immediately, and other right-wing parties agreed. Their anger towards Prime Minister Rabin came out in shocking ways.
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UNIDENTIFIED PEOPLE: (Chanting in non-English language).
ARABLOUEI: They chanted in blood and fire, we will expel Rabin. They carried massive signs with disturbing images of Rabin on them.
NATASHA ROTH-ROWLAND: You have photographs of Rabin, you know, that have been doctored so that he appears to either be in a Nazi uniform or looking like Arafat. You know, the keffiyeh around his head and - you know, and the kind of fatigues.
ARABLOUEI: This is Natasha Roth-Rowland. She's a historian and researcher at Diaspora Alliance, an international organization that combats antisemitism.
ROTH-ROWLAND: There is an equivalency that is being drawn by the Israeli right between Nazis and Palestinians, which is, you know, has long predated that and continues to this day.
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UNIDENTIFIED PEOPLE: (Chanting in non-English language).
ARABLOUEI: When demonstrators reached Jerusalem's Zion Square, politicians and activists spoke to them from a makeshift stage on the third-floor balcony of a hotel. One of those speakers was a rising politician named Benjamin Netanyahu.
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PRIME MINISTER BENJAMIN NETANYAHU: (Speaking Hebrew).
ARABLOUEI: I'm saying this to the government of Israel, which is bowing down to this man.
ROTH-ROWLAND: He does give this speech from the balcony of a Jerusalem hotel overlooking Zion Square, where all of this incredibly inciting language against Rabin is taking place.
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NETANYAHU: (Speaking Hebrew).
ARABLOUEI: In this speech, Netanyahu called Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat a bloody man. The crowd cheered. He accused Yitzhak Rabin's government of bowing down to Arafat. And then he said something ominous.
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NETANYAHU: (Speaking Hebrew).
ARABLOUEI: We are here because we will never allow Jerusalem to be divided anew. In other words, Netanyahu was saying, we will not allow Rabin to turn over East Jerusalem to Palestinian rule as part of the Oslo Accords.
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UNIDENTIFIED PEOPLE: (Chanting) Bibi, Bibi, Bibi.
ARABLOUEI: The crowd chanted Netanyahu's nickname, Bibi, as he worked them into a fervor with his fiery language.
HIRSCHHORN: It seems, you know, it was a kind of incitement to violence.
ARABLOUEI: An incitement that Netanyahu has denied.
HIRSCHHORN: It was a major moment in Israeli history. It's the time with, you know, sort of Benjamin Netanyahu's arrival on the political stage in a certain way but also, his understanding of appealing to the logic of the mob or the logic of the crowd.
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ARABLOUEI: About one month after that demonstration in Jerusalem, a rally was held in Israel's second largest city, Tel Aviv, in support of the Oslo Accords. The keynote speaker was Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.
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YITZHAK RABIN: (Non-English language spoken).
ARABLOUEI: I want to thank each and every person here taking a stand against violence and for peace.
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RABIN: (Non-English language spoken).
ARABLOUEI: This is the last speech Rabin would ever give.
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UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #1: Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin has been killed.
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #2: At 11:10 p.m...
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #1: Rabin was shot to death as he was leaving a peace rally in Tel Aviv.
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #2: He was hit by three bullets in his chest and his abdomen.
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #1: An eyewitness to the shooting said Rabin was coming down a set of stairs when three shots rang out. The eyewitness said Rabin doubled over, holding his stomach, and fell to the ground. He was said to be covered in blood.
ROTH-ROWLAND: Rabin is assassinated by a young man called Yigal Amir.
ARABLOUEI: Yigal Amir.
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UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #1: An Israeli Jew, a man in his 20s.
HIRSCHHORN: It's like the JFK moment for Israel. Where were you when Rabin was assassinated? And, you know, where were you on the political spectrum when Rabin was assassinated?
ARABLOUEI: Yitzhak Rabin's widow blamed Netanyahu and other right-wing leaders for stoking the flames of violence that took her husband's life.
HIRSCHHORN: You know, some read it as, you know, the future assassin of Yitzhak Rabin, you know, sees this as almost a coded message to himself to act on some kind of moral or God-given imperative to assassinate the prime minister.
ROTH-ROWLAND: Netanyahu doesn't really take responsibility. The Israeli right doesn't take responsibility. There's a lot of prevarication about who said what and who was really responsible for Rabin's murder.
ARABLOUEI: Benjamin Netanyahu later said he did not see any posters of Rabin wearing a Nazi uniform or a keffiyeh and that he never intended to inspire his killing. But one thing was clear. Rabin's assassination showed how deep the anger and rage towards the peace deal with Palestinians was among the right-wing of Israel's politics.
HIRSCHHORN: The fact that this assassination was perpetrated not by, you know, a Palestinian terrorist or, you know, someone sent from the Arab world to, you know, do a hit on the Israeli prime minister, but by a fellow Jew was, you know, totally shocking to a country and ripped the country apart.
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YASSER ARAFAT: I miss this brave man with whom I had signed the peace of the brave. He was a man who can respect his partner.
ARABLOUEI: This is the voice of Yasser Arafat, the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization, or PLO, reflecting on Yitzhak Rabin, the man who he'd signed the Oslo Accords with in 1993 and 1995, the man he accepted a Nobel Peace Prize with in 1994. Although the deal was criticized as imperfect by some on both sides, it did represent hope and a path forward, a measure of basic respect. But the right wing in Israel, who called Rabin a Nazi and a traitor, did not see it this way. They saw a peace deal as surrender.
HIRSCHHORN: People really felt that there were possibilities in the air, that there was going to be a real peace with Israelis and Palestinians. People were legitimately, you know, enthusiastic and hopeful, and that - it's gone. It is something that's really difficult to make people understand but is really important, you know, context for everything that's happened since 1995.
ARABLOUEI: The assassination of Yitzhak Rabin was a major turning point for a right-wing movement in Israel that had been growing for decades, a movement that uses a religious framework to define the state and its borders, that has aggressively resisted a two-state solution with Palestinians. For most of its history, Israel was dominated by left-leaning secular politicians. But today the right is in power through the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the government that is waging a war in Gaza which, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, has killed over 30,000 people, a significant number of those being children. The war is in response to the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack that, according to Israeli authorities, killed over 1,200 Israelis, with an additional 250 being taken hostage. So where did the right-wing movement in Israel come from? How did it start? And how did it make it to the seat of power? I'm Ramtin Arablouei, and we will explore those questions on this episode of THROUGHLINE from NPR.
DAVID CHILDS: This is David Childs (ph) from Salt Lake City, and you're listening to THROUGHLINE from NPR.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1, BYLINE: Part one - never again.
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ARABLOUEI: In 1967, after years of tension with its Arab neighbors, Israel launched a daring simultaneous preemptive strike on Syria and Egypt. Israel emerged victorious after only six days and, in the process, gained control over Gaza and the West Bank. The Six-Day War shocked the Arab world and completely changed the geopolitical reality of the Middle East for decades.
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UNIDENTIFIED PEOPLE: Five, six, seven, eight. Let my people immigrate.
ARABLOUEI: Meanwhile, across the Atlantic Ocean in the U.S., the student protest and civil rights movements were at their height.
(CROSSTALK)
ARABLOUEI: In 1968, in New York, in the midst of this tidal wave of radical politics, a new organization formed for the rights of Jewish people in the U.S. and abroad. The group was called the Jewish Defense League, or JDL, and it had a particular interest in the plight of Jews in the Soviet Union, who were often mistreated and had few places to worship safely.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2, BYLINE: Never again.
UNIDENTIFIED PEOPLE: Never again.
ARABLOUEI: The JDL popularized the phrase never again, referring to the Holocaust. It became the rallying cry.
ROTH-ROWLAND: The idea is to kind of represent Jews as, you know, a people that can defend themselves...
ARABLOUEI: This is Natasha Roth-Rowland again.
ROTH-ROWLAND: ...And not like a people who, quote-unquote, "went like sheep to the slaughter" in the Holocaust.
ARABLOUEI: The JDL founder and leader was a 35-year-old rabbi from Brooklyn, Meir Kahane.
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MEIR KAHANE: We will do exactly what we have been doing until every Jew within the USSR who wants to go free will be free.
HIRSCHHORN: He draws heavily from Black Power in thinking about, you know, Jewish power in the United States and how that should function.
ARABLOUEI: Sara Yael Hirschhorn again.
HIRSCHHORN: And he becomes kind of a cult figure in New York, you know, with his own Jewish activist scene.
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ARABLOUEI: Meir Kahane was born in Brooklyn in 1932 in a tight-knit Jewish family. His father was a rabbi. The idea of Zionism, that Jews should have their homeland in Palestine, was a part of his life from a young age. But his family had a particular interpretation of Zionism that would shape his future.
HIRSCHHORN: He grows up in a revisionist Zionist home in America.
ARABLOUEI: Revisionist Zionism is the belief that Israel should exist as an exclusively Jewish state on both sides of the Jordan River. That would mean Israel's official borders include the West Bank and Gaza Strip, which are internationally recognized Palestinian lands. As a teenager, Kahane became a militant activist after several Brooklyn synagogues were graffitied with swastikas.
ROTH-ROWLAND: In his teenage years, he joined an organization called Betar. Betar emulated fascist movements that were around it in the interwar period in Europe, you know, when fascism really sprung up. And when I say emulated, I mean in terms of their aesthetics. You know, they wore brown shirts. You know, they kind of glorified militarism and youth and violence - very, very anti-left, anti-socialist. And they - you know, they kind of pioneered this vision of greater Israel going in beyond the West Bank and kind of into the rest of the Middle East. So he subscribes to that ideology.
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KAHANE: Those who commit violence against Jews within their borders can fully expect, and rightly so, violence in return.
ROTH-ROWLAND: The Jewish Defense League kind of graduates, if you will, into terrorism. They start attacking Soviet targets in New York and Arab targets in New York because of antisemitism in the Soviet Union against Jews and because of, obviously, the Israel-Palestine conflict as well.
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UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #3: Three members of the militant Jewish Defense League, including Meir Kahane, pleaded guilty today to charges of conspiring to build explosives and transport them across state lines. Kahane admitted to the court he directed the making of bombs because he wanted to illustrate what effects bombs have.
ARABLOUEI: Seeing the writing on the wall, in 1971, Kahana fled to Israel.
ROTH-ROWLAND: He's essentially outrunning his legal troubles in New York.
ARABLOUEI: It was just four years after the Six Day War, a time where Israel was unofficially expanding its borders, with its citizens moving into the occupied West Bank and Gaza, building communities, towns, suburbs, settlements.
ROTH-ROWLAND: He arrives in Israel at a time when the religious far right in the country is really taking off because of that, because there's this perception that this victory in the Six Day War and the fact that Israelis were able to go back to these incredibly important religious sites that were scattered throughout the West Bank, from, you know, Hebron to parts of East Jerusalem.
ARABLOUEI: Kahane continued his activism in Israel, but he also formed his own political party.
ROTH-ROWLAND: He establishes a political party called Kach...
ARABLOUEI: Kach.
ROTH-ROWLAND: ...Which means thus, which has, basically, a pretty openly fascist political manifesto that it campaigns on.
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KAHANE: I've always said that Western democracy is incompatible with Zionism.
ROTH-ROWLAND: He wants a theocracy. Basically, he wants complete segregation between Jews and Arabs from - you know, separate beaches, separate schools. He wants to criminalize sexual and romantic relationships between Jews and Palestinians.
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KAHANE: The tragedy of Jewish girls - 4,000 Jewish women today married to Muslims. The prostitutes of Israel are overwhelmingly Jewish, and the pimps are overwhelmingly Arabs. And this is the Jewish state?
HIRSCHHORN: So they stood for Jewish militancy and deriding the secular Zionist tradition for its lack of militancy and even for, you know, inadequately representing the true spirit of Judaism.
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KAHANE: No guilt. The country is ours, every inch of it, every centimeter of it. No guilt. It's our country. It's not theirs. There is no Palestine, no Palestinians. There never was. There never will be. They're Arabs, so let them go live in Jordan.
ARABLOUEI: In the 1970s, Kahane's ideas were seen as extreme by most Israelis. The Kach Party was not able to win any seats in the Knesset. See, since 1948, Israeli politics had been dominated by the secular, left-leaning Labor Party - the exact people Kahane opposed. But in 1977, a political earthquake would happen in Israel that would alter the country's political landscape forever.
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UNIDENTIFIED PEOPLE: (Singing in non-English language).
SUSAN STAMBERG: Last night, the conservative Likud party, headed by Menachem Begin, swept to victory. Begin and defeated Shimon Peres and his Labor Party, which has dominated Israeli politics for 29 years.
AMJAD IRAQI: So 1977 was, without doubt, within Israeli politics, a pivotal milestone year...
ARABLOUEI: This is Amjad Iraqi. He's a senior editor at +972 Magazine and a Palestinian citizen of Israel currently based in London.
IRAQI: ...But it was also very much the beginning of what ended up becoming a constant shift towards the Zionist right.
HIRSCHHORN: What sets the opposition apart was, first, Menachem Begin's legacy as the kind of heir apparent of a kind of Zionism that saw Israel in eternal war with its enemies in the region and the necessity to take a very hawkish position towards Israel's future in the region and certainly towards peace negotiations or towards accommodating Israel's neighbors.
ARABLOUEI: This is how Menachem Begin's Likud Party 1977 platform begins.
(Reading) The right of the Jewish people to the land of Israel is eternal and indisputable and is linked with the right to security and peace. Therefore, Judea and Samaria...
...Which is the biblical name for the West Bank that's used by right-wing Israelis who claim the territories...
...(Reading) will not be handed to any foreign administration. Between the sea and the Jordan, there will only be Israeli sovereignty.
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STAMBERG: Begin adamantly opposes the return of the occupied West Bank to Arab control.
ARABLOUEI: Begin found support for this hard-line platform by appealing to revisionist Zionists, many of whom were settlers, and to the Mizrahi Jews - Israelis whose families originally came from the Middle East and North Africa - a group who had long felt oppressed by Israeli society and excluded from its politics.
HIRSCHHORN: These were Jews who came from Arab lands and then saw the enmity of the Arab countries, and many of them were very attracted to hawkish ideas about the way Zionism should oppose Arab nationalism and Arab power because they, frankly, had fled the Arab world because of that and saw Begin's party as being a place where maybe they belonged. So Begin was able to mobilize them, and it really made a huge difference in Israeli politics.
ARABLOUEI: With this major victory in 1977, the Likud party had given voice to right-wing views that had long been on the outside looking in.
ROTH-ROWLAND: There was a shift in terms of how these parties talked about what to do with the Palestinians in their midst. Particularly, the Likud had a much more direct way of talking about settlement.
ARABLOUEI: This is what the 1977 Likud Party platform says about settlements.
(Reading) Settlement, both urban and rural, in all parts of the Land of Israel, is the focal point of the Zionist effort to redeem the country, to maintain vital security areas, and serves as a reservoir of strength and inspiration for the renewal of the pioneering spirit.
ROTH-ROWLAND: Right-wing religious settlers take it upon themselves to really push deeper and deeper into the West Bank and to settle areas that the Labor government initially wouldn't.
HIRSCHHORN: Generally, because of Menachem Begin's hawkish orientation and belief that peace with the Arab world was not going to come about soon and, in any case, it would be valuable, you know, down the road, perhaps, to trade land for peace, Begin himself is able to institutionalize these ideas in ways that hadn't been part of the Israeli agenda before.
ARABLOUEI: The emergence of a right-wing government was seen by many in the Revisionist Zionist community as a major victory, but Meir Kahane was skeptical. He continued to push his extreme views. And in 1979, when Begin signed a peace deal with Egypt and started to entertain compromises with the Palestinians, Kahane felt the Likud government had betrayed the country.
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KAHANE: The question of the Arabs is something which no party, neither left nor right, neither a Rabin or a Begin is willing to deal with this greatest of all problems. The Arabs are not equal citizens here.
HIRSCHHORN: In the early 1980s is the same time that Meir Kahane is really, you know, trying to find his footing. It is the time where religious settlers decide that the government isn't doing enough and is, in fact, betraying the cause of the settler movement to further the expansionist and hawkish causes in even the aspiration to, you know, make Israel into a more of a theocratic state.
ARABLOUEI: Menachem Begin, for his part, considered Kahane dangerous, calling him a crazy man. And Kahane was actually jailed for six months for his alleged plan to put bombs on buses in Hebron in 1980.
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KAHANE: If it is necessary to save Jewish lives to kill Arabs, I wouldn't hesitate for a moment, not for a moment.
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ARABLOUEI: Still, Kahane didn't stop. He got out of prison and kept running for office. And in 1984, one year after an aging Begin left office, Kahane finally won a seat in the Knesset, Israel's parliament, by taking a page out of Begin's own playbook.
HIRSCHHORN: He, like Begin, turns to other disenfranchised groups, immigrants, who haven't found an outlet in party politics and were looking to maybe associate with something that was a little bit more radical.
ROTH-ROWLAND: And I think for American listeners, it's helpful to think about this in comparison with the Trump phenomenon. And so you have this very disaffected group that Kahane, even though he himself is not Mizrahi, he's able to tap into that sense of grievance and says to them, basically, you have a role to play in this country. The authorities have excluded you. The state looks down on you. Society looks down on you. But I'm here to tell you that you are important. You have a role to play. And in my movement, I will make sure that you get to experience that level of belonging and importance in this national religious project.
HIRSCHHORN: Kahane transforms the Israeli political scene, bringing this Jewish militancy message and xenophobic attitude towards the Arab community, and even aspirations for a Jewish theological state into Israeli party politics as kind of a one-man show in the Knesset in 1984.
ARABLOUEI: Kahane had finally started to gain some popular support. He was on the rise, but right in the middle of it all, his party, Kach, was banned from elections by a vote in the Knesset.
ROTH-ROWLAND: The ostensible reason for this is because he was running on an antidemocratic and racist platform. But actually, the parties that initiated Kach's ban on the right, including Likud, they were worried that he was going to cannibalize their share of votes. So they kind of removed him as a threat.
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UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #4: The founder of the Jewish Defense League was assassinated in New York City last night. Meir Kahane had just finished speaking to a Zionist group in a midtown Manhattan hotel when he was gunned down.
ARABLOUEI: Two years later, in 1990, Meir Kahane was murdered by an Egyptian American man, but neither his death nor the outlawing of the Kach party could stop the spread of his ideas. Kahane's ideology came to be known as Kahanism, and he'd already inspired the next generation of leaders, like a teenage activist who was in the crowd at that rally against Rabin in 1995.
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ARABLOUEI: Coming up, how Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel's current minister of national security, carried the Kahanist torch into the future.
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ADRIENNE STATLER: Hi this is Adrienne Statler (ph) calling from Morgantown, W. Va., and you're listening to THROUGHLINE from NPR.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3, BYLINE: Part 2 - We Can Get to Him.
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UNIDENTIFIED PEOPLE: (Chanting in non-English language).
NETANYAHU: (Non-English language spoken).
ARABLOUEI: It is 1995. We are back at that rally in Jerusalem where Benjamin Netanyahu gave a fiery speech against Yitzhak Rabin and the Oslo Accords, the rally that some point to as inciting the violence that led to Rabin's assassination. In the crowd was a 19-year-old man, an activist who would go on to become one of Israel's most powerful politicians. His name - Itamar Ben-Gvir.
ROTH-ROWLAND: He really first came to infamy in 1995 during protests against the Oslo Accords. And during one of these protests, Israeli right-wing activists yanked the ornaments off the hood of Rabin's car. And there is a television interview of Itamar Ben-Gvir holding this ornament up to the camera and saying, you know, if we can get to Rabin's car, we can also get to Rabin.
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ITAMAR BEN-GVIR: (Non-English language spoken).
ARABLOUEI: That video of Ben-Gvir holding up Rabin's hood ornament thrust him into the public eye. A few weeks later, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated by a far-right extremist.
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ARABLOUEI: Itamar Ben-Gvir was born in the suburbs of Jerusalem in 1976, a year before Menachem Begin's political earthquake. Ben-Gvir's parents were Mizrahi Jews with Kurdish and Iraqi ancestry. He grew up in a conservative household that supported both the Likud and Labour parties. His early activism was tied to the settlement movement, a movement that was going through its own internal tensions.
HIRSCHHORN: Should the aspiration be where people are going to live in bougie settlements and - that satisfy, you know, the requirements of living in the Holy Land of Israel while still having a shopping mall down the street? Or is this a fringe movement that is, you know, engaged in essentially open warfare against a state that isn't doing enough to make Israel into more of a theocratic state?
ARABLOUEI: It was also the moment when tensions between Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories were about to erupt.
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BOB EDWARDS: Fighting began after four workers from the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip were killed when their car collided with an Israeli army truck.
ARABLOUEI: In December of 1987, the first intifada, or Palestinian uprising, began.
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UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #5: Palestinian violence seems motivated by despair.
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UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #6: It was not just the buildup of frustration among West Bankers and Gazans at the lack of political progress or the lack of social services.
ARABLOUEI: The first intifada was fueled by Palestinian frustrations against Israel's occupation and the expansion of settlements. It lasted almost six years. It's when Hamas, the current ruling government in Gaza, was born and was marked by sporadic attacks on Israeli targets. This was also when Itamar Ben-Gvir became radicalized and joined with the Kach party and the Kahanist movement. Itamar Ben-Gvir's views were so extreme so early on that they kept him out of Israel's mandatory military service. He would rack up a ton of arrests. He's been indicted over 50 times and was found guilty of carrying a sign that said expel the Arab enemy. He has been convicted of inciting racism and supporting a terrorist organization. And a lot of this was happening during the second intifada that began in 2000.
HIRSCHHORN: The second intifada was, you know, a terrible time in Israel where buses were blowing up, you know, on every street corner. You never knew, when you got on a bus, is today going to be the day that, you know, you're on your way to work or school or, you know, to visit a friend and a bus is going to blow up?
ARABLOUEI: As the cycle of violence intensified, and after defending himself so many times in court, Ben-Gvir decided to go to law school.
HIRSCHHORN: His first part of his career was defending settler terrorists. Then he runs for the Knesset. All this time, you know, he is bringing with him this legacy as a youth activist, deeply involved in Kahanism and radical politics in the settlements.
IRAQI: And he was just always seen as this random fanatic in many respects.
ARABLOUEI: This is Amjad Iraqi again.
IRAQI: But the scene slowly started to evolve that allowed him to not only become legitimate, allow him to be seen as someone who actually has rational thought, as someone whose idea - whose political ideas actually have a rational place in our spectrum.
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BEN-GVIR: (Speaking Hebrew).
ARABLOUEI: This is Ben-Gvir in a 1994 interview saying, "I think if settlements are dismantled in the West Bank and Gaza, blood will spill."
ROTH-ROWLAND: And he ends up at the head of a party called Otzma Yehudit, which means Jewish Power.
ARABLOUEI: Jewish Power is a far-right party that advocates for deportation of Palestinians. It's a descendant of the Kach party. Ben-Gvir has led the Jewish Power party since 2019. Until recently, he kept a picture in his living room of Baruch Goldstein, an American Israeli settler who massacred 29 Palestinians in Hebron in the '90s.
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BEN-GVIR: (Speaking Hebrew).
ARABLOUEI: "Today, everyone also understands that running away brings war, that if we don't want to be there again, we have to return home and rule the territory and, indeed, propose a moral, logical and advantageous solution encouraging immigration and the death penalty for terrorists."
(CHEERING)
ARABLOUEI: There has been increasing violence and an increasing inability to reach any kind of resolution. Has that opened up the door for the message - an extreme message like the one from Kahane or Ben-Gvir or many other right-wing Zionists to find a place in the mainstream discourse?
ROTH-ROWLAND: Yes, definitely. We can really think about it as the post-Oslo generation. After the Oslo Accords, what it essentially did was it hermetically sealed off many, many Palestinians from meeting Israelis just in the course of day-to-day life. And so the only encounters that you really had were between Palestinians in the West Bank and Israeli soldiers or Israeli settlers. What you have is two populations that are kind of sealed off from one another. It's hard to really communicate the extent of just the everyday, grinding violence that the occupation demands. And it's everything from extreme levels of surveillance to checkpoints to segregation to structural violence keeping Palestinians penned in in ever smaller areas of land.
You have a wholesale internalization of the idea that this kind of violence is not only normal, is not only acceptable but is actually justifiable and is righteous. You should not feel bad for accepting this kind of violence or instituting this kind of violence because actually, when you do so, you are doing it for love of your people and love of your country. That message is going to resonate.
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ARABLOUEI: Coming up, Itamar Ben-Gvir brings Kahanism into the highest levels of government after the prime minister comes calling.
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MARGO VANDENHELDER: This is Margo Vandenhelder (ph) from San Francisco, Calif., and you're listening to THROUGHLINE from NPR.
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RUND ABDELFATAH, HOST:
Part three - the rise of Netanyahu.
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MORRIS ABRAM: Do the Palestinians have a right to a separate state?
NETANYAHU: No, I don't think they do. But I think that it's quite instructive that the Palestinians, who are invoking the right of self-determination, which is an attribute for separate nations, themselves are the ones who define themselves as part of the Arab nation.
ARABLOUEI: This is a 28-year-old Benjamin Netanyahu on a TV debate show called "The Advocates." It was 1978, and back then he went by the name Ben Nitay.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE ADVOCATES")
ABRAM: Mr. Nitay is a graduate of MIT. He is an Israeli, and he is a man who has written widely on this question before the house tonight.
ARABLOUEI: That question was, should the United States support self-determination for Palestinians in a Middle East peace settlement? Here was Netanyahu's answer.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE ADVOCATES")
NETANYAHU: I think the United States should oppose the creation of a Palestinian state for several reasons, the first one being that it is unjust to demand the creation of a 22nd Arab state and a second Palestinian state at the expense of the only Jewish state.
ARABLOUEI: Even in his 20s, Netanyahu emerged as an effective spokesman for conservative Israeli politics in the U.S., including the mention of a second Palestinian state since many right-wing Israelis argued that Jordan already exists as a Palestinian state. Netanyahu's role as a conservative spokesman may not be a surprise when you consider the world and the family he was born into.
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HIRSCHHORN: Benjamin Netanyahu had been known to Israeli politics because his father was a key figure in the Revisionist Zionist movement. He was not well accepted by Israeli - you know, Israeli Labor government leaders or by Israeli socialist society and had always been sort of on the margins of both an academic career and a political trajectory.
ARABLOUEI: Benjamin Netanyahu was born in Tel Aviv in 1948, just a year after Israel's creation. But when he was a teenager, his family moved to Pennsylvania when his father took a job there as a professor.
ROTH-ROWLAND: He had much of his education in the United States, and that's important because it gave him a particular kind of political approach that has proved very, very successful in Israel. And he also speaks very good English, which is really, really considered a boon in Israel - and not just for speaking to the outside world, but it's just kind of - there's, like, a cachet that comes with it.
ARABLOUEI: He returned to Israel after high school to join the military. He eventually became a special forces soldier and saw combat action in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. After the war, he returned to the U.S.
HIRSCHHORN: And reinvents himself as kind of a political commentator and, you know, security expert and other guises, I guess.
ARABLOUEI: He served several posts in the U.S. for the Israeli government, including at the Israeli embassy.
ROTH-ROWLAND: There, really fine-tuned the message that he likes to deliver to the outside world about why Israeli politics is the way it is and why Israel has to treat the Palestinians the way that it does, which is that Israel is this kind of lost outpost of, quote-unquote, "Western" civilization, and that it's, you know, the last line of defense between Europe and the Middle East.
ARABLOUEI: Netanyahu returned to Israel with deep connections in the U.S. and a renewed sense of purpose. He jumped straight into politics, getting involved with the conservative Likud party.
ROTH-ROWLAND: He climbs the ladder in Likud, and he wins the chair of the party in the mid 1990s.
(CROSSTALK)
HIRSCHHORN: Netanyahu, who is always very savvy to the pulse of the Israeli public, you know, really understands that the 1990s is a moment where Israel is at the brink of the civil war.
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NETANYAHU: (Non-English language spoken).
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ARABLOUEI: And so when he delivers his rousing speech at that 1995 rally in Jerusalem against Oslo and Yitzhak Rabin, he has his own political ambitions in mind.
ROTH-ROWLAND: This is something that he knows will draw a political base toward him, will help a right-wing political base consolidate around him...
ARABLOUEI: Netanyahu was right. It worked.
ROTH-ROWLAND: ...And sets about campaigning for prime minister at the elections that follow Rabin's assassination. And, by the way, in his campaigns for the prime ministership, he actually enlists the support of American Jewish political advisers who were advising various GOP candidates. So there's this kind of importing of American political tactics into Israel which are very much about the individual. It's about the personality, and, you know, Netanyahu kind of leans into that.
ARABLOUEI: He ran on a platform of economic reform and promised to oppose a Palestinian state, and he was able to tap into the anger against the Oslo Accords to bring out the vote.
ROTH-ROWLAND: He becomes prime minister despite the role that he played in the incitement campaign as, you know, one of its most high-profile figures.
ARABLOUEI: While a lot of Netanyahu's political success was due to his own shrewd strategy, he also benefited from the failures of the Labor-Party-led negotiations with Palestinians. As the promise of Oslo faded away and the second intifada loomed, suicide bombings and violence were a regular occurrence on the streets of Israel.
IRAQI: For a lot of Israelis, it almost, like, disproved the Zionist left thesis.
ARABLOUEI: This is writer Amjad Iraqi again.
IRAQI: The idea of giving Palestinians more rights, potentially a Palestinian state - the Oslo process in general - the narrative is that you tried to give Palestinians their rights and their statehood, and what we actually got was suicide bombings. That's the logic. And it's not to minimize, I think, the social and political trauma that was experienced by Jewish Israelis during that time, but the answer that was provided to that was to say, like, actually, the right-wingers were right.
ARABLOUEI: But Israelis got tired of Netanyahu's hawkish posture, a sluggish economy and a peace process that had ground to a halt. He was being accused by many on the right of being too centrist. So in 1999, he lost his reelection bid. It was a crushing defeat for Netanyahu.
NETANYAHU: (Non-English language spoken).
ARABLOUEI: In the time he was out of office and out of the public eye, he seems to have figured something out. If he were going to make a political comeback, he'd need to move further right. And 10 years later...
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RENEE MONTAGNE: In Israel, conservative Benjamin Netanyahu was sworn in as prime minister last night. Today, he returns to the office he held a decade ago.
ARABLOUEI: In 2009, he recaptured the prime ministership. And again in 2015, when he was challenged for reelection, he pushed his messaging further to the right.
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ELISE LABOTT: His surprising and crushing victory, the product of an 11th hour push for right-wing votes, promising there would be no Palestinian state on his watch.
NETANYAHU: (Through interpreter) The right regime is in danger. The Arab voters are coming in huge amounts to the polls.
ARABLOUEI: But unlike the U.S., Israel has a parliamentary system, which means even if your party wins an election, you still have to form alliances with other parties to create a majority in order to be a ruling government. Because of his inflammatory rhetoric, it was going to be hard for Netanyahu to create that government with mainstream parties who were turned off by his strategy.
HIRSCHHORN: So he looks towards, you know, parties to his right and decides that, you know, the kind of government that he wants to form is an ultranationalist and ultra-orthodox coalition because he doesn't want to have a national unity government. And he certainly doesn't want to partner, you know, with leftist parties.
ROTH-ROWLAND: Netanyahu is starting to get into a lot of legal and thus political trouble because he has corruption and bribery charges racking up. And so the country keeps going to elections as Netanyahu sort of tries to outrun these charges and tries to remain in power.
HIRSCHHORN: He certainly doesn't want to be in government with anybody who would - might - you know, might want to replace him and put him in prison. So these are his options, and, you know, he acquiesces to this situation.
ARABLOUEI: Netanyahu, to survive, has courted the most right-wing parties in the country. And one of the people he has cut a deal with is a politician who was also at that anti-Rabin protest back in 1995, Itamar Ben-Gvir.
ROTH-ROWLAND: And in the next election, which was back at the end of 2022, the combined slate that he runs on with another far-right party called Religious Zionism pulls in 14 seats. Ben-Gvir gets into the Israeli government, and he basically gets to play kingmaker because of the number of seats that he's pulled in. Netanyahu - you know, he is crucial to Netanyahu's coalition at this point. And so he gets appointed as national security minister, which is a new position which puts him in charge of all the police on both sides of the Green Line.
ARABLOUEI: The Green Line refers to the pre-1967 border between Israel and the West Bank.
ROTH-ROWLAND: And nobody's held power over both sets of police in that way before.
IRAQI: And so they're all interconnected. Everyone had - thought they had something to gain. And this is what allows what was once a kind of, you know, seemingly random, thuggish, activist/lawyer to become someone who has an entire ministry designed around him, who is now sitting in major meetings of the government, who is now prodding the prime minister and the defense ministry and the military that you're not going hard enough.
ARABLOUEI: Natasha Roth-Rowland says Ben-Gvir went from a pariah to a popular figure in Israel, especially with young people.
ROTH-ROWLAND: He voices what they see as things that they may not be allowed to say themselves. You know, he kind of - he voices the id of the nation, in a way, in much the same way that Trump did. And...
ARABLOUEI: And what kind of views was he expressing?
ROTH-ROWLAND: Just unabashed racism toward Palestinians - understanding every Palestinian, essentially, as a terrorist, supporting the death penalty for quote-unquote, "terrorists," which, in this case, is simply a dog whistle for Palestinians, supporting mass expulsion of Palestinians, terrorizing Palestinians who are simply going about their daily lives, basically implementing Kahane's vision in any way that they are able to.
IRAQI: Netanyahu has basically been in power since 2009, and with each coalition that he had, he enabled more and more far-right people to come into the Likud, to come and - into these coalitions and to be accepted into the political sphere. And Netanyahu definitely helped to facilitate that.
ARABLOUEI: Amjad Iraqi says that over the last 15 years or so of Netanyahu's prime ministership, the longest in the country's history, by the way, his attempts to survive politically haven't just had an impact on the Knesset, but also on Israeli public opinion.
IRAQI: Bibi's tenure was really a lesson for Israelis that actually you don't have to play - that if you kind of just keep pushing the envelope, you'll find that there are actually no consequences. So why wouldn't you just keep going more right wing? Why wouldn't you keep saying more racist and explicit things? They're so unafraid to say things that three decades ago, they would have had to think many times before they could say so.
ARABLOUEI: But Netanyahu and his Likud coalition overplayed their political hand in 2023 when they proposed a law that would eliminate the oversight power of the Israeli Supreme Court.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)
LEILA FADEL: Israelis woke up today to their three largest newspapers carrying a black front page.
STEVE INSKEEP: The black pages were ads that protesters took out, calling it a dark day for democracy in Israel.
ARABLOUEI: This move to weaken the judiciary was met with intense protests throughout Israel.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)
INSKEEP: Until now, the Supreme Court in Israel has had the right to reject some government actions it did not consider reasonable. So what happens now that the Knesset stripped that power away?
UNIDENTIFIED PEOPLE: (Chanting in non-English language).
INSKEEP: People of all ages are protesting in Israel. Doctors and lawyers are among those objecting to the Parliament removing a check on its power.
HIRSCHHORN: You know, I think if you actually ask the average Israeli on the street, like, what are the three major, you know, platforms of the - you know, of the judicial reform plan? Most people weren't necessarily interested in the, you know, technical details of what, you know, was going to happen with basic laws or overrides and all these kinds of things. But they did see this as being a my values against your values, you know, secular versus religious, interest in some kind of future negotiation of the Palestinians versus hard line, you know, or even violence towards, you know, Palestinian civilian communities. You know, do you want peace, or do you want Itamar Ben-Gvir? It often, you know, sort of got framed along those terms.
ARABLOUEI: Although Israel's right wing had won the day politically, there were still many Israelis who were deeply uncomfortable with the direction the country was going - enough to fill the streets with protests. But Natasha Roth-Rowland and Amjad Iraqi argue that there were still many voices missing.
ROTH-ROWLAND: The most telling thing about them was that they were not protests that involved Palestinians. And the reason for that is that what Israelis were protesting against was not the huge, decades upon decades upon decadeslong oppression of Palestinians or the unjust conditions in the West Bank or anything like that. They were simply protesting, by and large, against what they saw as the potential curtailment of their own rights as Jews in a Jewish state.
IRAQI: It's not a battle for democracy. It is a battle to maintain at least a little bit more of an image, to try to reclaim a bit more of an image that we're a democracy, that - for Jewish Israelis to convince themselves because they realize that maybe we took it a bit too far. But Palestinian citizens know full on, no matter who was the head of the coalition, no matter what the - who the judges were in the court, that actually the state always pursued the same objectives against Palestinians.
ARABLOUEI: Sara Yael Hirschhorn says the divisions on Israel's left and right are fundamental and got to a dangerous point last summer.
HIRSCHHORN: Really felt like Israel was on the brink of a kind of civil war, and people were really worried, and it was starting to happen towards the end of the judicial reform process, as things were starting to get a little violent. You know, it was becoming increasingly scary because no one really knew, you know, how this was going to play out. You know, October 7, in some ways, you know, just ended this whole debate because Israel, you know, immediately came together because of this tragedy but also the necessity of the war effort to unify as a country. But some of these divisions are still simmering under the surface.
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ABDELFATAH: And that's it for this week's show. I'm Rund Abdelfatah.
ARABLOUEI: I'm Ramtin Arablouei. And you've been listening to THROUGHLINE from NPR.
ABDELFATAH: This episode was produced by me.
ARABLOUEI: And me and...
LAWRENCE WU, BYLINE: Lawrence Wu.
JULIE CAINE, BYLINE: Julie Caine.
ANYA STEINBERG, BYLINE: Anya Steinberg.
CASEY MINER, BYLINE: Casey Miner.
CRISTINA KIM, BYLINE: Cristina Kim.
DEVIN KATAYAMA, BYLINE: Devin Katayama.
PETER BALONON-ROSEN, BYLINE: Peter Balonon-Rosen.
IRENE NOGUCHI, BYLINE: Irene Noguchi.
ARABLOUEI: Fact-checking for this episode was done by Kevin Volkl. The episode was mixed by Josh Newell.
ABDELFATAH: Music for this episode was composed by Ramtin and his band, Drop Electric, which includes...
ANYA MIZANI: Anya Mizani.
NAVID MARVI: Navid Marvi.
SHO FUJIWARA: Sho Fujiwara.
ARABLOUEI: Thanks to Johannes Doerge, Kara West, Tony Cavin, James Hider, Jerome Socolovsky, Edith Chapin and Collin Campbell. And finally, if you have an idea or like something you heard on the show, please write us at throughline@npr.org.
ABDELFATAH: Thanks for listening.
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