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He continued in a pleading tone, "There is no perfect solution for living here, but there are imperfect ways to live together on the ground. When you bash your head against the wall a hundred times trying to make a solution and don't get it, it's time to take a fresh look."
The Kids Are All Right
With his constant refrain of taking a "fresh look," or "thinking outside the box," Bennett's message is resonating with a new generation of Jewish Israeli voters who are increasingly dictating the direction of their society. Most were weaned during the Oslo era, the days of hope, only to be told after the collapse of the 2000 Camp David talks by then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak that there was no Palestinian partner. Some wound up in the Israeli army, laying siege to the West Bank and Gaza during the darkest days of the Second Intifada, when suicide bombers targeted bars in the heart of Tel Aviv. Others fought in the failed assault on southern Lebanon in 2006, as Bennett did, sharing his sense of abandonment at the hands of an inept and reckless government led by Labor and Kadima.
"There are still base constituencies here, but the rest of [the deciding voters] are young people under 35," Bernard Avishai, a business professor at Hebrew University and longtime analyst of Israeli politics, told me. "Bennett is a perfect example of the trend. He's born into a 45-year-old occupation. He doesn't know anything else." You have a whole generation in this country...who feel that all they're doing is calling the grass green. To them, it's just common sense."
The hard-line views of young Israeli Jews also reflect what Hebrew University professor of language and education Nurit Peled-Elhanan described to me as the outcome of "a clear socialization process" guided by a "racist education system." The author of Palestine in Israeli Schoolbooks, the most comprehensive study to date of the portrayal of Palestinians and the Israel-Palestine conflict in Israel's high school history and geography textbooks, Peled-Elhanan explained, "By the time Israeli kids go to the army, they have learned nothing about their Arab neighbors. Young Israelis are not even taught where the borders of their country are, so it is only natural that they think that the Palestinians are intruders on their land."
"You begin with a Zionist narrative and it goes on and on and on through the ceremonies, through the media, and then through the army, with intense indoctrination," Daniel Bar-Tal, an internationally renowned professor of political psychology at Tel Aviv University, remarked to me. "Think about an American kid who is taught from a very young age that America is great and then add to this context where the Israeli kids live, that they have to serve in the army, and you can see why they need so much preparation, legitimization and justification for the acts they have to participate in. How do you go to the checkpoints? How do you go to Gaza? You have to form a particular framework or prism of thought. That's why the army goes into the high schools. So when you take into account all this information, it's not surprising that there is a right-wing consensus in Israel today."
The New Likud
The factors propelling Bennett's meteoric rise are also driving a transformation in the Likud Party. The party has its roots in the aggressively expansionist Herut Party, with its terrorist and fascist-admiring elements, but it also contained a liberal strain that made it the home of relatively tolerant figures like Reuven Rivlin, an eighth-generation sabra and the current Knesset Speaker, whose father translated the Quran into Hebrew. In the next Knesset, however, Likud will be guided by zealots like Tzipi Hotovely, who embody the political sensibility of Israel's post-Oslo generation. Pretty, carefully coiffed and prone to comparing left-wing opponents to Joseph Stalin, the 34-year-old self-styled "religious right-winger" might be the Israeli answer to Sarah Palin.
Hotovely gained her first taste of politics as part of one of the "Orange Cells" that organized opposition on campuses around Israel to Ariel Sharon's 2005 withdrawal of settlers from the Gaza Strip. Four years later, Hotovely became one of the youngest ever to serve in the Knesset. To honor "Jewish Identity Day" in 2011, she convened hearings on the supposed scourge of Jewish women marrying Arab men, inviting members of Israel's far-right anti-miscegenation movement to testify. "We must confront the fact that the country has not valued education, which is the only way to prevent Jewish women from forging life connections with non-Jews," she declared, urging a nationwide "struggle against assimilation."
Alongside a crowd of far-right rebels -- from Ze'ev Elkin, the author of recent laws scrutinizing the political activities of human rights NGOs and authorizing lawsuits against Israeli advocates of a boycott against settlement goods, to Danny Danon, a proud friend of Glenn Beck who has said that to Israel, Obama "tried to dictate; he was a dictator" -- Hotovely has emerged as the new face of her party. Members of the old guard, who have been forced to the bottom of Likud's election list when they haven't been pushed out of the party altogether, have sunk into a state of utter despair. "The new Likud is not committed to the ethic of liberty, to the values of [Revisionist Zionist ideologue Ze'ev] Jabotinsky and [Former Prime Minister Menachem] Begin," Rivlin grumbled.
I met Hotovely in Tel Aviv on January 15, before she was scheduled to debate Merav Michaeli, a prominent feminist and widely published columnist who represents the left edge of the Labor Party's largely centrist ticket. Hotovely told me her views were identical to those of Bennett and the ideologues running on his party's list. When I asked why she was running on the Likud ticket, she insisted that being a part of Israel's largest party guaranteed the most possible influence in the next Knesset, where she was guaranteed a seat. She was flanked by several young Likud activists handing out fliers warning Israelis against throwing their votes away to smaller rightist parties like Bennett's Jewish Home.
On stage before an audience of several hundred young Anglo immigrants to Israel, Michaeli issued a tepid call for a two-state solution along the lines of the 12-year-old Clinton Parameters. "Hopefully we can evacuate as few settlers as possible," she reassured the crowd, which did not seem terribly enthusiastic about the proposal.
Hotovely rose from her seat and lashed into her opponent, casting her as hopelessly na????ve. "You need to look at the facts," she scolded Michaeli. "You can have your ideology, that's fine, but it's a religious ideology. You present yourself as a secular person, but you are so religious and you stick to [two states] as if it is a religious ideology. What I'm saying is very pragmatic and that there's no possibility for peace in the coming future."
Taking Tel Aviv
Though settlers are only about 7 percent of Israel's voting population, the percentage of settlers who will hold seats in the next Knesset is almost twice that number. Then there are many more, like Hotovely and Bennett, who live inside the Green Line but push the settlers' agenda. As Noam Sheizaf wrote in this magazine, the settlement movement is no longer a fringe phenomenon engaged in a series of pitched battles with the state; it increasingly is the state.
In the past four years, Israel's major institutions have begun to fall under the control of the settlement movement and its allies, from the Supreme Court, now headed by Asher Grunis, a right-winger installed as Chief Justice thanks to special legislation introduced by the Knesset's pro-settler bloc, to the Shin Bet, the country's internal security agency, which is directed by a religious nationalist named Yoram Cohen. In 2010, Maj. Gen. Yair Naveh became the first knit-kippa-wearing religious nationalist to rise to deputy chief of staff of the IDF, the second most powerful position in the armed forces. At least half of the soldiers in Israel's officer training colleges identify as religious nationalist, while around 30 percent of the officer corps adheres to Orthodox Jewish ideology.
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