Encounters With the Contemporary Radical Right by Peter H Merkl

Author:Peter H Merkl [Merkl, Peter H]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780367154417
Google: PzDgygEACAAJ
Goodreads: 48633557
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2020-12-07T00:00:00+00:00

Culture

Each of the responses to the Camp David accords was to evolve on its own course. But with time and against the background of a stagnating peace with Egypt, a sick Begin, a failing economy, and the fiasco in Lebanon, these responses also led to the formation of an unprecedented radical rhetoric and unrestrained street behavior. Extreme attitudes regarding the land and the Arabs, special expressions implying war and a never-ending struggle against the terrorism of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), enthusiastic utterances about redemption, and a constant siege mentality have in recent years expanded upon the nationalist rhetoric of Herut's "New Zionism."50 For a sizable public, these attitudes have produced more than a bitter mood; they have created a unique political and cultural life-style.

Within the nationalist camp, the Israeli Radical Right is presently a great deal more than the movements that are directly associated with it. It is a general climate of opinion and constitutes a syndrome of political behavior. It crosses party lines, economic divisions, and educational strata. The Israeli Radical Right is today again an integral part of the thriving general nationalist camp. But five salient themes, which bring together theory, practice, and special symbols, set it apart from the larger right-wing camp that wants Eretz Yisrael to remain undivided.

First, there is the nostalgia for the prestate Zionist community. In contrast to the popular image promoted by its rivals, the Israeli Radical Right is not Fascist. The political and social model that appeals to most of its leaders is neither drawn from foreign ideologies nor caters to antibourgeois, antiparliamentary, or antidemocratic ideas. It is instead a model of a limited democracy taken from the past, from the era that preceded the 1948 formation of Israel. Most of the leaders and followers of the Israeli Radical Right cherish the memories of the Zionist founding fathers, their values, and their behavior. Just like those members of the American Radical Right who constantly go back to the founding fathers, the Constitution, the rugged individualism of the time before Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the "American way of life," the Israeli radicals are nostalgic about the old days of the yishuv, the days when each Zionist settlement counted and Hagana (Defense Force) was a real thing; the times when Jews worried about Jews, not about Arabs. As Rabbi Moshe Levinger, Gush Emunim's settler number one, describes it, "In the old days Labor people have worked for settlement, immigration, security and peace with our neighbors. Today the political program of Labor has only one item, an agreement with the neighbors."51

The spokespersons of the Israeli Radical Right, very much like right-wing radicals in other countries, do not really understand what has become of their people, what corrupted them and turned them so soft, so liberal, and so pluralistic. They see themselves as perfect Zionists, the true inheritors of the old, prestate yishuv. Many of them also consider themselves good democrats or, more precisely, good Jewish democrats.52 The Zionist yishuv, they argue, was established in a democratic way and was operated as a democracy.

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