Extreme religious political ideas have entered mainstream Israeli politics because religious Zionists have spent the last decade focused on promulgating ideas, building institutions and integrating rightist religious organizations from the settlements into the Likud Party, said Rami Hod at a Y&S Nazarian Center event in winter 2025.

By Peggy McInerny, Director of Communications

UCLA International Institute, April 24, 2025 —Israel has been experiencing democratic backsliding over the past decade, the pace of which has not abated during the Gaza War, said Rami Hod at a late February 2025 event at the Younes & Soraya Nazarian Center for Israel Studies.

Hod is executive director of the Berl Katznelson Center in Israel, a democratic “think-and-do” tank focused on building the ideas, policies and leadership of liberal Zionism in Israel. He is currently in residence at the Y&S Nazarian Center as the 2024–25 Diane & Guilford Glazer Foundation Distinguished Fellow.

In Israel, said Hod, “democracy is shrinking. A series of legislative initiatives and policy actions have undermined Israeli democracy since October 7 [2023], and inconceivably, the judicial overhaul has only intensified.”* As a result, he said, the political system now embodies majority rule without any checks and balances to guarantee citizens’ basic rights.

Recent amendments to existing laws and proposals for future laws, he said, would allow the country’s minister of internal security to dictate police policy, including policies specific to police investigations, and put judicial appointments under political control. At the same time, the laws on public broadcasting are under attack and Israel’s last budget, for the first time in its history, allocated more money to religious schools than to public schools.

The rise of organized religious Zionism

Most people do not, said Hod, understand the reasons for Israel’s weakened democracy, which he compared to that seen in Poland under the previous government (of the Law and Justice Party) and in Hungary under Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.

One argument explains democratic backsliding in the country as the result of a steady rightward shift in public opinion that began after the Second Intifada.** “The problem with this thesis is that it’s not really true,” said the speaker.

Although public opinion has indeed shifted rightward, according to Hod, the two main political blocs in Israeli politics — the center left and center right — have not significantly changed over the past decade. He noted that Likud, the largest party in the country, has been able to form a government with right-wing parties alone only twice since 1977. “Israel went through five [recent] elections precisely because of the political tie between the two blocs,” he observed.

Hod was equally dismissive of the argument that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict led to democratic backsliding. “[D]uring the Second Intifada, when terrorist attacks occurred on almost a daily basis… it was terrible to live in Israel,” he recounted. “[But] the Israel government, led by right-wing leaders, didn’t initiate anti-democratic laws and reforms. In fact, there was no real change in the status of the Supreme Court, in the rights of the Arab citizens, the free press and the content taught in schools.

“We need to dig deeper. We need to focus on ideas,” he stressed. “Radical ideas which were never… part of the mainstream in Israel are turning into laws and policies… The driving force, the ideological force, the organizational force behind this is the Israeli religious right.”

Israel’s disengagement from Gaza and northern Samaria in 2005, during which settlements were evacuated not by a leftist leader, but by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, led to a deep crisis on the religious right, said Hod. Their conclusion was that secular Zionism had lost its way, and that religious Zionism and a “true Jewish state” was the only answer.

“This strategic shift is best understood through the writings of one of Israel’s central figures of the religious right, [Rabbi] Eli Sadan,” said Hod. (Sadan is the co-founder of the Bnei David pre-military academy, whose goal is to prepare Orthodox men for service in the military.)

The idea is that “the religious right must present a comprehensive alternative not only to the left — this is obvious — but also to the secular right, which has failed,” he explained. The ‘true Jewish state’ would replace today’s Jewish state, based on Theodore Herzl’s “Der Judenstaat” and the Israeli Declaration of Independence, with a non-democratic state.

In the same way that the conservative movement has transformed the Republican Party in the U.S. since the 1970s, Hod said religious Zionists have spent a decade or more developing new, well-structured ideas; building a network of institutions; and cultivating cadres and leaders “to enter the country’s central institutions — the education system, the judiciary, and public service — not to ensure better representation of religious right[ist] individuals, a claim I think is basically justified, but to fundamentally reshape the DNA of these institutions.

“This strategy was implemented through three key efforts: introducing new ideas, establishing new institutions and engaging in politics,” said Hod. In addition to creating new think tanks, new media outlets, publishing houses, leadership programs and university programs over the past decade, the religious right has also effected a systemic change in national politics by incorporating religious settler organizations into the Likud Party.

Among the ideas advocated by religious Zionists are the annexation of the West Bank and Gaza without giving citizenship rights to Palestinians; eliminating the independence of the courts, particularly the Israeli Supreme Court; and incorporating religious content into education, particularly education in and about the settlements.

“All these ideas are new to the Israeli political landscape,” commented Hod. “Only a decade ago, annexation wasn’t even a part of our political vocabulary. No one talked about it. Today, it has become a consensus across all right-wing parties in Israel.”

The “old right” respected judicial independence, whereas “the religious right drafted the judicial overhaul long before it served Netanyahu’s personal legal interests,” added Hod. In addition, he noted that the old right never considered injecting a religious nationalist context into school curricula.

Hod and moderator Tamar Hofnung, Israel Institute Fellow at the Y&S Nazarian Center, during the
question-and-answer session following Hod's lecture. (Photo: Peggy McInerny/ UCLA.)

The future of Israel

Looking at the recent rise in popularity of religious Zionist ideas, Hod said, "[I]n terms of Israel’s political history, there is nothing new here. In the early 20th century, Zionists were not the majority of the Jewish people, but they were the most determined and organized group in [terms of] institutions [and] having a clear vision and strategy… Zionist history teaches us that a determined and organized group that knows what it wants to achieve will always be more effective than the silent majority.”

Democratic liberal policies have had success in Israel in waves, said Hod, including the peace agreements and peace proposals of the 1990s and the first decade of the 2000s. Yet the long success of the Labor Party was not accompanied by the building of institutions, leadership programs and the encouragement of national service.

Noting the enormous, and to date successful, protests against the judicial overhaul in 2023, Hod said it was now up to the coalition that supported those protests to reshape Israel’s civic and political culture. That work, he insisted, demands patience, persistence and strategy.

“Will we be able to articulate and inspire a new vision for Israel, one that ties together strengthening our democracy at home with enhancing security and advancing regional arrangements at our borders?” he asked. “Will we see a wave of institution building, young people with democratic values joining centers of influence: education, public service, politics, religious institutions? I believe this is our primary challenge.

Going forward, Hod insisted that discussion of Israeli politics, including the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, must be based on an analysis of “the internal situation in Israeli society and politics… the processes that shape how political camps in Israel develop ideals, [together] with institutions, and consolidate power. You need to look at education, law, economics, religion — the same things we analyze in any adult society, even one engaged in a bloody national conflict.”

* Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced a package of judicial reforms in early January 2023 that sought to curb the power of judges, limit the Supreme Court’s ability to review laws and parliamentary decisions and give the government wider powers to appoint judges. Mass political protests against the reforms followed for nine months, ending only when the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7 sparked the current war in Gaza.

** The Second Intifada refers to the roughly five-year (2000–2005) uprising of Palestinians against Israeli occupation that began with a protest following Likud Party leader Ariel Sharon’s visit to the Temple of the Mount in Jerusalem. It was characterized by large-scale riots and repeated suicide bombings against Israeli civilians, as well as violent suppression of Palestinian demonstrations by the Israeli Army.