Israel 3.0

Netanyahu can’t muster 61 Knesset seats, but continues to dominate the Right; the Left can only take power aided by disgruntled Right-wingers. So as long as the stalemate continues, elections will be policy-free, and revolve around one choice: Yes, Bibi or No, Bibi.

But look beyond these truisms, and what seems like the country’s irrational descent into personality-driven politics could mask a new cultural fault line. Call it Israel 3.0, in which the split over Bibi masks a choice between universalist, increasingly progressive values on one side and a focus on conservative values and Jewish identity on the other.

In his strikingly titled Catch-67, a book about the Gordian knot that is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Micah Goodman charts the evolution of the first two iterations of the Left-Right divide.

Ben Gurion’s left, he says, was motivated by socialism and saw a Jewish state as the perfect place to implement Marx’s vision. But in the wake of the Six Day War, and as the ills of socialism became increasingly clear, the Israeli Left was spared irrelevance by transforming into a peace movement.