The New Yorker:

A new coalition has brought extremist politics into the mainstream, but undemocratic strains go back to the country’s founding.

By Isaac Chotiner 

Several months ago, the most right-wing government in Israel’s history took power. Led by Benjamin Netanyahu, the coalition has put forward legislation that severely limits the powers of the judiciary. For several weeks, tens of thousands of protesters have gathered in Tel Aviv and other cities to rally against what they view as a grave risk to their democratic institutions. At the same time, the government is overseeing—and encouraging—brutal attacks by settlers on Palestinians. (At least fourteen Israelis and more than sixty Palestinians have been killed since the fighting flared this year.) Even a pretense of pursuing peace seems to have evaporated; the new government has announced “guidelines” declaring its intent to “advance and develop settlement in all parts of the land of Israel.” Netanyahu, despite being a paragon of the Israeli right, is now more moderate than most of his cabinet, which is full of extremists such as Itamar Ben-Gvir, the national-security minister, and Bezalel Smotrich, the finance minister who has been given a role supervising settlement policy. (My colleague Ruth Margalit recently profiled Ben-Gvir for the magazine.)

To understand what is happening in Israel and what the protests mean for its political future, I recently spoke by phone with Dahlia Scheindlin, an analyst and policy fellow at Century International, and also a columnist for Haaretz. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed why the different strains of the Israeli right joined forces in the latest government, the distinct threats that the government poses to the country’s democratic norms, and how much of Israel’s current course was inevitable in light of its failure to end the occupation.

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