Israel’s fractured electoral landscape is more a muddy morass than it is interesting chequered scenery. Moving fault lines criss-cross in every direction, bogging down the apparatus of government; stymieing progress. Hence the collapse of the Bennett-Lapid administration and the scheduling of yet another general election for later this year.

The tectonic plates separate along numerous lines:

• Ashkenazic, Sephardic and Mizrachi;
• Secular, religious and ultra-religious (Haredi);
• National-religious Zionist and secular Zionist;
• Ultra-Left and ultra-Right;
• Israel-rejectionist Arab Muslims and Israel-embracing Arab Christians.

And variations of all the above. Did I say morass? It’s a maelstrom!

For the purpose of this piece – because it will be of interest to this readership – I have chosen to ignore the Israeli Arab demographic, and to take a closer look at one of the major lines dividing those Israeli citizens who are designated in the population registry as “Jewish,” and who therefore make up the majority of voters. An historic event illustrates this rift rather well:

On November 4, 1995,a kippa-wearing man shot Yitzhak Rabin in Tel Aviv. The assassination of the prime minister by a “right-winger” was seized on; the overwhelmingly leftist news media stoked anti-Zionist fervour, and the centerground of Israel’s electorate lurched Left.

Two men were in the running for the subsequent elections set for May, 1996: the leftist veteran and éminence grise, Shimon Peres, 73, and the right-of-centre, golden-mouthed Opposition leader, Binyamin (Bibi) Netanyahu, 47.

Initial opinion polls indicated there was no contest; the Right “engendered evil” and was “anti-peace” (Rabin had been attending a massive “peace rally” when he was shot). Peres was surely a shoo-in.

Paradoxically, Palestinian Arabs lent a bloody hand, twisting the knife in Israel’s self-inflicted wound. Terrorism escalated, with four suicide bombings killing close on 90 Israelis in the first months of 1996. Surveys tracked how, with each attack, the fulcrum shifted, edging the electorate back towards the Right.¹

Although the gap narrowed, Peres was still the front-runner on election night. As the voting booths closed, the exit polls predicted he had won and, together with his countrymen, he went to bed believing that he had. The first televised view of Peres the following morning was of a stooped, defeated figure walking a deserted Knesset corridor, stomaching the news that not he, but Netanyahu, had been elected prime minister.

“What happened, Mr Peres?” asked a journalist.

“We lost,” came the bitter reply.

“Who lost?”

“The Israelis.”

“Then,” pressed the interviewer, “who won?”

“The Jews,” said Peres.

Peres deceased in 2016, but his perspective remains applicable in its exposé of one of Israel’s principal political fault lines. His “The Jews” referred to those in almost every sector of Israeli society – men and women, younger adults and seniors, family people and single people, blacks and whites and even, sometimes, to both religious and secular (not atheistic) – whose Jewishness is rooted in the Biblical account of the nation’s genesis, and its foretold future.

For “The Jews,” Israel’s history runs unbroken on a 4,000-year continuum, from Abraham, Moses and King David through the Maccabees, the 2nd Temple Sanhedrin and Bar Kochba, through the long Diaspora with its crusades, pogroms and Holocaust, to David Ben Gurion, Rabin and Netanyahu. Jewish national history was not put on pause while they were out of the Land, to resume when they returned to it. Their national ownership of the Land was not suspended during their absence (on top of which, there has always been some Jewish presence in the Land). Although multitudes of “The Jews” are not “settlers,” that is, they do not live in the 240 Jewish cities, towns and villages in Samaria and Judea, they absolutely do believe that those areas – the Biblical heartland – belong to Israel. Both their national pedigree and their title deed to the Land of Israel are imprinted in the Bible; endorsed and attested to by adonai elohei’hem, melech ha’olam.

For “The Jews,” May 1948 marks not the birth of Israel based on a United Nations vote and the actions of Labour Zionists; it marks the resurrection of the nation in its own Land to continue its unique global mission as ordained by the Almighty. The Feasts remain the Feasts of the Lord – they are not some cultural tradition. Their eyes are fixed on the future rebuilding of the beit hamikdash – the House of the Lord. And they believe in moshiach.

Peres’s “The Israelis” are those Jews who see Israel as more a member of the modern international order, a secular progressive state that wishes to be “counted among the nations”; to be one with all the others in the Global Village. These Jews see their Jewishness as a cultural identification comprised of traditions like circumcision and bar mitzvahs, incorporating Purim, Passover, Sukkot, etc, but as festivals, often with New Age elements; events from which the Lord is basically expunged. (In some ways similarly to the way infant baptism, catechism, Christmas, Lent and Easter are observed as cultural events by nominal “Christians”).

“The Israelis” recognise that their ancestors had tenure in Samaria and Judea, but believe it was lost to them, and their humanistic worldview makes it okay if that territory becomes a new state called Palestine.

To many of “The Israelis” the Jewishness of “The Jews” is archaic and embarrassing – a discomforting dinosaur. Some even count their Biblically-oriented countrymen as enemies whose views stultify the progress of the modern state and are a craw in the throat of the world. (One news report had Peres snarling at one of “The Jews” (a woman I knew) who protested his progressive policies, to “go back to where you came from.”)

“The Israelis” appear to have reason to believe that the future is with them. The international community (including the large Reform Diaspora) is wholeheartedly on their side. Jewish and Christian Bible-believers see quite the opposite. It is without any doubt “The Jews” who have it right.

Zionism is not just one of the myriad new nationalisms that sprang up in the 20th Century. It is an at least two-millennia-old hope and expectation, founded on, and kept alive by promises made by the prophets of the Lord who, writing in the very same language spoken today by both “The Jews” and “The Israelis,” foretold modern Israel’s reconstitution.

The Jews are not being brought back from captivity to establish just another modern nation state – secular, immoral, godless. Israel’s future is quite different, gloriously so. When we pray – also concerning the next election – we pray for the fulfillment of the promises in God’s Word, even if – I would say, all the more so if – “the odds” are aligned against it.

We cannot say when all Jews will be united in the embrace of their national calling. What we do know is that this is their destiny. The Bible tells us so:

“But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days,” says the Lord: “I will put My law in their minds, and write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be My people. No more shall every man teach his neighbour, and every man his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they all shall know Me, from the least of them to the greatest of them,” says the Lord. “For I will forgive their iniquity, and their sin I will remember no more.” (Jeremiah 31:33-34)