Closed Dossier: The Wrong Words

Israeli politics runs on three independent grammars at once. The American mono-axis read collapses all three and loses the plot.

"The most right-wing government in Israeli history." It's not — and every American reading that begins with right or left has already failed the data. Israeli politics runs on three independent axes plus an ethnic substrate, and the American single-axis sort cannot read a coalition where a finance minister defends haredi daycare against the Attorney General and the leader of the left is a combat-decorated Major General. Read the bloc, not the party. This brief is the corrective, written down.

Every American reading of Israeli politics that begins with “right” or “left” has already failed the data, and the failure is structural.

The Israel Brief is the Mitzpe Institute's read on Israel and the region — most mornings, Sunday through Thursday. More at mitzpe.org.