The Long Brief: The Wrong Words
Israeli politics runs on three independent grammars at once. The American mono-axis read collapses all three and loses the plot.
Shalom, friends.
The Long Brief usually lands Friday before Shabbat. This one didn't — life got in the way, and I'd rather send late than half-baked. Here it is on Monday. Back to the regular Friday cadence this week.
I decided to write this brief because I felt attacked by absurdly naive vocabulary — from our own camp. One morning last week, I read a column by a journalist who used the phrase. The same morning a cable-news segment had used the phrase. During an afternoon Zoom meeting that day, an upper official from a major Jewish organization had used the phrase. And at that point I could not keep quiet anymore [though I’m sure many don’t think I can manage to keep quiet even while I sleep.] The phrase was “the most right-wing government in Israeli history.” It’s not. I get it. You don’t like Trump. Ok. But stop assuming things in other countries work the same as in DC or Chicago or Denver. Or at least own up to using it in support of your politics, not as though you’re saying anything truthful — at least not in the way the American recipient of those words will understand. Or you’re Israeli and don’t realize the context that is doing substantial harm with your words. Not entirely your fault — the translation is just not quite right.
By the time the third invocation arrived that day I had to do breathing exercises to tamp down my stress levels and a supreme annoyance the situation should not have produced. Especially not in someone who is paid to think clearly about exactly this kind of category error. The annoyance, however, was earned.
In American English those three words carry a partisan-weight load the Hebrew original does not.
The journalist, the cable-news anchor, and the panelist on the webinar did not know they were performing a translation that the categories can’t survive. Though they should have.
I have given the corrective explanation more times than I could count. By the end of that day, I thought maybe it was time to issue a comprehensive corrective.
So here is the corrective, written down.
“Right-wing” in Israel is not a single dial.
It barely exists in the way an American can understand it. The coalition has four parties that disagree with each other on three different axes, and the only thing the parties agree on is the coalition arithmetic that put them together. Likud cut child allowances in 2003 and expanded them post-2022. Shas sat in Rabin’s coalition and abstained on Oslo — the abstention is what carried Oslo across the line. Religious Zionism’s sovereignty agenda is a different doctrine from Otzma Yehudit’s National-Guard agenda. The Haredi parties are economically socialist. Fifteen minutes into any of these conversations the listener has stopped nodding agreeably and is squinting or cocking their heads. They want to ask the question. The question is almost always the same.
So what is it then?
That is the right question. This brief is the answer.
The mirror conversation, with Israelis who do not quite hear the English they are speaking, runs the other direction and is somehow more exhausting. An Israeli analyst, an Israeli politician’s English-language adviser, a Tel Aviv journalist landing a piece for the Atlantic will say “most right-wing government in history” because in Hebrew the phrase is arithmetic. Ha-memshala ha-yamanit be-yoter (literally: the most right-wing government) — the most right-wing combination by seat-count and ministerial composition. In English the same words pick up an ideological charge that was not in the Hebrew original. The Israeli speaker does not hear it. The American listener does not hear anything else. Two Middles, the long brief from April 24, traced what happens when American political life sorts Israel into one of its two partisan containers. This brief tracks what happens when an American sort reads a country that does not run on its grammar, helped along by Israelis describing the country in the only English available.
American Right-Left Cannot Read Israeli Politics
Every American reading of Israeli politics that begins with “right” or “left” has already failed the data, and the failure is structural. The American sorting apparatus bundles cultural, economic, and foreign-policy positions into two opposing partisan containers.
Once you know an American voter is a Democrat, you can predict their position on abortion, climate, immigration, LGBTQ policy, police funding, and Israel with roughly 75% accuracy.
The accuracy comes from the sort, which has connected the issues regardless of any logical connection among them.
Israeli politics runs on the opposite grammar. The effective number of parliamentary parties in Israel rose from 4.39 in 1992 to 8.69 in 1999 and has averaged roughly 7.8 across the nine general elections since. The American comparator runs under 2.0. This is a different operating system. Coalition-system politics with eight effective parties cannot mechanically produce a single-axis sort, because the audience required for the sort (voters whose positions cluster on one dimension) does not exist at sufficient density. The Israel Democracy Institute’s 2026 pre-election survey clocked the top three voting factors among Jewish voters within five points of each other: foreign policy and security at 20%, religion-and-state at 19%, economy and cost of living at 19%. On the Israeli left specifically, religion-and-state surfaced as the most decisive factor — ahead of security — in IDI’s cross-tabs by several points. Three independent axes pulling roughly equally on the same electorate is the empirical signature of a system the American sort cannot read in one dimension.
The mismap is therefore not a failure of any particular analyst. It is what happens when a sort calibrated for one country gets pointed at another. The sort produces output. The output is internally coherent inside the original grammar. The output is wrong about the country it was pointed at.
The reader who has been told the 37th government is “Israel’s far-right government” — J Street’s standing characterization, Bernie Sanders’s recurring formulation, the wallpaper running through NYT, Guardian, and Haaretz English coverage 2022 to 2026 — has been handed an output that bundles Likud, Religious Zionism, Otzma Yehudit, Shas, UTJ, and Noam into a single ideological actor on a single axis. Each of those parties extracted its coalition price on a different axis, and the prices were not interchangeable. UTJ extracted yeshiva funding on the religion-state axis. Shas extracted food vouchers and ministerial rotation on the economic-redistributive axis. Religious Zionism extracted Civil Administration powers in Judea and Samaria on the sovereignty axis. Otzma Yehudit extracted the National Guard and police authority on the security axis. The coalition agreements themselves are public. The axis-by-axis structure is a five-minute reading. The bundling persists anyway, because the alternative is to retool the categories, and retooling the categories is harder than running the categories that don’t work.
We tracked that bundling in Two Middles at the caucus level. Here we look at what the senators were voting on, axis by axis. On April 15, 2026, Senator Elissa Slotkin of Michigan released the statement explaining her vote to block two arms transfers to Israel. She did not say it from the floor. Kelly did that part. She put it in a press release. The line her staff almost certainly crafted to soften the vote for a 2028-curious Democratic primary audience ran like this: “being pro-Israel today is not about simply supporting the political or military agenda of Prime Minister Netanyahu, just like being pro-American should not be equated with loyalty to President Trump.” The careful Michigan moderate, with the CIA-and-Pentagon CV, has just told the country that pro-Israel commitment and Netanyahu’s “political or military agenda” are properly distinguishable categories — and that the distinguishability is the same kind of distinguishability that separates pro-American from loyalty-to-Trump. One agenda. One man. One axis on which to be for or against. The parallel construction is a giveaway.
Slotkin’s grammar reads American partisan tribalism as a one-axis sort and exports the same one-axis read to Israel. She is voting against a coalition that bought religion-state policy from Shas and UTJ on Haredi welfare lines and bought sovereignty-axis policy from Religious Zionism in a February 2023 administrative transfer that gave Smotrich sway over Judea and Samaria. She is voting against a Likud whose voters skew 58% Sephardi-Mizrahi and 46% below-average-income — the wrong half of any American demographic stack you might draw to map them. She does not know any of this is what she is voting against. Her colleague Senator Mark Kelly, on the same day, framed his floor speech as opposition to “the reckless decisions being made by Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Trump.” Two names. One axis. One political agenda you are either for or against.
Friedman’s February 2026 column “Netanyahu Plays Trump and American Jews for Fools — Again” is the columnist-class instance of the same error. The previous version, “The Israel We Knew Is Gone“ from November 2022, bundled Likud, Religious Zionism, and Otzma Yehudit into a single rightward shift across all three axes simultaneously. Each successive Friedman column repeats the same error [don’t worry, he finds new errors too].
The institutional class downstream of the column then repeats it. The columnist’s framing becomes the briefing-book consensus, and a Senator Slotkin who is trying very hard to vote thoughtfully ends up speaking the language the briefing book prepared for her. [She has been failed by the grammar her staff inherited.] The mismap travels as a pre-loaded grammar, harder to dislodge than an explicit claim. Explicit claims can be checked against data. Grammars determine what counts as data in the first place.
A personal note, because the failure mode is in front of me and I am in the middle of it. I used to think of myself as fairly progressive, interested in what I thought of as social justice. I voted Democrat in every cycle going back to the first one I was eligible for. More recently the apparatus around me has moved enough that where I stand is read as centrist. In some rooms, people wonder if I’m a Republican. My positions on the underlying questions haven’t changed. The apparatus has. The most recent presidential election was the first I did not vote in. I could not bring myself to vote for Kamala Harris, and the state I am registered in is firmly red enough that my abstention changed nothing, neither for good nor for bad. The diagnostic the brief just delivered — a sort calibrated for one country pointed at another — has a domestic counterpart. The sort moves. The voter stays put. The label belongs to the sort.
Three Axes, Not One — and a Substrate Beneath All Three
Israeli politics runs simultaneously on three independent axes, and the axes do not move together. The first is security and territorial: where Israel’s defensible borders sit, what the IDF’s operational stance is, what the country’s relationship is to the populations west of the Jordan River. The second is religion-and-state: how religious authority is administered inside a Jewish-majority state, who controls personal status, conversion, marriage, Shabbat in the public square, and the boundaries of the rabbinate. The third is economic: how redistribution, regulation, taxation, and welfare are organized in an economy that is simultaneously a Western tech-export power and a society with substantial sectoral dependencies on state transfers. None of the three reduces to either of the others. A voter’s position on the first does not predict the second. The second does not predict the third. Any analyst who claims otherwise has not looked at the longitudinal voter-factor data.
Beneath the three sits an ethnic-cultural substrate that has been weakening for two generations but still shapes coalition formation. Ashkenazi-Mizrahi intermarriage climbed from 13% in Israel’s first decade to roughly 25% in the most recent marriage cohorts, and only about 5% of Israelis now name ethnic cleavage as the country’s main source of tension. The substrate has receded. It has not disappeared. The Sephardi-Mizrahi modal voter, the Ashkenazi-secular modal voter, the Russian-speaking Soviet-aliyah modal voter, the Ethiopian and Mountain-Jew sub-clusters — each carries voting patterns that align imperfectly with axis positions. Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu illustrates the point with painful clarity for any single-axis American observer. The Russian-speaker community is roughly 770,000 voters, some 12% of the eligible electorate, and 40 to 50% back Lieberman, who runs a coalition platform that is secular, hawkish on the security axis, economically liberal, and aggressively anti-Haredi. There is no American axis on which all four positions sit together. The combination is unintelligible to the American sort because the American sort has only one axis on which to put it.
Two Middles described this same multi-axis structure in identity terms — religious/secular, Ashkenazi/Mizrahi, hawk/dove, veteran/oleh. This brief reframes in issue terms — security and territorial, religion-state, economic. Same terrain. Different cut.
A note on the Hebrew, because it matters more than the translation lets you see. The word for right-wing in Hebrew is yamani — adjective form of yamin, which means right hand and also south. In Tanakh the default orientation is qedem(east as “front”), so south sits to the right hand of anyone facing the rising sun. Hebrew geography embeds in the word. Yamin is a directional and territorial term first, a hand-orientation term second, a political term third. When an Israeli says ha-memshala ha-yamanit be-yoter the word does work English does not — it locates the coalition spatially-territorially before it locates it ideologically, because that is the order Hebrew built into the term. English “right-wing” is purely political-directional, an artifact [and here’s some pub trivia just waiting for an application] of where representatives sat in the post-1789 French National Assembly. The Hebrew speaker is using a word saturated with Land-of-Israel orientation. The English translation strips the saturation in the same step it claims to be doing the translation. I keep coming back to this when I am trying to explain why the Israeli analyst on stage at a US foreign-policy conference cannot quite hear the gap. The gap is in the word itself. The analyst is the medium in which the word loses its load.
An example for the cross-cutting structure: the Rabin coalition of 1992. Rabin assembled Labor, Meretz, and Shas — a coalition routinely described as Israel’s most dovish ever, with Shas’s six Haredi seats sitting alongside Meretz’s secular-left contingent. On a single American axis the combination is impossible. Haredi parties cluster with the religious-traditionalist right. Secular-left parties cluster with the progressive flank. To the American mind, the two cannot share a coalition. It’s incomprehensible. On the actual Israeli grammar the combination is the system functioning as designed. Shas and Meretz disagreed on the religion-state axis sharply. They agreed on a coalition price that resolved each party’s primary axis-demand: Meretz extracted security-axis flexibility for Oslo. Shas extracted economic-redistributive line items and religious-services portfolios. Shas abstained on the Oslo vote (which is what carried Oslo across the line) and left the coalition in September 1993, as Deri’s legal problems converged with the post-Oslo backlash. The religion-state and economic gains had been priced for one level of security-axis cost. The formal signing pushed the cost past the price.
The Israeli left runs the same machinery in the opposite direction. Yair Golan, currently leader of the merged Democrats party, is a former IDF Deputy Chief of Staff who on October 7, 2023 drove south in his personal Toyota Yaris and rescued Nova Festival survivors with the combat reflexes of nearly forty years’ service. The current leader of Israel’s left is a combat-decorated Major General. There is no American axis on which “leader of the progressive flank” and “former Deputy Chief of Staff who pulled wounded civilians out of a kibbutz under Hamas fire” sit on the same point. Golan is the natural leader of a left whose institutional lineage runs back through Mapam to the Haganah to the kibbutz movement — the same kibbutz movement that disproportionately staffed elite combat units for fifty years. The Israeli left built the IDF. Again, to an American steeped in our politics, that reads as incomprehensible.
Lieberman completes the demonstration. His voters are secular, hawkish on the security axis, economically liberal, and aggressively opposed to Haredi exemptions. On the American axis the same voter would have to be either secular and progressive or religious and conservative — the bundles do not separate. On the Israeli axis the secular-hawkish-anti-Haredi combination has commanded 40 to 50% of a 770,000-voter community for two decades. Three worked examples, three cross-cuts, all invisible to the American sort and decisive on the Israeli one. The grammar is just different. The cost of refusing to learn it accumulates downstream in every Senate floor speech, every NYT column, every J Street press release that mistakes the system for a flatter version of itself.
One more thing about the substrate before we look at the parties. Historical axis salience has shifted across decades. Post-1967 the security-territorial axis dominated. The 1977 Likud Revolution introduced the Mizrahi-substrate axis at electoral scale, breaking three decades of Mapai dominance. The 2011 J14 protests — 450,000 participants, the largest rally in Israeli history — elevated the economic axis from secondary to primary for several cycles, and Yesh Atid’s 2013 19-seat showing was the downstream expression. October 7 pulled the security axis back to dominance. Each shift moved which axis dominated. The other axes kept operating in the background. The American observer who reads “Israel has shifted right” since 2022 is reading a re-prioritization across three axes as movement along one. The voter who appears more hawkish on security after October 7 may sit unchanged on religion-and-state and unchanged or more redistributive on economic policy. The single-axis read collapses three-axis movement into one direction the data does not support.
The Likud Is a Populist-Right Coalition Party, Not a GOP Analogue
The Likud-as-GOP equation is the most consequential American misread, and almost every downstream error compounds from it. Likud is hawkish on the security axis. Likud is redistributive-populist on the economic axis — child allowances, welfare, settlement infrastructure subsidies, public-sector expansion — none of which are GOP fiscal orthodoxy. Likud is pragmatic-secular on the religion-state axis with internal factional pulls. Its voter base is heavily Mizrahi-traditional, below-average income, and Masorti-religious in roughly equal measure. Drop a modal Likud voter into the United States in 1972 and they vote working-class Catholic Democrat. They do not vote Reagan Republican. The mismap is wrong on every axis except security, and even on security the equation breaks once you read the actual record.
Take the fiscal record first, because it is where the equation breaks most cleanly and where US analysts have the longest history of refusing to look. The 2023–2024 budget allocated NIS 13.7 billion in coalition funds — a category of spending whose entire purpose is to satisfy coalition partners’ redistributive demands. Of those 13.7 billion shekels, roughly 3.7 billion went to yeshiva stipends, about 1 billion went to a food-voucher program pushed by Shas’s Aryeh Deri, and roughly 1.2 billion went to UTJ’s non-state-supervised educational systems — the institutions that do not teach core subjects like math and English, on which the Finance Ministry’s own economists warned the government. The 2025 state budget increased total spending by NIS 32 billion, a fiscal expansion under a coalition the American sort would predict to be cutting. Smotrich himself, sitting as Finance Minister and acting in the most “right-wing” capacity an American observer could imagine, defied the Attorney General in August 2024 to maintain daycare subsidies. The opposite of GOP-style welfare retrenchment. The opposite of Reaganite fiscal orthodoxy. None of this is hidden. The data is in the budget documents.
Now the demographics. Likud voters are 58% Sephardi-Mizrahi, and only 26% Ashkenazi at peak. The demographic profile shows 46% of Likud voters reporting below-average income. IDI characterizes the base as commanding “strong support from lower- and lower-middle-class voters.” On religious identity, 35% of Likud voters identify as Masorti-traditional-non-religious, 23% as Masorti-religious, with a combined 58% traditional and only about 5% Haredi. The base is empirically the development-town and urban-periphery working class — the demographic the post-1980 GOP’s suburban professional anchor does not reach. Drop these numbers into a US sociodemographic crosswalk and the comparator is the working-class Catholic Democrats of the 1960s and 1970s — urban-periphery, ethnic-out-group from a previous generation’s view, redistributive on economics, traditionalist on culture, comfortable with strong national-security commitments. The American party those voters sat in for forty years was the Democratic Party. The Likud’s analytical home in US comparative-politics terms is the Carter-era Democratic working-class coalition, which has no current American equivalent because the partisan sort dissolved that coalition in the 1980s and 1990s.
The security axis is where the GOP analogue holds best, and even there it does not hold cleanly. Netanyahu’s 2009 Bar-Ilan speech explicitly accepted a demilitarized Palestinian state under conditions: “two peoples live freely, side-by-side, in amity and mutual respect. Each will have its own flag, its own anthem, its own government.” That is a Likud prime minister, on Likud platform space, accepting the two-state frame that hostile US commentary subsequently accused Likud of categorically rejecting. The Abraham Accords continued the same security-axis logic: alliance-building with Sunni Gulf states framed around shared Iran threat, with the Palestinian question deliberately set aside. The “Abraham Alliance” framing Netanyahu reached for after Iran’s April 2024 attack extended the alliance-building logic into the post–October 7 environment. This is the move of a populist-right coalition party whose security-axis position is hawkish-pragmatic and whose territorial position is whatever the coalition will support. The American observer who reads Bar-Ilan and the Abraham Accords as instances of Netanyahu’s “right-wing extremism” — Sanders has used exactly that formulation — is reading text that contradicts the framing as evidence for the framing.
The American who insists on the Likud-as-GOP equation is translating across a category gap they have not been told about. The translation produces output that reads coherent inside the original grammar and is wrong about the country it claims to describe. A Likud finance minister defending Haredi daycare against an Attorney General is not Paul Ryan. A Likud prime minister addressing Bar-Ilan on a two-state demilitarized framework is not Marco Rubio. A Likud voter on 46%-below-average-income with Masorti-traditional religious identity and Mizrahi family origin is not the median GOP primary voter and never has been.
The Israeli Left Lives in the Tel Aviv Bourgeois, Not the Squad
The mirror error inverts the actual sociology of the Israeli left so completely that the American observer who maps Meretz onto AOC has gotten something close to the demographic opposite. Meretz voters are 93% secular, the highest secular share of any Israeli party. The Ashkenazi-Mizrahi split among Meretz voters runs 69% to 12% — almost the inverse of Likud’s base. Labor voters are 75% secular and 55% Ashkenazi. The Center-Left voter base reports above-average income at a plurality, against Likud’s 46%-below-average. Geographically, Meretz and Labor concentrate in kibbutzim, regional councils, and high-income coastal cities: Tel Aviv, Ramat Gan, Ramat HaSharon, Herzliya. The base is wealthy, secular, university-educated, IDF-veteran-dense, and concentrated in the country’s professional-managerial coastal corridor. Drop that voter into US politics and they vote suburban Republican on every axis except security-axis dovishness.
The institutional lineage is the second piece, and on this one the inversion runs deeper. Mapam was founded in 1948 from the kibbutz-based Hashomer Hatzair Workers Party and Ahdut HaAvoda, rooted in the kibbutz movement and the IDF’s founding cadres. Mapam was Israel’s second-largest party in the 1950s. Mapai, David Ben-Gurion’s party, became Labor in 1968. Labor Zionism built institutions still standing in Israel today, including the IDF. The pre-state Haganah, which became the IDF, was a Labor-Zionist creation. The kibbutz movement disproportionately staffed elite combat units — Sayeret Matkal, Sayeret Tzanhanim, Shayetet 13 — for fifty years. The party’s founding declaration describes the combined entity as “liberal-democratic Zionist.” The American “Squad” comparator misses every demographic dimension except security-axis dovishness. The Israeli version of the dovishness is calibrated as separationist. The Squad’s voter base opposes its own military. The Israeli left built theirs.
The honest acknowledgment, before we move on: the Israeli left as currently constituted is electorally small. Labor took four seats in the 2022 election, and Meretz did not cross the 3.25% threshold. The merger to The Democrats consolidated electoral position. It did not expand the program. The argument here turns on the bloc’s sociology, which is the reality on the ground regardless of seat-count, and the sociology is the inverse of what the American comparator predicts. When American observers ask why Israeli elections keep producing right-wing coalitions, the implicit assumption is that the Israeli left has been outvoted by a working-class populist majority — the way American progressives have been outvoted by a working-class populist majority. The implicit assumption inverts the sociology. The Israeli electorate’s working-class populist majority is the Likud base. The Israeli electorate’s secular-bourgeois minority is the left base. The combination produces electoral outcomes the American single-axis sort cannot predict because the sort reads the wrong demographic stack onto the wrong party labels.
Aaron David Miller’s Carnegie observation that the merged Democrats’ positions reflect “where most US Democrats are” is itself a mismap. The substantive policy claims may overlap on the security axis. They diverge everywhere else. A US progressive Democrat is more likely to be young, working-to-middle-income, downwardly mobile, increasingly diverse on race and religion, and military-service-light. An Israeli Democrats voter is more likely to be older, above-average income, economically secure, Ashkenazi, and IDF-veteran. The single-axis equation collapses the demographic realities into the policy overlap, and the collapse produces the Squad analogy plus the consequent surprise when Yair Golan turns out to support the Iron Dome upgrade and the Lebanon campaign and the targeted-killing program. He supports them because he is the demographic the equation said he wasn’t. The equation failed. The politician did not.
The Haredi Bloc Is Sectarian-Redistributive, Not Religious Right
Mapping Shas and UTJ to “American religious right” misses every defining feature of their politics. The misunderstanding has cost American observers two decades of analytical clarity on Israeli coalition dynamics. The Haredi parties are sectarian, defined by community boundary. The national-religious project belongs to a different bloc entirely. They are economically redistributive: Haredi welfare, yeshiva stipends, child allowances are central to their coalition demands. They are historically dovish-to-pragmatic on territory, especially Shas under Ovadia Yosef. Their position in right-wing coalitions is instrumental: it buys religion-state policy concessions, with no ideological alignment to the security axis. The Christian-right comparator gets the religion-state axis right and everything else wrong. Even the religion-state axis it gets right at the wrong altitude, because the Haredi religion-state agenda doesn’t cleanly map onto the American culture-war agenda of moral legislation.
Start with Yosef on territory, because the historical anchor is the cleanest demonstration that the Christian-right analogue cannot survive contact with the record. Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, Shas’s founding rabbinic authority, ruled in the late 1980s, in a responsa titled “Ceding Territory of the Land of Israel in Order to Save Lives,” that pikuach nefesh (saving life) overrides territorial commandments. Yosef ruled that it is halakhically permissible to give territory from the Land of Israel in order to achieve a genuine peace. The ruling enabled Shas to join Rabin’s coalition in 1992 — six Knesset seats sitting alongside Labor and Meretz — and Shas remained until September 1993, abstaining on the Oslo vote (the abstention is what carried Oslo across the line) and then exiting the coalition in the weeks around the White House lawn signing as Deri’s legal problems converged with the post-Oslo backlash. On a single American axis this is a contradiction. On the actual Israeli grammar this is a Haredi party operating exactly as its religion-state-and-economic-axis priorities predict: it joined to extract religion-state and welfare concessions. It left when the security-axis cost of staying exceeded the religion-state-axis benefit. The American observer who reads Shas as “Israeli Pat Robertson” is misreading both Shas and Pat Robertson.
UTJ is the other half of the Haredi bloc and runs the same logic from a different community-boundary. UTJ is a non-Zionist faction that does not endorse the creation of a secular Jewish state. The party “maintains no political commitment to Israeli sovereignty over specific territories and the party has been open to concessions in the past.” UTJ was a member of the Sharon coalition that carried out the 2005 Gaza disengagement — sitting in the cabinet that authorized Israel’s largest territorial withdrawal in three decades, while Religious Zionism experienced the same disengagement as a doctrinal-political defeat. UTJ’s coalition behavior is what the literature describes as “centrist” in the technical sense: positions determined by religion-state imperatives, with security and diplomatic considerations subordinate. The party has no uniform position on Judea and Samaria resettlement. The party has been pragmatic on territory across decades because territory is not the axis the party prioritizes. The American Christian-right comparator, hawkish on Israeli territorial questions as a matter of theological commitment, runs in the opposite direction.
The economic-axis evidence is even more direct. Shas built schools and social services targeted at development towns, poor areas, and slums. Aryeh Deri ran on “socioeconomic equality and consensus ‘one nation’ politics that resonated outside the traditional Shas votership.” Bituach Leumi child allowances scale with family size. A large Haredi family receives roughly NIS 1,336 a month in child allowances. Kollel stipends average about NIS 752 per student per month. The 2023–2024 budget extracted NIS 13.7 billion in coalition funds from a Likud-led coalition, of which the majority flowed to Haredi line items — yeshiva stipends, daycare, food vouchers, UTJ educational systems. This is sectarian-redistributive politics. The Christian-right American comparator is fiscally conservative and culturally maximalist. The Haredi parties are fiscally redistributive and culturally preservationist. The two are inverse on the dimension American observers most consistently miss.
The religion-state agenda, where the Christian-right comparator nominally holds, also operates at a different altitude than the American observer assumes. Sacred Authority, the long brief from January 1, 2026, traced the Rabbinate and adjacent religion-state institutions in detail. The operative point for this section is that the Haredi religion-state agenda is preservationist. The American culture-war frame of moral legislation does not apply. The agenda is to maintain rabbinic authority over personal-status questions (marriage, divorce, burial) and to preserve specific public-sphere arrangements: Shabbat closures, kashrut certification, military-service exemptions for yeshiva learners. The agenda does not legislate moral codes onto the population at large in the American culture-war sense. There is no Haredi school-prayer fight, because Israeli public schools already track religious observance by school stream. There is no Haredi abortion fight at scale, because Israeli abortion law is administratively permissive and has been for decades. There is no Haredi LGBT-marriage fight, because Israeli civil marriage is administered through the Rabbinate, and the Rabbinate already does not perform same-sex marriages — there is no civil alternative to be legislated against. The American culture-war frame projects fights that have no Israeli analogue onto Israeli religion-state institutions organized along different fault lines. The Christian-right comparator sees overlap. But the overlap is rhetorical.
Shas’s voter base is the giveaway that the comparator is wrong. Roughly 75 to 80% of Shas voters self-identify as Sephardi-Mizrahi. Only 3 to 5% identify as Ashkenazi. About 60% define themselves as Haredi, 23% as Masorti-traditional, 16% as national-religious — a Haredi majority with a substantial traditional-Sephardi tail UTJ does not reach. Shas is a sectarian-redistributive party with strong religious-identity politics, defined by community boundary. The party operates as the political vehicle for Sephardi-Mizrahi religious-traditionalist working-class Israelis, and its coalition demands track the priorities of that constituency: economic redistribution, religion-state preservation, sectarian patronage. None of those priorities are American Christian-nationalist priorities. None sit in the cluster American observers expect when they hear “Israel’s religious right.”
Religious Zionism Has No American Analogue — and the Sovereignty Axis Is Why
Look. None of the IR theorists who built the sovereignty literature were writing about Israel. They were writing about post-Cold-War sovereignty, post-colonial state formation, the EU. Their frameworks describe what Religious Zionism actually does because the configuration sits inside the conceptual room they cleared. Religious Zionism reads the room. The American institutional class trying to map Religious Zionism onto Christian nationalism has not. The party closest to a functional American religious-nationalist analogue is Religious Zionism, and the analogue breaks on a feature American politics does not contain: a sovereignty-and-territorial axis where the party’s position is constitutive of its doctrine, with everything else subordinate. Without that axis, Religious Zionism reads to Americans as fringe theocratic. With it, the party reads as a coherent post-Oslo strategic bet about Jewish sovereignty over the historical Land of Israel. The bet may be wrong. It is not unintelligible.
The doctrinal lineage runs through Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook (1865–1935) and his son Rabbi Tzvi Yehuda Kook (1891–1982). The elder Kook held that settling and building the Land of Israel would bring the Messiah. Tzvi Yehuda spent fifty years teaching, expanding, and applying his father’s practical-messianic ideas, especially to the lands captured in the 1967 Six Day War. Gush Emunim was founded in 1974 under the slogan “The Land of Israel, for the people of Israel, according to the Torah of Israel,” after the 1973 Yom Kippur War, as a religious-nationalist movement aimed at Jewish sovereignty over all parts of the Land as defined in the Bible. Gush Emunim’s eight resettlement attempts in 1974–1975 in the Nablus area, evading IDF roadblocks with the participation of Tzvi Yehuda Kook, established the practical-doctrinal pattern: resettling the land as a religious obligation that overrides government directives when government and religious obligation conflict. The doctrine’s central feature, for the purposes of the American mismap, is that it is sovereignty-axis maximalist. The territory is the project’s object. The territory is constitutive of what the project is for.
This is the feature the American Christian-nationalist comparator does not contain. American Christian nationalism is a cultural project that uses biblical-territorial language for the United States. Religious Zionism is a sovereignty project that uses biblical-territorial language for Eretz Israel. The doctrinal cores are inverse. Christian nationalism applies biblical sovereignty to a non-biblical national territory and operates inside a constitutionally-secular state’s culture-war frame. Religious Zionism applies biblical sovereignty to the biblical territory itself and operates as a sovereignty-axis position inside a coalition system. The two projects share religious vocabulary and almost no shared features. The American who reads Smotrich as “Israel’s Mike Johnson” is reading two doctrines whose only shared element is a shared lexicon.
Smotrich’s Decisive Plan from 2017 is the doctrinal articulation. The executive summary holds that “there is only room for one expression of national self-determination west of the Jordan River: that of the Jewish Nation,” and that “any solution must be based on cutting off the ambition to realise the Arab national hope between the Jordan and the Mediterranean.” Smotrich’s biblical framing draws explicitly on Joshua’s letters to the inhabitants of the Land — “those who want to accept will accept; those who want to leave, will leave; those who want to fight, will fight.” The doctrine is sovereignty-explicit and territorially grounded in the biblical sovereignty narrative of the Land. The argument is doctrinal-sovereignty. The American observer who hears the argument and translates it into Christian-nationalist register is performing a translation the categories cannot survive.
The operational outputs are recent and concrete. On February 23, 2023, Netanyahu, Smotrich, and Defense Minister Gallant signed an agreement transferring Civil Administration authority in Judea and Samaria to Smotrich. Smotrich became responsible for designing much of Israel’s settlement-and-administration policy in the area — land allocation, planning, construction, law enforcement on illegal construction (both Palestinian and Israeli), infrastructure, water allocation. The transfer translated the doctrinal-sovereignty-axis position into practical power over civilian governance, exactly as a sovereignty-axis party would extract on its primary axis-demand. The American press attribution that read this as “Netanyahu annexes the West Bank” is the bloc-attribution failure we will deal with directly in the synthesis section.
Ben-Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit operates in the adjacent space, and the comparator works even less cleanly there. Otzma Yehudit’s doctrinal lineage runs through Kahanism. Kach was banned in Israel in 1994 and listed as a US foreign terrorist organization the same year — the US listing was lifted in a routine 2022 review. Ben-Gvir’s political background runs through three decades inside that banned movement. His current operational role centers on the National Guard he extracted in March 2023 in exchange for supporting a temporary pause on judicial-reform legislation. Three different axes operating inside one transactional moment, with each actor extracting on the axis it actually prioritizes. The American reading that bundles “Smotrich and Ben-Gvir” as Israeli Christian nationalists misses that they are sovereignty-axis and security-axis maximalists respectively, with overlapping but not identical doctrinal commitments, operating inside a coalition that uses the religion-state and economic axes as bargaining substrate for both of their primary axis-demands.
Ben-Gvir’s voter base completes the demonstration that “Smotrich and Ben-Gvir” was always two distinct electorates bolted together for threshold-crossing arithmetic. Smotrich’s base is the national-religious settler core — 61% national-religious, concentrated in the heartland of the territorial right, with 22% of the settler vote in 2022 (over twice the national share) and majorities east of the security barrier. Ben-Gvir’s base is younger, more Mizrahi, more periphery, more soldier — voters reaching for an internal-security axis the established right has historically under-served. Two parties on one slate, two axes inside one bloc, two electorates inside one cabinet portfolio. The American reading that takes it as one ideological project misses all of it.
The bet may be wrong. The settlement project’s strategic premise — that compounding administrative acts produce de facto sovereignty over time, that the demographic question can be deferred indefinitely while territorial facts accumulate, that international recognition follows Israeli fait accompli — is a bet about how sovereignty actually accumulates in contested territory. The costs are real. The project has produced friction with the Israeli legal system, with American administrations of both parties, with European partners, and with the Sunni-Arab partners the Abraham Accords were supposed to consolidate. None of those costs are the same as unintelligibility. Whether the bet pays off is an analytical question. Whether the bet is intelligible is not.
Israeli Centrism Is About Which Axis to Fight On
The Israeli “center” is a position about which axis to prioritize. Yair Lapid’s project — and Benny Gantz’s after him — is to push the security axis to the background and run Israeli politics on the religion-state and economic axes, where the secular middle has plurality coalitions. American “centrism” does not have an axis-prioritization function because there is only one axis to prioritize. The Israeli center has no equivalent in US politics, and the difference is what the American sort cannot read.
Yesh Atid’s founding platform in 2012 emphasized religion-state and economic axes explicitly: “equality in education and the draft — with all Israeli school students required to be taught essential classes and all Israelis to be drafted into the Army, including the ultra-Orthodox sector.” The 2013 election produced 19 Yesh Atid seats (the strongest first-showing for a new party in two decades), running on burden-sharing and Haredi conscription. The result was the security-axis-deferred, religion-state-axis-foregrounded outcome, and it produced a concrete legislative output: the Shaked-Lapid Conscription Law which established annual Haredi conscription targets rising through 2017. Yesh Atid was prioritizing one set of axes over another. Prioritization itself was the political content.
The Bennett-Lapid government was the full axis-prioritization experiment. An eight-party coalition spanning the full ideological spectrum — Yamina through New Hope through Yisrael Beiteinu through Yesh Atid through Labor and Meretz and Ra’am — governed on the explicit premise that security-axis-divisive issues (Iran strategy, two-state versus annexation) would be deferred to enable religion-state-and-economic-axis governance. The legislative output was the demonstration: an overdue budget passed. Specialized funding for religious parties was reduced. A Haredi draft bill passed first reading 51-48 on January 31, 2022, lowering the exemption age from 24 to 21. The government collapsed before the draft bill completed subsequent readings, but the first-reading passage demonstrates the prioritization mechanism working as designed.
A Yesh Atid voter can be hawkish on security and dovish on religion-state simultaneously, or vice versa. What makes them centrist is the axis-prioritization. The position on any single axis is secondary. Yesh Atid’s voter base (concentrated in Tel Aviv, Herzliya, Ramat HaSharon, Kiryat Ono, Ramat Gan, with 55% self-identifying as centrist, 21% as left, 24% as right) is a coalition of voters whose primary axis-priority aligns even when their secondary positions diverge. The American “moderate” comparator collapses this into a left-right intermediate position and loses the analytical content that makes the centrist project what it is.
October 7 pulled the security axis back to dominance, and the Bennett-Lapid 2026 “Beyahad” merger is the centrist response: a polling-competitive project that explicitly excludes Arab-party reliance (”The Arab parties are not Zionist, and therefore we will not rely on them,” in Bennett’s framing) while running primarily on the religion-state and economic axes. The mechanism still operates. The salience has shifted. October 7 did not kill axis-prioritization centrism. It made the security axis harder to defer. May 2026 polling shows Beyahad at 25 against Likud at 25, with the right-wing bloc at 59 against 61 needed for a majority. Both blocs are below threshold. Whether voters tolerate axis-prioritization governance when the security axis demands constant attention is the open question the 2026 election will answer.
The Arab Parties Are Off the American Frame Entirely
Mapping Israel’s Arab parties to “minority Democrats” is the cleanest American category error in the entire mismap inventory, because the Arab parties are not one constituency and have never been. Ra’am is the Israeli Muslim Brotherhood’s political wing. Hadash is communist. Balad is rejectionist-nationalist. Ta’al (Ahmad Tibi’s secular-Arab-nationalist-pragmatic party) is the fourth project. The one-time Joint List slate, formed in 2015 in response to the electoral threshold rising from 2% to 3.25%, masked four distinct political projects that shared only their excluded-from-Zionist-coalition status. The Joint List fragmented in stages — Ra’am peeling off in 2021, Balad in 2022 — and the staged fragmentation made the four-projects-in-one-coalition structure visible. None of them maps onto US minority-coalition behavior. The Ra’am-Bennett coalition agreement in 2021 was unintelligible to American observers in part because the analytical category that would make it intelligible did not exist on their map.
Take Ra’am first. Ra’am is the political wing of the Southern Branch of the Islamic Movement in Israel, the Israeli Muslim Brotherhood lineage with the Southern Branch’s operational discipline the Northern Branch (banned in 2015) refused. The Jihadist Continuum mapped the Brotherhood as the institutional-capture variant of the same end state ISIS and Hamas pursue through spectacle: “Its texts and offshoots aim for the same end state as more openly violent actors.” Ra’am operates inside that tradition. Mansour Abbas’s framing — “for the southern branch the sanctity of life prevails over the sanctity of land, therefore it abandoned violent resistance and focused on improving the living conditions of Arab residents” — is the enforcement-choice version of the Brotherhood operating system. The framing carries a tactical operating choice. The doctrinal end state is unchanged. Ra’am’s June 2021 entry into the Bennett-Lapid government (the first Arab party to formally join an Israeli governing coalition) was the move in practice. Tactical coalition entry when the math allows. No doctrinal repudiation of the end state. The coalition agreement extracted approximately NIS 53 billion in budgets and development plans for Arab society, NIS 30 billion over five years in economic-development funds, NIS 2.5 million to fight crime in Arab society, a two-year freeze of the Kaminitz Law, and legalization of three unrecognized Bedouin villages within 45 days of swearing-in. The extraction was on the economic-redistributive axis and on the law-and-order axis. The American “minority Democrats” comparator predicts none of this. A Muslim-Brotherhood-lineage Islamist party in a Zionist governing coalition extracting redistributive concessions is what the comparator’s grammar cannot read. The analytical move is to read the entry as tactical-redistributive extraction inside an unchanged doctrinal frame. Islamic moderation is not what is happening.
Hadash is the second project. Hadash is a left-wing-to-far-left political coalition formed by the Communist Party of Israel and other groups. The Communist Party origin is direct: Maki split in 1965, with the anti-Zionist faction forming Rakah, and Rakah’s 18th Congress in December 1976 resolved to form Hadash for the 1977 elections. Hadash is a Jewish-Arab joint communist project. The party’s doctrinal commitment is communist and binational, with all the doctrinal baggage that entails — including Soviet-era international alignments and a continuing commitment to a one-state binational outcome. Mapping Hadash onto AOC is the same kind of category mistake as mapping the French Communist Party onto Bernie Sanders: rhetorical overlap on specific issues, no doctrinal overlap on shared features.
Balad is the third project and runs on rejectionist-nationalism. Balad is a secular Arab nationalist party founded in 1995 by Azmi Bishara, with a platform calling for the transformation of Israel into “a democracy for all its citizens, irrespective of national or ethnic identity” — the “state of all its citizens” formulation. The platform opposes Israel’s existence as a Jewish state and supports its reformation as a “democratic and secular” state, which is doctrinally incompatible with the constitutional structure of Israel. Balad submitted a separate candidate list in 2022 because its rejectionist project was not compatible with Hadash-Ta’al’s pragmatist project. The 2022 separate-list submission is the operational evidence that “the Arab parties” was always a procedural alliance, never an ideological coalition.
The single-axis American sort cannot read these distinctions because it has nowhere to put them. “Minority Democrats” assumes a single ethno-political constituency aligned with one of two partisan containers and pursuing distributive politics inside that container’s frame. None of the four Arab-Israeli projects fits the template. Ra’am pursues distributive politics inside any Zionist coalition that will pay for it. Hadash pursues binational communism no Zionist coalition will accept on substantive grounds. Balad pursues rejectionist-nationalism the Zionist consensus will not accept on definitional grounds. Ta’al pursues secular-Arab-nationalist pragmatism that floats in and out of coalition with Hadash on tactical considerations. Four projects, four doctrines, four operational behaviors, one electoral category. The single electoral category is the artifact of an electoral threshold and American observers’ grammar. No underlying ideological convergence ties the four projects together.
The post–October 7 cross-cutting data on the Arab-Israeli electorate completes the picture and complicates it further. Trust in the IDF among Arab citizens increased from 21% in June 2023 to 44% in December 2023, a 23-point post–October 7 surge. Druze service has reached 85%, Bedouin service over 60%, with many in combat roles including the Desert Reconnaissance Battalion. Druze identification with the Jewish state polls at 80%, Christians at 73%, Muslims at 62%. Mansour Abbas’s foreign-facing line — “does not reflect Arab society, the Palestinian people, and the Islamic nation” — is the enforcement-choice version of the doctrine. The line is not theological reform. More than half of Israeli Arabs agreed with the line in polling. About a third did not. The Israeli-Arab civic distance from Hamas is the variable that matters. None of this is on the American sort. Arab citizens whose IDF trust doubled in six months. Druze whose Israeli identification runs ahead of some Mizrahi-Sephardi traditional voter populations. Bedouin combat-soldiers in the Desert Reconnaissance Battalion. All consequential, all analytically invisible to a grammar that only knows how to read minority-coalition behavior on a single axis.
Read the Bloc, Not the Party
Israeli policy outcomes are produced by coalitions. The analytical unit that matters for the American reader is the bloc — and the corrective to two decades of mismap is procedural: look at the coalition agreement, look at which party holds which ministry, look at the axis on which the policy is moving, then attribute. American reporting that names “Netanyahu” or “Likud” as the actor and ignores the bloc misreads who is actually setting policy on each axis. The procedural fix is not difficult. It is unfamiliar to a reading that defaults to single-actor attribution because the actor’s name is what the front-page headline can hold.
The 37th government, formed December 29, 2022 after the November 1, 2022 election, gathered five parties at formation (Likud, Shas, Otzma Yehudit, Religious Zionist Party, Noam), with UTJ joining at swearing-in. The government’s basic guidelines text held that “the Jewish people’s exclusive and inalienable right to all parts of the Land of Israel” was the founding premise, alongside a vow to “bolster the settlement of the Galilee, the Negev, the Golan and Judea and Samaria.” The American press read the guidelines as a unified ideological project. The actual coalition structure was an axis-by-axis trade. Likud held PM (Netanyahu), Defense (Gallant, then Katz), Foreign Affairs (rotating to Sa’ar), Justice (Levin), and the bulk of the economic-administration portfolios. Religious Zionism held Finance (Smotrich) with Civil Administration authority over Judea and Samaria, which is the sovereignty-axis portfolio. Otzma Yehudit held National Security (Ben-Gvir) with police authority and the National Guard, the security-axis-internal-enforcement portfolio. Shas held Interior and Health (Deri, until Supreme Court disqualification) and the food-voucher program, which carries religion-state and economic-redistribution work. UTJ held Housing (Goldknopf) and yeshiva-budget streams. Noam took the Jewish National Identity portfolio (Maoz) — the euphemism the coalition agreement gave the explicitly anti-LGBT brief — and subsequently left.
The coalition agreements were published in full. The axis-by-axis structure is a five-minute reading. The American press attribution that read judicial reform as “Netanyahu’s judicial coup” missed that Levin (Likud) led the reform but Rothman (Religious Zionist) was the Knesset-committee enforcer, and Smotrich publicly framed the reform as a sovereignty-axis vehicle. The coalition agreements required “complete and total preference” to legislation aimed at judicial-system reform, binding all factions to support judicial-reform bills as proposed. The bloc structure forced bloc-level enforcement of a policy that originated outside Likud’s electoral platform. Attribution to Netanyahu personally misreads which actor is moving which policy on which axis.
The internal coalition dynamics reinforce the point. Otzma Yehudit (Ben-Gvir) left the government on January 19, 2025over a Gaza ceasefire agreement — a security-axis dispute with Likud — and rejoined after the ceasefire collapsed in March 2025. Smotrich (Religious Zionist) threatened to quit over a deal preventing a return to war. Likud and Religious Zionism have publicly disputed Smotrich’s crushing Knesset defeat on specific votes. The bloc is a transactional alliance whose members constrain and amplify each other axis by axis, and whose internal disputes are the routine operating texture of the system.
The corrective is procedural. When a policy moves, ask which party drove it. Look at the coalition agreement establishing the demand. Look at the ministry holding the relevant portfolio. Look at the axis the policy operates on. Then attribute. A US senator preparing a floor speech who runs this procedure for ten minutes produces a speech that reads more accurately than 90% of what the institutional class is currently producing. A US columnist who runs it for an hour produces a column that does not embarrass the columnist five years on. The procedure is available. The data is public. The mismap persists because the categories are unfamiliar, and retooling the categories is harder than running the categories that do not work.
Slotkin issued her statement and Kelly took the floor on April 15 to vote against two arms transfers to a coalition whose internal axis structure they had not been told about. The vote made sense in their grammar. Their grammar made sense in the political environment that pre-loaded it. Neither tells the American reader what is actually moving inside Israeli politics. Two Middles established that US-Israel relations are now sorted into a partisan container. This brief has shown that mismapping Israeli politics under those conditions produces real error — the senator’s vote, the columnist’s framing, the institution’s strategy all run through the mismap, and the policy outputs that follow get the country wrong on every axis except the one the sort can read.
Read the bloc, not the party. Read the axis, not the headline.
The coalition that forms after the 2026 election will be assembled the same way the 37th was — axis by axis, agreements public, ministry assignments traceable in the record.
And, finally, please just stop saying “the most right-wing government in Israeli history.” It doesn’t mean what you think it means.
— Uri Zehavi · Intelligence Editor, Israel Brief