Netanyahu advances the Israeli far right’s most extreme agenda in Gaza

“Let’s go, Bibi, let’s go!” A group of people wrapped in Israeli flags cheered last Sunday as military trucks passed through Sderot, in southern Israel, chanting the nickname of Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, who now heads the most right-wing government in the country’s history.

They were there to heckle some 300 protesters who, on the other side of the road, were scuffling with police and soldiers in an attempt to approach the Gaza border. The protesters were demonstrating against the new invasion of the Gaza Strip that had begun the previous day. Police pushed them aside and arrested 10 of them.

Shortly before, in the square in front of the Sderot train station, two women had called the protesters “traitors,” as warplanes tore through the air and the ground shook. One explosion after another served as a reminder that this unremarkable place is just two miles from the hell unfolding in Gaza. In 19 months of war, Israeli attacks have killed more than 53,900 people there, according to authorities in Gaza.

Behind that fence, which the peace activists were unable to reach, nearly 17,000 children have died. More than 900 of them were under one year old. Another 14,000 may not reach adulthood either if, over the next 10 months — as the United Nations has warned — Israel does not increase the meager humanitarian aid that Netanyahu authorized this week in an effort to maintain U.S. support. The U.N. has described the aid as “a drop in the ocean of need.”

Meanwhile, the still relatively mild international pressure is beginning to shift from lukewarm condemnations to concrete actions, such as the European Union’s announcement that it will review its association agreement with Israel.

Netanyahu has embraced — partly out of conviction and partly to maintain the necessary support to stay in power — the Gaza agenda of his allies in Israel’s far-right nationalist movement. This vision, which is being implemented at a rapid pace, centers on establishing settlements and carrying out the ethnic cleansing of the population in Gaza.

It also includes the conquest and annexation of Gazan territory, the declared objective of the military operation Gideon’s Chariots, which the pacifists in Sderot were protesting against. In February, U.S. President Donald Trump gave a boost to the religious far right’s long-standing dream of expelling Palestinians from their land by announcing a real estate plan for the invaded territory, which he dubbed the “Riviera of the Middle East.”

Even more important to Netanyahu’s ultra-right partners — who give voice to the radical Israeli settler movement — is seizing control of the West Bank, the biblical Judea and Samaria, which they consider the heart of the land of Israel, which they believe God promised to the Jews.

The Gaza border, which Israel closed to the entry of food, water, and medicine on March 2 — pushing 2.1 million Palestinians to the brink of famine — is not off-limits to all Israeli civilians. In November 2024, Daniella Weiss, leader of the radical settler organization Nachala (Heritage, in Hebrew) — one of the groups building Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank — strolled through the ruins of Gaza in an Israeli army vehicle. She was scouting land for the return of settlements that Ariel Sharon’s government had ordered evacuated in 2005.

The red carpet rolled out for this settler, in contrast to the police violence during the rare pacifist protest against the war, serves as a metaphor for the fundamental shift in Israel’s political map brought about by the December 2022 entry into government — alongside Netanyahu — of three messianic far-right nationalist parties that represent settlers like Weiss: Noam, Jewish Power, and National Religious Party–Religious Zionism (Mafdal-Religious Zionism).

These parties are minority forces, but “they have taken control of the government” because “Netanyahu needed them to regain power in 2022” and now relies on their support to stay in office, says Mairav Zonszein, senior analyst on Israel for the International Crisis Group.

The new Israeli military invasion of Gaza and the plundering, expulsion of Palestinians from their lands, and the colonization of the West Bank are happening at the same time — although the brutality of the offensive in the Gaza Strip casts a shadow over the abuses taking place in the other occupied Palestinian territory.

On the same day, March 22, that the government’s security cabinet — which determines the course of the war in Gaza — established a new administration within the Ministry of Defense to allow Gazans to “voluntarily” leave Gaza, it also granted approval to “divide 13 settlements in Judea and Samaria.” This effectively means doubling those and establishing an equivalent number of new settlements, which are illegal under international law.

As the world watches Israel raze what remains of Gaza, the Israeli government has authorized the construction of 16,820 settler homes in the West Bank so far this year, an all-time record, according to the Israeli NGO Peace Now.

Right-wing shift

Before Netanyahu brought them into government in December 2022, the extremism of these ultra-right parties was such that even Israel’s secular far right had kept them at arm’s length. They were pariahs.

The Israeli prime minister “would never have agreed to collaborate with them before,” says analyst Zonszein. But in 2022, Netanyahu had been in the opposition for a year and a half and, most importantly, had been indicted on charges of bribery, fraud, and breach of trust. Even though his party, the conservative Likud, won the election, he had become a political outcast to his former centrist allies — and even to parts of the Israeli right.

The far-right Mafdal-Religious Zionism, which won around 11% of the vote and became the third-largest parliamentary force with 14 seats, became Netanyahu’s near-only option for forming a coalition. With the support of its three parties — the two main ones being Jewish Power, led by Itamar Ben-Gvir, and Mafdal-Religious Zionism, headed by Bezalel Smotrich — along with two ultra-Orthodox parties, Netanyahu secured his sixth term as prime minister.

These forces then left the margins of Israeli politics and began setting the tone for the government on critical issues. First, in 2023, by pushing — for their own benefit and Netanyahu’s — the controversial judicial reform intended to strip the Supreme Court of its ability to strike down laws passed by Parliament. The proposal triggered massive protests, with hundreds of thousands of Israelis taking to the streets. Then, they shaped the course of Israel’s military offensive in Gaza, launched in response to Hamas’s attacks on October 7, 2023, in which nearly 1,200 people were killed and 251 kidnapped.

However, the normalization of Jewish Power and Mafdal-Religious Zionism would not have been possible if Israeli society had not shifted so far to the right over recent decades, while the Zionist left — which dominated Israeli politics during the country’s early decades — fell into irrelevance. Zionism is the colonial-origin project to establish a Jewish-majority state in historic Palestine.

Until around 2000, when the Oslo peace process with the Palestinians visibly collapsed, the Zionist left and right were roughly balanced with around 40% support each. Today, about 62% of Israelis identify as right-wing, while only 12% consider themselves left-wing.

This radicalization has a strong generational component. Young Israelis, who have barely known any prime minister other than Netanyahu, are overwhelmingly right-wing. According to a January survey by the Israel Democracy Institute, 73% of Israelis aged 15 to 24 identify as right-wing.

This shift is partly due to demographic reasons, explains Jorge Ramos Tolosa, a historian specializing in Palestine. Settlers and ultra-Orthodox Jews, who tend to vote right-wing, have large families — an average of seven children in the case of the ultra-Orthodox. Another reason, he argues, is the nature of a state “born at gunpoint, after the ethnic cleansing of the Nakba [catastrophe in Arabic],” referring to the expulsion or flight of 750,000 Palestinians due to the advance of Jewish militias and later the Israeli army between 1947 and 1949. This history, he says, fosters “militaristic dynamics and a security obsession” that “fit more easily into right-wing narratives than those of the left.”

Narratives like that of the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, once only openly endorsed by the religious far right, are now being publicly debated in Israeli media. When Trump announced his plan to expel Gaza’s native population, the Jewish People Policy Institute conducted a poll: 82% of Jewish Israelis supported the “relocation” of Gazans, while only 3% considered it “immoral.”

Hamas attacks

These underlying dynamics, which already existed before October 7, were exacerbated by the Hamas attacks, says Zonszein, accelerating Israelis’ rightward shift. Even pacifists like Anabel Friedlander — who joined the protest in Sderot — felt that Israel “had to respond” to Hamas’ actions, she recalls. Friedlander is a member of Women Wage Peace, one of the groups that organized Sunday’s demonstration and now calls for an end to the war.

The rhetoric that became widespread at the time, Zonszein notes, went far beyond that sentiment and evolved into the belief that “there is no way to achieve peace with the Palestinians; there are no innocents in Gaza.” This assumption “legitimized” settlers who had been promoting that ideology for decades. The Hamas attack, moreover, happened at a time when their political representatives were in an exceptionally powerful position, thanks to their coalition with Netanyahu.

When forming his coalition at the end of 2022, Netanyahu granted his ultra-right allies “the most important ministries in the cabinet,” says Zonszein.

Before the Hamas attacks, Itamar Ben-Gvir — a settler living in Kiryat Arba, near Hebron, who was convicted in 2007 for inciting racism — was already National Security Minister, meaning he was in charge of the police. The day after the Hamas massacre, he ordered the easing of gun license regulations for civilians.

Even before that, he had already made it easier for settlers to obtain firearms in the occupied West Bank. His arrival in government also marked a rise in impunity for settlers expelling and attacking Palestinians in the territory. Ben-Gvir is a member of the security cabinet, which makes key political decisions about the invasion of Gaza.

His ally Bezalel Smotrich, leader of the Mafdal-Religious Zionism Party, serves as Finance Minister, a strategic post that allows him to direct funds toward the construction of new settlements in the West Bank. The coalition with Likud also granted him additional powers within the Defense Ministry by creating the Settlement Administration, which oversees the colonies in the West Bank.

Smotrich is effectively a “minister of settlements,” controlling several key mechanisms Israel uses to dispossess Palestinians of their land, annex it, and legalize settlements. He also controls certain functions of COGAT, the military body responsible for approving aid entry into Gaza.

“The policies of the current government of Israel appear to be aligned, to an unprecedented extent, with the goals of the Israeli settler movement,” determined a February 2024 U.N. report on the West Bank.

Show of force

A far-right nationalist rally in Jerusalem on January 28 this year turned out to be a prophetic preview of what would unfold in Gaza. Titled the “Conference for Israel’s Victory: Settlements Bring Security,” the event was attended by no fewer than 10 ministers from four parties — Likud, Mafdal-Religious Zionism, Jewish Power, and United Torah Judaism — as well as 27 members of parliament. Nearly a quarter of the Israeli Knesset took part in this show of force, where speakers openly advocated for ethnic cleansing in Gaza, the re-establishment of settlements, and the military conquest of the enclave.

One of the speeches came from Eliyahu Libman, the head of the settlement where Ben Gvir lives, who declared: “Those who cannot be eliminated [in Gaza] must be expelled and disinherited; there are no innocent people.”

Israeli political scientist Gayil Talshir later said in an interview that the event served as a warning to Netanyahu.

Two days later, the prime minister visited an army training academy and promised a “total victory over Hamas.” On March 2, Netanyahu ordered a total blockade on the entry of humanitarian aid into Gaza. On March 18, he broke the ceasefire with Hamas to avoid negotiating an end to the war, and on May 5, he announced a military operation to conquer the Gaza Strip. Ben Gvir, who had left the government in January when the pause in Israeli attacks was agreed to, rejoined the cabinet when the bombings resumed.

According to Haizam Amirah Fernández, executive director of the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies (CEARC), it is now the settlers “who set the agenda and make the decisions, with Netanyahu’s complicity.” The prime minister’s top priority, says the expert, is “political survival,” but also ensuring he does not go down in history as “the failed leader” who did not prevent the Hamas attacks. To that end, he warns, Netanyahu “will do whatever it takes, even if it means sending young Israelis to war and death.”

Edo, who took part in the anti-war protest in Sderot, speaks with a trembling voice. This 20-year-old was not a pacifist. At first, he believed the Israeli offensive in Gaza was “to defend Israel.” He no longer thinks that — his view changed when Netanyahu broke the ceasefire with Hamas. Both his brothers, aged 24 and 26, are soldiers currently deployed in Gaza. “But they’re not there fighting for Israel, or for the Israeli hostages,” he says. “They’re there so Netanyahu can stay in power.”

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