opinion
Israel’s New Government Is
Precisely What You’ve Heard
A Michael J. Koplow
couple of days before Prime Minister
Binyamin Netanyahu began his third stint
as prime minister, his new double-hatted
finance minister and minister in the Defense Ministry
Bezalel Smotrich penned an op-ed in the Wall Street
Journal purporting to explain the new government’s
motivations. Entitled “Israel’s New Government Isn’t What
You’ve Heard,” Smotrich’s aim was to disabuse
Americans of the notion that the new Israeli govern-
ment is out to fundamentally transform the state and
its institutions in ways that may look nefarious from
this side of the ocean. In fact, according to Smotrich,
the intention of the new government is not to scare
Americans, but to emulate them by pursuing a classi-
cally liberal agenda of freedom of conscience, free
markets, individual rights, and checks and balances
directly drawn from the liberal American model. For
years, Israelis have told Americans that we have
unrealistic expectations that they conform to our
democratic model and liberal practices, and lo and
behold the paragon of religious nationalist Israeli
politics is apparently now on our side!
Yet before anyone anoints Smotrich as a modern-
day Israeli combination of John Locke and Oliver
Wendell Holmes, a bit of perspective is in order.

Smotrich’s tendentious op-ed is indeed an Israeli
message to Americans, but it is an old one rather
than a new one. It continues the dubious Israeli Sallah
Shabati tradition of assuming that most Americans
don’t know enough to challenge Israeli claims that
stretch the truth to absurd proportions.

Smotrich has hit upon a clever trick of appealing to
notions of American exceptionalism and pretending
that Israel wants to be like us, understanding that
the key to getting Americans to begin defending
unprecedented Israeli behavior will be to do the very
thing that Israelis admonish Americans for doing
by creating false equivalencies between here and
there. In this case, however, Smotrich either does
not understand the American system, is deliberately
misrepresenting his own plans and policies, or both.

Take the paragraph on religion and state. Smotrich
locates the new government’s plans in a fundamen-
tal American axiom of religious freedom, writing
that the only thing being sought is to prevent
religious Israelis from being punished for their beliefs
without coercing secular Israelis into having to abide
by religious dictates. This sounds compelling, and
Smotrich claims it is no different than recent U.S.

14 JANUARY 12, 2023 | JEWISH EXPONENT
Supreme Court jurisprudence on religious freedom.

Naturally, Smotrich elides that, unlike the U.S. with
its separation of church and state, Israel’s system is
one where state and religion are deliberately inter-
twined, and thus the government is able to impose
all manner of religious strictures in ways that make
any comparison to American legal principles absurd.

But where he truly misleads is in his description of
what the government wants to do. The new coali-
tion is not interested in preventing religious Israelis
from being punished for their beliefs; it is interested
in preventing this for only some religious Israelis. If
you are a religious Israeli who believes, for instance,
that you have the right to take a Torah scroll to the
women’s section of the Western Wall, you are out
of luck. The new coalition is also not interested in
legislating greater freedom of religious expression
without coercing secular Israelis, unless your version
of non-coercion includes building neighborhoods
that can exclude non-haredi and non-Orthodox Jews
by law or forcing secular Israelis to sit in even more
endless traffic jams because no state-funded public
works projects can be operational on Saturdays.

But where Smotrich’s op-ed is at its most dissem-
bling is in its discussion of Palestinians and the
West Bank. The main problem is not, as Smotrich
writes, that “a feckless military government lacks
the civil-service orientation required for governing
civil life.” The problem is that temporary military
occupations lack the orientation required to sustain
themselves for over half a century, and that keeping
85% of the population living there in a situation of
permanent statelessness and with no path to citizen-
ship and political rights does not meet any conceiv-
able definition of civil life.

Smotrich knows full well that Israel will not, as he
claims, develop the area for the benefit of all, partic-
ularly when the very next paragraph is devoted to
complaints about a Palestinian takeover of Area C,
which is the 60% of the West Bank over which he
has jurisdiction in his new position in the Defense
Ministry. Saying that you intend to promote Jewish
rights and development while curtailing the same for
Palestinians will not comport with American sensi-
bilities, and thus Smotrich prepares a word salad
of “efficient service” and “individual rights” without
saying that he intends this only for Israelis but also
without explicitly saying that he intends to apply
these standards equally to Israelis and Palestinians.

There is, however, one spot where Smotrich is
blatantly dishonest, which is in his pledge that his
proposed set of reforms “doesn’t entail changing the
political or legal status of the area.” Say what you will
about U.S. policies around the globe, but whether
it is Iraq, Afghanistan, or Guantanamo, the U.S. is
clear that it will not annex the extra-territorial spots
that it militarily occupies, and it governs them under
military administration. Smotrich understands that if
he is arguing that Israel is simply trying to emulate
the U.S., he has to talk about rights and benefits
rather than about annexation and sovereignty. But
this is where his stretching the bounds of credulity
actually breaks them.

The coalition agreement between Likud and
Smotrich’s Religious Zionism calls for Israeli settle-
ment outposts that are illegal under Israeli law to be
retroactively legalized, which certainly qualifies as
changing the legal status of areas in the West Bank. It
calls for applying sovereignty to Judea and Samaria,
which certainly qualifies as changing both the polit-
ical and legal status of the West Bank. It calls for
repealing the 2005 disengagement law that made it
illegal for Israelis to enter four evacuated settle-
ments in the northern West Bank — one of which,
Homesh, the new government this week announced
its intention to legalize immediately despite the fact
that it was built on private Palestinian land — which
again qualifies as changing the legal status of areas
in the West Bank. Perhaps Smotrich justifies this line
because he genuinely views the West Bank as terri-
tory that already rightly and legally belongs to Israel,
and thus these moves would not change any political
or legal status. But by any reasonable and objective
definition, he is outright lying, and thinks that he is
doing it in a way that is savvy enough to fool all of us
gullible English speakers, who don’t know any better.

Smotrich has no intention of “bringing Israel more
closely in line with the liberal American model,” as
he writes, but is looking to craft a new and distinctly
Israeli model. It is a model that prioritizes Jewish
supremacy, religious observance, and Greater Israel
territorial maximalism.

As an Israeli minister elected by the Israeli people,
he can pursue whatever policies he pleases, but
nobody should mistake them as an effort to bring
Israel in line with the American political and legal
tradition. That he does not want to admit that when
addressing American audiences, and instead believes
that he needs to dress up his wolf in sheep’s clothing,
says more about him than it does about us. ■
Michael Koplow is Israel Policy Forum’s chief policy
officer, based in Washington, D.C. This op-ed was
originally published by Israel Policy Forum.