Last week we reported that Israel became more traditional<\/a>. Today we look at ideology, where the story is slightly different. When it comes to ideology, there is no need for a familiar \u201con the one hand\u201d (most Israelis became more traditional) and \u201con the other hand\u201d (seculars became less traditional). On the question of left and right everybody is moving in the same direction. To the right.<\/p>\nWe should be precise about what we measured. We asked people to tell us where they were politically before the war, and where they place themselves today. This is not a measure of concrete movement over time but a measure of felt movement. Israelis say: \u201cI moved to the right.\u201d Did they really? That will require other data sets. But the very fact that they feel they have moved is meaningful.<\/p>\n
When an Israeli says \u201cI shifted to the right,\u201d he or she is sending us a message: I became more suspicious of peace processes, more skeptical of concessions, more demanding about security guarantees. \u201cI moved right\u201d is another way of saying: don\u2019t expect from me the same positions I expressed before the war. My situation changed; my stance changed.<\/p>\n
To capture this movement, we used an unusually detailed scale. Not the classic five definitions \u2013 left, center-left, center, center-right, right \u2013 but nine rungs, from \u201cdeep left\u201d to \u201cdeep right.\u201d Why? Because many people feel a slight shift that is not strong enough to justify jumping from \u201ccenter\u201d to \u201cright.\u201d On a coarser five-point scale they will stay where they are. On a nine-point scale, they can inch from \u201ccenter\u201d to \u201cright close to center,\u201d or from \u201cright\u201d to \u201cdeep right\u201d \u2014 and we can see it.<\/p>\n
And this is, in fact, what we see: not dramatic leaps from \u201cleft\u201d to \u201cright,\u201d but small, consistent steps to the right. A notch here, a notch there. From \u201cleft close to center\u201d to \u201ccenter.\u201d From \u201ccenter-right\u201d to \u201cmoderate right.\u201d From \u201cright\u201d to \u201cdeep right.\u201d In most cases, it\u2019s one step on the ladder. But it happens almost everywhere, in almost every group.<\/p>\n
Take one example from the table behind the survey (the table is on the right-hand column). Among Israelis who say that before the war they were \u201cright close to center,\u201d only a bit more than a third \u2014 36% \u2014 say they are still \u201cright close to center\u201d today. The rest moved. Some of them moved left or to the center, but many more moved right: 29% now define themselves as \u201cmoderate right,\u201d 17% as \u201cright,\u201d and 7% as \u201cdeep right.\u201d Add these up, and you get a clear result: 53% of this group shifted to the right. A majority of those who were already somewhat right-wing moved further right.<\/p>\n
Once you understand how the table works, it becomes easy to see the pattern. For most starting points on the ideological scale, there are more people moving right than left. In many groups the main move is just one step, but it is almost always in the same direction. The \u201cdeep right\u201d has nowhere to go, so it mostly stays put. The center and the center-left still exist, but many within them report a gentle drift rightward. The \u201cdeep left\u201d is so small in the sample that we cannot say anything statistically meaningful about it \u2014 which is, in itself, a kind of result.<\/p>\n
This is similar to what happened to Israelis 25 years ago. A Palestinian campaign of violence \u2013 the Second Intifada \u2013 leads to a change in attitudes among those under attack. After the Second Intifada, Israel became significantly more right-wing on diplomatic issues and never truly swung back. The \u201cpeace camp\u201d of the 1990s evaporated in the 2000s.<\/p>\n
Of course, there is still an Israeli camp that calls itself \u201ccenter\u201d or \u201ccenter-left,\u201d but it is no longer defined primarily by its stance toward the Palestinians. On that front, much of this camp accepts what used to be called \u201cright-wing positions\u201d: deep suspicion of Palestinian intentions, insistence on strong security control, skepticism about a final-status agreement. A country that has lived through another round of trauma, and that now sees itself \u2013 and its political place on the map \u2013 somewhat further to the right than before. The coming campaigns are likely to be fought less over Oslo and more over the Supreme Court, over ultra-Orthodox conscription, over corruption and governance.<\/p>\n
Jewish Journal<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When an Israeli says \u201cI shifted to the right,\u201d he or she is sending us a message: I became more suspicious of peace processes, more skeptical of concessions, more demanding about security guarantees.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":21548,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"tags":[],"class_list":["post-27539","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","topics-identity","library-op-ed","library-publications"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jppi.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27539","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jppi.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jppi.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jppi.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jppi.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27539"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/jppi.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27539\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27769,"href":"https:\/\/jppi.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27539\/revisions\/27769"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jppi.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21548"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jppi.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27539"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jppi.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27539"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}