What ‘right’ and ‘left’ mean in Israel today
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x whatsapp-stroke copylink google Add Al Jazeera on Google info Yair Golan, head of the "left-wing" Democrats party, addresses Israeli anti-government protesters during a demonstration against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Tel Aviv on November 8, 2025 [AFP] By Ehab Jabareen Palestinian political analyst and researcher from inside Israel.
For readers outside Israel, the words “right” and “left” can be misleading when applied to Israeli politics. In Europe or the United States, those labels are usually organised around taxation, welfare, labour, immigration, race, religion and the size of government. Israel has versions of these debates, but they do not structure its party system in the same way.
For decades, the Israeli divide has centred on a different set of questions: the Palestinians, territory, security, settlements, the meaning of Zionism and the tension between the Jewish character of the state and its democratic institutions. Economic and social policy still matter, but they often cut across the camps rather than defining them. A politician can favour state intervention in the economy and still be treated as firmly right-wing; another can be socially liberal and remain inside the nationalist camp.
Historically, the divide had a stronger economic and institutional dimension. The Israeli left was identified with Labor Zionism and the bodies that built the state: the Histadrut, the kibbutz movement, state-led development and a relatively collectivist model of growth. The right, rooted in the Revisionist tradition and later organised around Likud, challenged Labor’s long dominance and placed greater emphasis on Jewish historical claims to the land, a more nationalist idea of sovereignty and, over time, a more market-friendly economic outlook. That divide did not disappear, but it ceased to be the defining one.
After 1967, and more clearly after Oslo in the 1990s, Israeli politics increasingly centred on the territories and the Palestinians living in them. The left became associated with territorial compromise, negotiations and the claim that some form of separation from the Palestinians was needed if Israel was to remain both Jewish and democratic. The right became associated with opposition to a Palestinian state, support for settlement and the claim that withdrawal would produce new security threats rather than settle the conflict.
The second Intifada did more than any single economic debate to weaken the left among Jewish voters. For many, the violence of the early 2000s was read as proof that the Oslo Accords had failed, or at least that concessions did not reliably produce peace. The withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005, Hamas’s takeover and the rounds of fighting that followed hardened that reading. The October 7, 2023 attacks did not create the shift. It accelerated a movement already under way, making security and Jewish identity even more central than they had been in the years after Oslo.
What it means to be “right-wing” in Israel today is above all to take a harder line on Palestinian national claims, security and territorial control. That can include rejecting a Palestinian state altogether, or accepting only a very reduced form of Palestinian self-rule that falls well short of sovereign independence. Illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank are no longer treated across this camp as a temporary bargaining chip that can be easily traded away. For parts of the right, it is a security asset; for others, it is also a national and religious project. The Jewish nation-state is not a side issue here. It is the frame.
This right is not automatically a US-style conservative bloc on the economy. Likud still presents itself as relatively market-oriented, but Israeli right-wing politics can live quite comfortably with subsidies, public employment, housing support and large transfers when they serve coalition needs or particular constituencies. The right is more unified around security, sovereignty and the Jewish character of the state than around a single theory of markets.
Likud remains the main vehicle of that camp. It mixes nationalism, scepticism towards Palestinian statehood and a strong security posture, while drawing secular voters, traditional Jews, religious Jews and people whose first identity is nationalist rather than theological. To its right sit parties such as Religious Zionism and Otzma Yehudit, where nationalism is joined to a more explicitly religious reading of the land. For those currents, settlement is not only strategy. It can be understood as the fulfilment of a historical and religious claim, making territorial compromise harder to treat as a technical matter.
The same currents have been more willing than the older Likud establishment to confront the Supreme Court, the attorney general and parts of the security elite when those institutions are seen as blocking an elected right-wing majority. The fight over judicial reform before October 7 grew out of that suspicion, with supporters arguing that elected politicians should recover power and opponents warning that the reform would weaken one of the few remaining checks on government. The argument did not disappear after the war. It was postponed, then returned in a more crowded field of security and identity questions.
The Zionist centre and what remains of the Zionist left sit…
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