Israel | In the last elections, the Juutalainen vima party barely crossed the vote threshold, now they are calling it a kingmaker

Israel head to the ballot box again on Tuesday. The parliamentary elections are already the fifth in almost four years. Prime minister Naphtali Bennett’s the season only lasted one year, and since July he has been replaced Yair Lapid.

Read more: Israel’s parliament dissolved, new elections will be held in November

Once again, the big question of the election is whether Israel’s power figure will return Benjamin Netanyahu as prime minister. Netanyahu ruled Israel as prime minister from 1996 to 1999 and from 2009 to 2019.

Netanyahu, 73, must come to power to avoid facing criminal charges of corruption. Netanyahu needs help, and it’s coming from the far right.

Multi like the rest of the country, Israel has moved further and further to the right.

“Extreme right-wingism continues to become mainstream. All mainstream parties support the use of more direct and harder measures,” says the doctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki Antti Tarvainenwhich follows elections in Israel and the occupied West Bank.

The most talked about character of the election is the one who lives in the settlements Itamar Ben-Gvir and his far-right party Jewish Power. It is a religious Zionist party that promotes the cause of settlers with extremely harsh rhetoric.

The story is familiar from many countries: in the last elections, the party barely crossed the vote threshold, now it is being called a kingmaker.

Juutalainen vima party is now the third largest in opinion polls in the country and the second largest among the right-wing parties. If Netanyahu is going to power, he can hardly avoid Ben-Gvir.

Benjamin Netanyahu is a hard-right politician himself. However, he represents secular Israel, and at one time his Likud party could be characterized as moderate. With Netanyahu, the party has moved further and further to the right, and other parties in its wake.

Election themes include reforming the judiciary so that it is under more direct political control. For example, Israeli soldiers who shot Palestinians would receive immunity from prosecution. There is an attempt to portray the Palestinians in Israel as a security threat.

With the exception of a few marginal left-wing parties – and of course Israel’s three Arab parties – all parties have adopted the same hard basic line.

Of them passing by on the right is the Jewish force, which often says the same things but even more provocatively. Last week, the leader of the party, Ben-Gvir, for example, went around waving his pistol in East Jerusalem.

“The rise in popularity of the party is part of the global rise of the populist right,” says Tarvainen.

“Israel has a long tradition of right-wing provocation, for example Ariel Sharon happened at the time of the second intifada on the Temple Mount, and since Israel’s independence, the messianic Zionist wing has been influential.”

Ben-Gvir likes to flirt with violence. Until a few years ago, he is said to have kept on his desk by Baruch Goldstein describes. Goldstein shot 29 Arabs at the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron in 1994.

Ben-Gvir’s mentor is a far-right rabbi Meir Kahanewhose party was banned in Israel in 1994. Kahane pushed for the annulment of the Palestinian nationality in Israel and the segregation of public spaces.

“Ben-Gvir has broken away from the most radical positions of his mentor and said that he does not support the deportation of all Palestinians from Israel. That also belongs to the contemporary right-wing rhetoric, that at the same time it is said and not said,” says Tarvainen.

last in the elections, Ben-Gvir was a marginal figure. It is not that Israel has now made a sudden turn to the extreme right – rather, the change has been slow and gradual.

The political deadlock of recent years has caused more moderate voters to sink into apathy. Ben-Gvir’s party is the only one that has brought energy to the election campaign.

“It might bring new voting groups. Very right-wing young people who have no biblical reason may vote for the party,” says Tarvainen.

The most apathetic of all are the Palestinians in Israel, who make up about a fifth of Israel’s citizens. Many boycotted the elections. The Arab parties may not even want to join the government, because last time they noticed that it was very difficult for them to get their goals through in the government, Tarvainen thinks.

Situation The occupied West Bank is now very tense.

Israel and the West Bank have had the bloodiest year since 2015. 18 Israelis have died in attacks by Palestinian militants.

At the same time, an estimated 130 Palestinians have died in Israeli attacks. New victims come every week. Israel strikes against militants, but bystanders often die in the strikes as well.

“The situation is really tight and tense. Nablus has been practically besieged for a second week, and there are attacks every night,” says Tarvainen on the phone from the West Bank near Ramallah.

The Leijonanluola movement, founded in Nablus only in August, is the first new group of Palestinian militants in a long time to raise armed resistance.

Read more: The bloodiest day of the year on the West Bank – Israel attacked the new Leijonanluola group

You would think that the situation in the West Bank would be the leading theme of the elections, but it appears quite a bit in the Israeli media or even in people’s speeches, says Tarvainen.

“The whole system is based on the fact that violence flares up somewhere, but normal life continues in Israel, and the problem is isolated as quickly as possible.”