The Netanyahu Era

Tells the story behind the rise of national-conservative populism in Israel across multiple arenas, including the judiciary, foreign affairs, and the media, and the cultural battle over Israeli identity, all of which are rooted in the struggle over Israeli democracy.

This book offers the first in-depth ideological exposition of the makeup of Benjamin Netanyahu's rule, highlighting the profound transformation of the once-shared worldview featuring Israel as both Jewish and democratic. The Netanyahu era took Israeli society from a representative democracy, an egalitarian state with universal welfare and public education based on a collective Israeli identity, to a neoliberal, polarized Jewish state. Israel is perhaps a "startup nation," but it is also a fragmented, ethnically divided society. Netanyahu's creation of the National Camp as an anti-Zionist revolution rolled back secular nationalism to reincarnate Jewish religion as state ideology. It facilitated the dominance of Jewish supremacy engulfed in a full-scale regime change from a national-liberal democracy to a national-conservative populist autocracy in his sixth government. Netanyahu did not just follow the authoritarian protocol-he invented much of it, setting the stage for other populist leaders seeking to transform democracy from within. He executed the Deep State agenda before the term was coined. Under his rule, ideological transformation was cemented into structural changes in diverse arenas, transforming Israeli democracy beyond recognition.