The Rise and Prospects of Israeli Conservatism

For more than a half-century, public debate in Israel has been dominated by two large sets of issues: externally, how to work for peace while maintaining maximum security; domestically, how to navigate the relationship between religion and state. But when it came to social and economic policy, debate gave way to across-the-board consensus: for decades, it was taken largely for granted that welfare-state economics and heavy government regulation made up the sine qua non of the good society.

The past few years, however, have seen a subtle yet quite dramatic change. Several new issues have become prominent in public debate, and acutely so during the recent election campaigns. The deficiencies and limitations of the regulatory welfare state are now openly discussed. So is the question of how to define Israel as the Jewish nation-state, and how to do so in terms of its national character—a question distinct from the persistent debates about religion and state.

Such issues happen to be central to the concerns of conservatives and classical liberals—and, indeed, more and more openly conservative voices have been making their views known. Thus, for example, a host of young politicians have championed far-reaching free-market reforms. For another example, after years of debate and gestation the Knesset last year passed a law declaring and defining Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people and listing a number of specific manifestations of that definition (among them its flag, anthem, calendar, language, connection to the Jewish Diaspora, and immigration and settlement policies). In May 2019. the first annual conference on the subject of conservatism in Israel, sponsored by the Tikvah Fund, was held in Jerusalem, attracting wide media attention and close to one-thousand energetic and mostly young participants.