THE ONLY EXISTENTIAL THREAT IS INTERNAL:

Some in the newer generation of Religious Zionists, raised entirely during the troubled settlement movement in the West Bank, have taken away a bitter lesson: The state and its institutions didn't care about them or even want to listen to their ideas. And so, those who cared about the settlers' future decided that the state would have to be taken over, year by year and bit by bit. One of them was a 25-year-old activist who had once closed down a highway to protest Israel's withdrawal from Gaza, leaving him in administrative detention. His name is Bezalel Smotrich. 

A rabbi's son, Smotrich grew up in Beit-El, a religious settlement in the West Bank. Unlike most young Religious Zionists, he spent years in a yeshiva, and, well past combat age, did only partial military service as an assistant adjutant. He studied law one day a week, not at an elite university but at Kiryat Ono Academic College, one of the small colleges that arose to meet the needs of students who are ineligible for or uninterested in the country's public universities.

Israeli society was getting used to a new kind of Religious Zionist -- Naftali Bennett -- elite commando officer, successful hi-tech entrepreneur, politically right, socially moderate, halakhically observant, but far from religiously intense. For many he seemed to validate a long-cherished dream among an early Religious Zionist party -- the National Religious Party (NRP) -- of full integration into Israeli society. Smotrich and others on the hard right viewed him and his ilk with scarcely disguised contempt. 

Smotrich entered public life as the founder of the "Regavim" movement ("Clods of Earth"), which seeks to counter what it sees as anarchic Bedouin land grabs in the Negev Desert. Smotrich became a member of the Knesset in 2015, in one of the factions into which the old NRP was splintering, beginning a political career in which he formally called for the dissolution of the Palestinian Authority in 2017, advocated for Israel to annex the West Bank and sought that Palestinians be given status as residents but not citizens unless they swore full allegiance to Israel. In a brief tenure as transportation minister, he proved himself an adept and capable administrator. 

An ideologue through and through, Smotrich thinks that he has a full understanding of the deeper currents of world history, Jewish history and the innermost processes of Israeli societal structures -- to such an extent that anyone can, with accuracy, pinpoint people's ideological errors and correct them to align with a proper understanding of society and the state. Unlike Religious Zionists of the past, Smotrich and his followers see themselves not as bridging figures between the state and society but as its true, deserving leaders: an intellectual avant-garde, like the Labor Zionist revolutionaries of old but with God on their side. 

And that is just one of the differences between him and his co-leader, Ben-Gvir. 

Born in Jerusalem to second-generation immigrants from Iraq and Kurdistan, Ben-Gvir grew up in the middle-class Jerusalem suburb of Mevaseret Zion. Like many Mizrahim (Jews from the Middle East and Central Asia), his family was neither Orthodox nor secular but lived a life best described as traditional: respect for Jewish religion, a deep sense of peoplehood, religious observance less rigorous but deeply felt and faithful and (crucially) not spelled out in ideological terms. 

The vehicle of Mizrahi politics in Israel's recent decades has been the Shas Party, which rose under the magisterial spiritual leadership of the late Rabbi Ovadia Yosef and the cunning genius of his political lieutenant Aryeh Deri, now the party's head and close confidante of Netanyahu. Sephardic traditionalism had long avoided the hard-and-fast ideological categories of the religious and secular borne out of the European experience. But starting in the 1980s, after decades of humiliation at the hands of the Ashkenazi establishment, Shas finally adopted the European paradigm, turning its broad traditionalism into a marching ideology. 

Ben-Gvir's own religious-ideological awakening at age 12 during the First Intifada of the late '80s and early '90s, though derived not from Shas but from the teachings of American-born Rabbi Meir Kahane, the founder of the far-right Jewish Defense League who emerged from the heady, radicalized New York of the 1960s and brought its furies to Zion.

A central element of Kahane's theology was revenge -- the Holocaust has so bent the horizons of morals and theology that only Jewish revenge can restore God's place in the world.

Ben-Gvir never met Kahane, who was killed in New York by an Egyptian-born American who was later implicated in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. But coming of age in the furies of the intifada and the convulsions of Oslo and seeking a deep religious identity other than the new Sephardic ultra-Orthodoxy of Shas or the, by now, sectoral ranks of Religious Zionism, Ben-Gvir found himself amid the ranks of Kahane's followers. He first came to public attention in 1995 through the theatricality that has marked his public life; brandishing for the cameras a hood ornament he claims he had taken from Rabin's car, he said that "the same way we got to this ornament, we can get to Rabin."

He became head of the youth wing of Kach (Kahane's political party) and, after high school, studied in Kahane's yeshiva. His youthful radicalism was so extreme that the Israel Defense Forces chose not to induct him into the army.

Over the years, Ben-Gvir became a regular target of Israeli police surveillance, and by early 2009, he had been indicted more than 45 times. Eventually, he went to law school and, after repeated appeals and an acquittal for an outstanding indictment, was admitted to the bar. He regularly represented Jewish activists from the farthest right of the spectrum, who assaulted mosques along with Israeli soldiers, hoping to inflame what to them are the unbridgeable tensions between being both a Jewish and democratic state.

As an attorney, Ben-Gvir proved himself an able advocate and talented showman and slowly made his way toward the political establishment, first as a parliamentary aide to a hard-right Knesset member and then as a candidate for a Kahanist party. Following a series of factional splits in the party, Ben-Gvir was elected to the Knesset in 2021 and subsequently merged his Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power) party with Smotrich and another one-person party. They ran again in 2022 and met with astonishing success.

In the Knesset, Ben-Gvir kept up his showmanship, moving his office to the deeply contested East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, the site of years of protests over the government's plans to evict Palestinian families who had lived there for generations to make way for Israeli settlements. To his mind, the prerequisite to coexistence with the Palestinians is their not harboring any national aspirations at all.

But the most critical point of all is the protesters' understanding of the term "democracy" -- an idea they have so intensely mobilized around. In both the so-called Balfour protests and the current ones against the judicial coup, democracy was a central demand; only a limited, albeit persistent, group of anti-occupation demonstrators sought to emphasize the connections between the violation of Palestinian rights in the occupied territories and Israel's ability to maintain a democratic regime.

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