Things have never looked brighter for the Israeli right’s political prospects. Israel’s current government is widely acknowledged as the most right-wing in the country’s history. The opposition is so weak and fragmented that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is practically leading the country unopposed. The decades-old project of expanding Jewish settlements into the West Bank has lured more than 300,000 Israelis into the West Bank, threatening to render the two-state solution obsolete.

Yet scratch beneath the surface and you’ll find that neither Netanyahu nor his allies on the religious right know what to do with this power. In fact, as its political influence grows, Israel’s right is becoming more aimless and confused. It excels at crushing its political adversaries, but doesn't know what to do once they’re vanquished. Much of its conduct over the past few years has been about buying time. It all comes down to the simple fact that the Israeli right has no endgame.

For the past 50 years, the major strategic goal of the right wing has been to formally annex the territories Israel occupied after the 1967 war. The idea was not merely to pass legislation extending Israeli sovereignty to these territories, but more importantly to make them part and parcel of what Israelis, Palestinians and the international community consider to be Israel. The aim was to attain wide recognition of the Jewish people’s right to these lands, first and foremost among Israeli Jews themselves. In this respect, the story of the Israeli right is one of absolute failure. Its success in prolonging the legal and political limbo of military occupation actually betrays its inability to go all the way to annexation.

A Discourse of Sovereignty

Why can’t the right, despite its political dominance, fulfill its larger vision of extending Israel’s sovereign borders to encompass what many on the right call “Greater Israel”? The answer is the same as it always has been: That vision is not politically viable. Israelis are just not into it. Leaders on the right understand that, if forced to choose, most Israelis would favor the two-state solution over annexing the West Bank. After all, annexation would mean either naturalizing some 3 million Palestinians—thus putting an end to the Jewish state—or diving headlong into international isolation, with devastating consequences for the economy. Knowing full well that its actual ambitions are anathema to the majority of Israelis, the right has instead put its energies into postponing the moment of choice.

As its political influence grows, Israel’s right is becoming more aimless and confused.

What is the underlying logic of this politics of postponement? Originally, the settlements were merely a means to an end, the end being the establishment of Jewish sovereignty over the West Bank, and previously also Gaza and Sinai. But the past two decades have seen the means run wild as the end goal proved unfeasible. Today, talk of annexing the territories is restricted to the fringes of the Israeli right. While Greater Israel is still one of the right wing’s deepest aspirations, the policy ideas and legislation the right proposes are almost invariably publicity stunts designed to shore up short-term support and divert attention from the long-term impasse.

The settlement movement began as the brainchild of a small group of religious zealots who subscribed to a particular strand of Jewish political theology inspired by Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook. Kook, who died in 1935, considered the return of the Jews to their ancestral homeland as the beginning of the redemption of the Jewish people. His teachings were relatively marginal until the 1970s, when religious Zionism was still known for its moderation and its political alliance with the leftist Labor movement. In the euphoria following Israel’s conquests in the 1967 war, however, young religious activists turned Kook’s messianic view of history into a political platform. A small group, guided by Kook’s son, began to gradually take over the institutions and ideology of religious Zionism, devoting itself to the sacred duty of settling the land of Israel. This group, called Gush Emunim, or “the bloc of the faithful,” transformed the very meaning of religious Zionism from Zionists who happened to be religious to a conception of Zionism and the state of Israel as divine instruments. Their newfound eagerness and devotion turned the national-religious movement into a major force in Israeli politics, while driving it further away from the pragmatic, earthbound concerns of the general Israeli public.

Israeli settlers watch the demolition of a building at the Jewish settlement of Beit El, West Bank, July 29, 2015 (AP photo by Tsafrir Abayov).

Settlers are acutely aware of the conflict between their messianic theology and the motivations of regular Israelis. More importantly, they know that this split may one day seal the fate of their project. In 1984, after the settlement of Yamit in the Sinai Peninsula was evacuated following Israel’s 1979 peace treaty with Egypt, one of the founders of Gush Emunim, Yoel Bin Nun, warned in an article for Gush Emumim’s magazine, Nekuda: “Our victory or loss will be decided by the hearts of the people and by the political or public mood. . . . [W]e cannot succeed without support from the majority.” He added that for settlers were mistaken “to think that the number of people or houses [in settlements] can serve as a guarantee.”

Bin Nun’s admonition that winning over the hearts and minds of Israelis is more crucial than occupying hilltops began a new phase in the settler movement’s approach toward the Israeli public. Settlers now turned their efforts to “settling in the hearts,” as Bin Nun called it. And what began as an attempt to draw Israelis to their side gradually turned into a wide-ranging effort to take over positions of power and influence in the government, military, media and, more recently, the courts.

Institutionalizing the Religious Right

Settlers’ ascendance in the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) has been particularly notable. Over the past two decades, estimates indicate that the proportion of religious graduates of IDF officer training courses rose from about 2 percent to some 40 percent; there is little official data on the increase—the last reliable statistics, from 2007, indicate that the number of religious officers rose from 2.5 percent in 1990 to 30 percent in 2007. This transformed the nature of the Israeli army, creating tension between its traditional designation as “the people’s army” and an increasingly dominant image of it as “the Lord’s army.” In 2014, before sending troops into combat in Gaza as part of Israel’s Operation Protective Edge, Col. Ofer Winter, an IDF brigade commander, wrote to his soldiers: “History has chosen us to spearhead the battle against the Gazan terrorist enemy who curses, reviles and abominates the God of the armies of Israel.” Winter was widely criticized for turning the military mission into a holy war and for imposing a religious agenda on his soldiers. But his dispatch on the eve of the incursion was merely a symptom of the culture war that is threatening the very foundations of the IDF.

Settlers are acutely aware of the conflict between their messianic theology and the motivations of regular Israelis.

This tension has escalated in recent months, reaching a boiling point after Elor Azaria, an Israeli soldier, executed a Palestinian who lay wounded and unarmed on the ground after stabbing one of Azaria’s fellow soldiers in Hebron in March. The execution stirred heated debate in Israel, with many on the right siding with Azaria against the official position of the army, which charged Azaria with manslaughter. The affair hastened the resignation of then-Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon, who joined Chief of Staff Gen. Gadi Eizenkot in expressing a commitment to the IDF’s standard of ethical warfare.

Their declarations may well have been principled, but they also reflect a growing concern among the IDF’s top brass about conceding the chain of command to the rabbis. Eizenkot recently decided to remove the Orwellian-sounding Department of Jewish Consciousness from the Military Rabbinate’s jurisdiction, placing it under the direct responsibility of the IDF’s manpower directorate, which is currently headed by a secular officer disdained by the national-religious establishment. Since it was founded in 2001, the department has been the spearhead of the religious right’s efforts to exploit the IDF’s authority over soldiers for religious and political indoctrination.

Eizenkot’s decision led to an unprecedented attack on the army from the religious Zionist establishment. In a recent public lecture, Yigal Levinstein, a prominent rabbi and educator and co-founder of Bnei David, the premier pre-military academy for national-religious youths, railed against what he believes are radical changes in IDF values. In his telling, they began with the integration of women into combat roles in the late 1990s and have been escalating in the past couple of years. Levinstein fulminated in particular against the army’s tolerance of gay people, to whom he referred repeatedly as “perverts.”

Although the lecture caused uproar, mainly in response to Levinstein’s homophobia, it revealed more than just the bigotry often on display from Israel’s religious ultra-conservatives. Decrying the army’s supposed adoption of democratic and pluralistic values, Levinstein described a subterranean culture war in which the military establishment is seeking to either re-educate religious soldiers—and especially officers—or get rid of them. In a fascinating admission of the growing rift between the military and the settler movement, Levinstein said, “We used to be the darlings of the IDF. Today we’re considered a risk. . . . Today they’re apprehensive about our motivations—especially about our deep national sentiment and its connection to religion. From their perspective it’s an extremely dangerous thing.”

Levinstein appeared genuinely shocked and betrayed; what is most striking, however, is that the IDF has let things get this far. The worldview that Levinstein represents is ultimately incompatible with military hierarchy, popular sovereignty and the rule of law. “We are all Ofer Winter,” he said, referring to the officer who had called upon his soldiers to wage holy war in Gaza. “We fight for the glory of God. We don’t work for anyone other than God Almighty.”

It is hard to overstate Levinstein’s prominence in the religious-Zionist world. Although not a religious authority himself, Levinstein educates the military-settler elite and heads an institution that is a veritable production line for IDF officers. He belongs to a subsection known as Hardalim—a Hebrew portmanteau of the words “ultra-orthodox” and “national-religious.” As the most religiously devout sect within religious Zionism, the Hardalim enjoy moral authority over the more moderate, modern branch sometimes dubbed the “religious-lite.”

Levinstein described a subterranean culture war in which the military establishment is seeking to either re-educate religious soldiers or get rid of them.

Naftali Bennett, a former army officer, tech millionaire and currently minister of education, took over the National Religious Party—now called the Jewish Home—in 2012 by mobilizing youths from the pre-military academies that Levinstein had set up. But his campaign for the March 2015 general elections downplayed the religious identity of his party, focusing instead on promoting a chummy image of himself with slogans like “Bennett is a Bro!” Bennett’s goal is to draw religious Zionism into the mainstream, making himself over as a potential prime minister in the process.

This puts him naturally at odds with the ultra-conservatism of the Hardalim. In an attempt to dodge the fallout from Levinstein’s tirade against the LGBTQ community, Bennett said, “This is not the way of religious Zionism.” However, he was quickly rebuked by more than 300 prominent religious Zionist rabbis who signed public letters in support of Levinstein.

Naftali Bennett addresses journalists and diplomats at The Israel Project’s pre-election foreign policy debate, Jerusalem, Jan. 8, 2013 (Israel Project photo by Mati Milstein via flickr).

Sooner or later, Israel’s religious right will have to choose between God and power. The theocratic regime that Levinstein and his peers envision for Israel is not quite what the vast majority of Israelis—including a substantial chunk of religious Israelis—wish for themselves. The frenetic religious Zionist race to take control of the Israeli establishment would doubtless be slowed by greater public awareness of the actual agenda of the rabbis who still hold considerable sway over the national-religious crowd. Bennett is gingerly trying to distance himself from the Hardalim, but it remains to be seen whether a complete break is in store.

The Right’s Other Wing

Where is the secular right in all this? Arguably, it no longer exists as an independent ideology in Israel. The ascendance of the religious right forced secular elements in the governing Likud Party, formerly a bastion of European-style nationalism with strong liberal inclinations, to assimilate into the religious-Zionist framework or face electoral damnation. The last remnants of the secular right were purged during the 2012 Likud primaries, in a dynamic largely similar to that of the Tea Party in U.S. politics, albeit more successful. The goal of the religious right’s ideological and, in some respects, institutional takeover of Likud is not to impose a religious outlook, but rather to safeguard the interests of the settlement project by keeping the ruling party in a headlock.

Settlers learned this lesson the hard way in the past when, in several instances, the secular right left them in the lurch. While the religious right dreams of a theocratic empire, the right wing’s political support in Israel is based on hostility toward the Palestinians and the belief that the right does a better job than the left of keeping the country safe. Indeed, when free from messianic commitments, the secular right in Israel tends to be pragmatic and often carries out policies associated with the left: Former Prime Minister Menachem Begin withdrew from the Sinai Peninsula in 1982; former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon withdrew from the Gaza Strip in 2005; and his successor, Ehud Olmert, offered the Palestinians a more far-reaching peace deal in 2008 than his Labor Party predecessors.

Sooner or later, Israel’s religious right will have to choose between God and power.

The settler movement has learned to distrust its secular partners, who place security and the public interest above religious and metaphysical commitments, thereby often coming dangerously close to converging with the left. The army’s swift and resolute execution of the evacuation of Jewish settlements from Gaza in 2005 left the religious right particularly traumatized.

If Netanyahu sees his term through, he will become Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, surpassing David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister and the primary founder of modern Israel. Unlike Ben-Gurion, however, Netanyahu’s record in office is thoroughly unimpressive. If his term were to end prematurely, perhaps due to corruption allegations that surfaced in July, he will be remembered not for what he accomplished, but for what he prevented from being accomplished—most notably, an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank.

This is not an incidental feature of his leadership. Netanyahu sees his role in historical terms, but his perception of history, and especially Jewish history, is dark and pessimistic. He is notorious for saying that his responsibility as prime minister is not for the quality of life in Israel but rather for “life itself”—that is, for keeping Israelis alive. In an interview with Fareed Zakaria at the World Economic Forum in Davos earlier this year, Netanyahu voiced this aspiration clearly: “I would like to be remembered as the protector of Israel. That’s enough for me.”

The paradox underlying Netanyahu’s politics is that he is a thoroughly secular person who believes in the imminence, and perhaps inevitability, of apocalyptic catastrophe. In this respect, his worldview is diametrically opposed to that of the religious Zionists: They fantasize about divine redemption; he dreads earthly calamity. They seek to bring about the end of days; he intends to forestall it. But their alliance is based on a strong mutual belief in the necessity of holding on to the occupied territories.

What the Politics of Postponement Means for Peace

Those who believe that Netanyahu is willing to cut a deal with the Palestinians have tragically misunderstood him. For Netanyahu, the Palestinians are merely the latest incarnation of the eternal enemy of the Jewish people. “In every generation, they rise against us to annihilate us,” reads the Passover Haggadah. Netanyahu’s worldview can be summed up as the belief that Israelis cannot count on God to save them from their enemies, as the Haggadah suggests. Zionism, for Netanyahu, did not change the fundamental condition of the Jewish people; Jews, as he sees it, are still threatened, maligned and oppressed. But for Netanyahu, Zionism gave Jews the strength to ward off their enemies, at least for the time being. Compromise and reconciliation with those who wish to annihilate Jews would be foolish, naïve and possibly suicidal. Therefore, the idea that Netanyahu has somehow crossed the Rubicon with respect to accepting the two-state solution is dangerous wishful thinking that has greatly damaged the peace process.

It is no coincidence that in his first term, from 1996-1999, Netanyahu’s nickname in Israel was “the magician.” He is a master illusionist. And the secret to his magic is his ability to hide a stern, uncompromising worldview under a veneer of political opportunism. Despite the common wisdom, however, Netanyahu is not out only for his own political survival. He is an ideologue with a particular mission, which he envisions in world-historical terms. He talks the talk of the two-state solution, but he will not budge an inch.

Netanyahu sees his role in historical terms, but his perception of history, and especially Jewish history, is dark and pessimistic.

Netanyahu and the religious right have come to the politics of postponement from opposing premises. The religious Zionists wish to delay the moment of choice, since their grand messianic vision is not attainable within the current social and political conditions in Israel. Netanyahu prefers the relative safety of the status quo to the known and unknown dangers of moving toward partition or annexation.

But the politics of postponement falls short of dealing with the actual risks and challenges that Israel faces. It generates no solution to the waves of terrorism that will continue to strike Israel as long as the conflict with the Palestinians remains unresolved. It provides no remedy to the serious effects of the occupation of the West Bank on Israel’s democracy and culture. And it offers no future other than continuing the unsatisfactory present. The status quo is far less stable than Netanyahu seems to believe. Sooner or later, the Israeli public will have to choose between partition and annexation. When this moment comes, the right wing’s winning streak may come to a surprising halt.