Secular Right in Israeli Politics

"Secular right" is not the name of a single, formally defined Israeli political movement. Sources apply the phrase variously: as a description of a recognizable political tendency, as a label for specific parties in particular electoral contexts, and in survey data distinguishing religious identity from political self-identification.[1] The Library of Congress country study of Israel in the 1980s identified secular left-of-center, secular right-of-center, and religious right-of-center tendencies, noting that secular Jews held varied conservative, liberal, or socialist views. Secular identity alone therefore did not determine a person's left-right position.[5]

At its core, the orientation combines hawkish positions on security and diplomacy with opposition to religious coercion.[6][4] In party politics, recurring issues include Haredi military service and Shabbat commerce.[7][4] Israel Democracy Institute data reported by N12 found that approximately one-quarter of Israeli Jews who self-identified as right-wing were secular, with the remainder comprising roughly one-quarter traditional-but-nonreligious, about one-third religious-traditional or religious, and about 15% ultra-Orthodox.[8] The self-identified left, by contrast, was reported as 83% secular.[8]

The intellectual roots of the secular right in Israel trace to the Revisionist Zionist movement founded by Vladimir Jabotinsky in 1925, the organizational precursor of today's Likud.[9] Avi Shilon argues that at that stage Jabotinsky was a secular Jew who envisioned modern Jewish nationalism as part of a Western secular revolution and favored a Jewish state on a classical-liberal model, with no official role for religion in government.[9] Jabotinsky's attitude toward religion evolved later in his life, and Hillel Halkin argues that his Revisionist Party ultimately helped lay the groundwork for an eventual alliance of right-wing nationalism, religious Orthodoxy, and Mizrahi Jews.[10]

Herut, established in 1948 by Menachem Begin and based on the Irgun, carried the Revisionist heritage into Israeli statehood, advocating for the unity of Eretz Israel within its historic boundaries.[11] In 1965, Herut entered a parliamentary and electoral bloc with the Liberal Party called Gahal.[11] In 1973, Gahal joined additional groups to establish Likud, which emerged as the largest parliamentary group in 1977 and brought the Israeli right to power for the first time.[12]

Halkin notes that Jabotinsky's militancy toward the British and Arabs, his pro-free-enterprise views, and his sympathy for Jewish religious tradition appealed to Mizrahi Jews, who during the late British Mandate years were more active in the Revisionist-affiliated Irgun than in the mainstream, left-leaning Haganah.[10]

Tzomet, led by former IDF Chief of Staff Rafael Eitan, represented a further iteration of the secular-right tendency in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It explicitly sought secular right-wing voters, winning two Knesset seats in 1988 and eight in 1992, making it the strongest right-wing party competing with Likud in that election.[13]

Likud occupies an ambiguous position in discussions of the secular right. It is described as a secular or largely secular center-right party while also being more traditional and respectful of Jewish heritage than Labor.[12][14] Historically, it has supported the settlement enterprise in the West Bank — known by its original, indigenous Jewish name of Judea and Samaria — and liberal or free-market economic policies.[6][12] Yisrael Beiteinu, by contrast, has made a secular-right identity explicit in its own rhetoric.[4]

Pew Research Center's 2014–2015 survey found that Likud was the most common party affiliation among both Masortim (traditional Jews) and Hilonim (secular Jews), and characterized Likud at the time as a largely secular, center-right party.[14] An Israel Democracy Institute analysis reported by The Jerusalem Post found that 28.1% of Likud voters identified as secular, compared with 81.1% of Yesh Atid voters.[15]

A SAPIR Journal essay describes many Mizrahi Likud supporters as leading largely secular lives while valuing the authority and status of religious Orthodoxy and revering rabbinic figures without practicing an Orthodox way of life — a pattern it terms "vicarious religiosity."[16] This profile illustrates why Likud resists easy categorization as either a straightforwardly secular or a religious party: its coalition bridges voters whose relationships to Jewish tradition vary considerably.[16][17]

Yisrael Beiteinu is the Israeli party most explicitly identified with the secular right.[4] Founded in 1999 by Avigdor Lieberman, it historically represented Russian-speaking Israelis, a largely secular community that leans to the right on diplomacy and defense.[6][18] The party combines hawkish policies with demands concerning religion and the state; it has pressed for yeshiva students to be drafted and opposed religious coercion in disputes over Shabbat commerce.[18][4]

In a 2018 interview, Lieberman described Yisrael Beiteinu as representing "a secular right, a traditional right," saying he supported tradition but opposed religious coercion, and framing a dispute over supermarkets opening on Shabbat as part of a wider question about whether Judaism should be "welcoming or inflexible."[4] At the September 2022 launch of the party's election slate, Yisrael Beiteinu promoted itself with a jingle calling it the "real secular right" and linked its secular agenda to opposition to Netanyahu's reliance on Haredi coalition partners, including over Haredi education and military service.[19]

The party has also sought to broaden its base beyond Russian-speaking immigrants. A 2018 effort in Tel Aviv targeted young, secular, right-wing voters with no personal roots in Soviet-era immigration, with organizer Boris Shindler explicitly invoking the Jabotinsky tradition of liberalism and individual freedoms as the party's ideological heritage.[20] An Israel Democracy Institute voter profile found that fewer than 8% of Yisrael Beiteinu voters identified as religious, traditional-religious, or Haredi — a figure that underscores the party's unusually secular electoral base.[15]

During Israel's 2019 coalition negotiations, Yohanan Plesner of the Israel Democracy Institute described Lieberman as positioning himself as "the leader of the secular right-wing in Israel."[7] The immediate trigger was Lieberman's insistence on a bill to increase the number of ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students enlisted in the military; his refusal to join a coalition dominated by religious-right parties contributed to the dissolution of the Knesset and a new election set for September 17, 2019.[7] That same cycle, an Israel Democracy Institute survey identified "moderate right-wing" voters as people who had voted for Blue and White, Gesher, Yisrael Beiteinu, Likud, Kulanu, New Right, or Zehut in the April election, characterizing this group as conservative, secular and traditional, generally over thirty, and college-educated.[7] Within that group, 69% said an indicted prime minister must stand trial, 67% supported protecting Supreme Court judicial review, and 55% said immunity from prosecution for public figures creates inequality before the law.[7]

Several other parties have represented aspects of the secular-right tendency at different moments in Israeli political history. The New Right, formed in 2019 by Naftali Bennett and Ayelet Shaked after they left Jewish Home, explicitly sought to appeal to right-wing Israelis who did not want Jewish Home's religious political agenda.[21] Bennett was religious and Shaked secular; the party's stated positions included cooperation between religious and secular Jews alongside opposition to Palestinian statehood, support for settlement growth, and a hawkish defense policy.[21]

The secular-liberal Shinui party, formed in the late 1990s with the stated aim of freeing Israel from religious control, shows that not every secular political force belonged to the right.[22] In 2019, Israel's Registrar of Political Parties approved registration of Ron Kobi's party named "The Secular Right." Yisrael Beiteinu had petitioned against the registration, arguing that the party name could mislead voters because Yisrael Beiteinu had itself used the words "right" and "secular" in its campaign; the registrar rejected the objection, ruling that those words were generic and commonly used.[2]

Analyst Haviv Rettig Gur has characterized attempts to combine right-wing politics with liberalism and secularism as a recognizable but generally unsuccessful tendency in Israeli politics, citing Lieberman and Gideon Sa'ar and concluding of such efforts, "They don't take off."[1]

The secular right's defining domestic concern is the religion-state relationship. Disputed matters in Israeli public life include Shabbat observance and commerce, non-kosher food, civil marriage and burial, state funding for Orthodox schools, and conscription of ultra-Orthodox Jews.[22] A status quo established around Israeli independence avoided a formal split between secular and religious Zionists but left these questions unresolved through political pragmatism, local or judicial handling, or inaction.[22]

The depth of this cleavage predates the current party system. A 1999 survey cited by an Israel Studies anthology found that 62% of respondents said the schism between Orthodoxy and secularism overshadowed other divisions, while 60% viewed internal divisions as a greater danger than the conflict with the Palestinians. The survey was conducted before the Second Intifada.[22]

The status quo came under pressure from, among other developments, mass immigration from the former Soviet Union — approximately one million Soviet Jews arrived beginning in the early 1990s, many of whom were not considered Jewish under Orthodox definitions.[22] An Israel Studies anthology describes this immigrant community as politically and socially organized, with hawkish, economically liberal, and secularist views, and notes that a party associated with those immigrants became involved in struggles with Shas over control of the Ministry of Internal Affairs.[22] The anthology describes the religion-state debate more broadly as a disagreement over what it means for Israel to be a Jewish state: secular Israelis tend to understand Jewishness in cultural and national terms, while the Orthodox conception is rooted in religious law.[22]

The 2023 Hiddush Israel Religion and State Index, cited by the U.S. State Department, found that among 800 adult Jewish Israelis surveyed, 46% identified as secular and 18% as traditional-not-religious; 60% supported separation of religion and state, 66% supported choice in marriage and ending the Rabbinate's monopoly over it, and 71% supported public transportation on Shabbat.[23] These are population-wide figures, not results specific to right-wing voters, but they indicate the scale of secular preferences on religion-state issues across Israeli Jewish society.

Survey data consistently show that secular identity and right-wing political self-identification are distinct dimensions that overlap only partially among Israeli Jews. Pew Research Center's 2014–2015 survey found that most Hilonim — the Israeli Jewish category commonly translated as "secular" — placed themselves in the political center (62%), with 14% on the left.[14] Pew cautioned that many Hilonim still observe some religious traditions, such as keeping kosher or fasting on Yom Kippur, and that the connection between religious subgroup and political position is less exact on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict than on religion in public life.[14]

A 2019 Washington Institute survey found that religiosity was the strongest predictor of political beliefs in its data: 92% of Orthodox respondents identified as right-wing, compared with 72% of ultra-Orthodox respondents, 72% of traditionally religious respondents, 60% of traditional non-religious respondents, and 28% of secular respondents.[3] The same report noted that the political center's positions on the Palestinian conflict were described as "very similar" to those of the traditional right — complicating simple mapping of religious identity onto political ideology.[3]

A separate Washington Institute analysis noted that the right-wing coalition in Israel historically included Mizrahi Jews, Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox citizens, immigrants from the former Soviet Union, and the national religious community.[24] The share of Israeli Jews identifying as secular stood at 52% in 1998 and declined to 47% by 2018, according to that analysis, while President Reuven Rivlin noted in 2015 that only 38% of Jewish first graders were secular — pointing to a longer-term demographic shift in Israel's religious composition.[24]

A Globes analysis of Israeli National Election Studies data for 2021 reported that 68% of right-wing bloc voters identified as traditional through religious, excluding Haredim, compared with 51% of the general public; 51% of right-wing voters said government should ensure public life follows Jewish religious tradition "fully" or "mostly," compared with 37% of the general public.[25] These figures describe the overall right-wing bloc and illustrate that the secular right, while a genuine and documented constituency, represents a minority strand within Israel's broader right-wing coalition.

Several boundaries surrounding the secular-right label are contested. Yisrael Beiteinu's description of itself as the "real secular right" is partisan campaign language rather than a neutral or exclusive classification.[19] Separately, N12's reporting on the "soft right" treated that term and the related phrase "center leaning right" as disputed categories; they should not be assumed to be interchangeable with "secular right."[26] Historian Avi Shilon argued that some voters described as soft-right may instead be centrists whose political positioning is explained by their stance on Netanyahu rather than by changed views on security or the Palestinian conflict.[26]

Accounts of the Israeli right's historical trajectory are also interpretive. A 2008 academic study proposed that Israeli political culture shifted from "secular nationalism" — strong nationalism combined with weak religionism — toward "religious nationalism," with stronger religious commitment accompanying nationalist politics.[27] This is an analytical thesis rather than an uncontested historical description. Similarly, explanations for why Mizrahi voters have supported Likud and the broader right are contested; one SAPIR Journal essay explicitly challenged accounts that treat those preferences primarily as reactions to exclusion or material circumstances, emphasizing instead the role of Jewish belonging and the state's Jewish character in shaping political identity.[16]

Likud's place on the secular-religious axis is itself ambiguous. Encyclopedia.com calls it secular but more traditional than Labor, while SAPIR describes many Mizrahi Likud supporters as secular in daily life yet deferential to Orthodox authority.[12][16] These descriptions help explain why the party cannot be classified solely through a secular-religious binary.