The unprecedented gains made the far-right Religious Zionist alliance in this month’s Israeli elections were caused by voters’ fear of rising crime, Jerusalem’s deputy mayor, Fleur Hassan Nahum, has told the JC.
Speaking in an interview during a visit to London, Ms Hassan — who was brought up in Gibraltar and studied in London before making aliyah — said the key to its success was Itamar Ben-Gvir’s oft-repeated campaign claim that the authorities had lost control.
The failings of the police to control rising crime were, she said, much more important in influencing the result than terrorist attacks within the borders of Israel and in the West Bank, which this year have reached a decade-long peak. In the latest incident, three Israelis were killed and three wounded by a “lone wolf” attacker in the Ariel settlement on Tuesday.
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Itamar Ben-Gvir (Getty Images)
Ms Hassan, a Likud member who ran unsuccessfully in the party’s Knesset elections primary, told the JC: “People didn’t vote for Ben-Gvir or [his list co-leader] Bezalel Smotrich because they are homophobic or harbour anti-Arab sentiments.
After all, this is the same electorate which only last year elected a government that included the Left and an Arab party linked to the Muslim Brotherhood.
“Ben-Gvir and Smotrich are riding the wave of a zeitgeist in which people feel threatened. Israel has changed. The most important issue used to be national security. But that changed with the 2021 war with Hamas in Gaza, when mixed Arab and Jewish cities such as Lod and
Tira saw violent riots. Israelis were waking up to find their cars torched.
“That sense of internal insecurity has been compounded by crime. Israel has always been a country where women could walk freely and safely at night, and increasingly that is no longer the case. There has been a surge in lawlessness within the boundaries of the State of Israel.
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Bezalel Smotrich (Getty Images)
“Successive governments have ignored the fact that crime has been increasing in predominantly Arab areas, and all too often, Arabs — especially women — are the victims.”
Ms Hassan said that she felt angered by the outrage kindled abroad by Otzma Yehudit’s success, on the basis that its leaders had made inflammatory statements in the past: “I find the whole thing extremely hypocritical. Where was that outrage when the government included Arab MKs who were openly homophobic? No one said a word.”
She said the police had become nervous of intervening to the point where some communities had effectively become no-go areas. “We are damned if we intervene by Israel’s critics and damned if we don’t. If the police do go in, they are condemned. So we have let these areas ferment.
“The consequence is what I call femicide: Arab women being killed by their partners. So-called honour killings are rife. Yet the Israeli police are reluctant to get involved.”
The general lawlessness had spread to the point, Ms Hassan said, where people could be threatened at gunpoint in the middle of the day in restaurants, as had recently happened to a friend of hers in Tira. “He was just sitting having coffee and a guy comes in and points a gun at his head.”
“And then in comes this tough guy, Ben-Gvir, who carries a gun of his own, and says: ‘We’ve lost control.’ Well, we have lost control. He’s right. His slogan ‘Who is the boss?’ resonates, even with Jewish liberals in Tel Aviv. Even in Arab town such as Umm al-Fahm, Ben-Gvir picked up votes.
“My children and their friends were walking around repeating that slogan: Who is the boss? People are terrified about the breakdown of law and order in their own country.”
Ms Hassan said that Mr Smotrich’s main appeal lay elsewhere: in his appeals to voters’ belief in a strong Jewish identity and to West Bank settlers, which enabled him to occupy the vacuum left by former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett’s withdrawal from politics. “With Bennett gone, they had no one else to vote for.”
The final element to the Religious Zionists’ success — which leaves them with 14 Knesset seats, the third-largest bloc — was, she said, Prime Minister-designate Benjamin Netanyahu’s genius in seeing that the way to create a majority was to persuade Ben-Gvir and Smotrich to run a joint list of candidates: “He saw the roadmap to victory.” Meanwhile, the left was almost obliterated because Labour and Meretz refused to unite.
Ms Hassan held meetings with MPs and peers in London this week, as Jerusalem’s foreign affairs representative. She is also co-founder of the Gulf-Israel Women’s Forum and of the UAE-Israel Business Council.
She told the JC she is committed to building on the progress of the Abraham Accords, which had huge positive potential in both the economic and social spheres.
