Beyond trauma: systemic drivers of Israel's rightward shift amid ongoing occupation and regional militarization
Original framing: “In shadow of war, Israelis to decide if hard-right turn is permanent” — The Japan Times
The current rightward trajectory echoes earlier periods such as the 1977 Likud rise following the Yom Kippur War and the 1996 Netanyahu surge after the Oslo peace process, showing a pattern where conflict trauma is leveraged to consolidate nationalist power. Historical precedents demonstrate that temporary security spikes often produce lasting policy shifts toward settlement expansion and militarization. Ignoring this cycle treats each election as isolated rather than part of a longer structural trend.
The election discourse presented by the Japan Times reduces a complex settler‑colonial reality to a reactive trauma story, thereby obscuring how enduring structures of occupation, settlement expansion, militarized economics, and external aid shape Israeli politics.
By reinstating indigenous Palestinian sumud, historical parallels to earlier rightward surges, cross‑cultural settler‑colonial analyses, scientific data on militarization’s socioeconomic impacts, artistic visions of coexistence, future scenario modelling, marginalized voices such as Mizrahi Jews and Arab citizens, and a trickster lens that exposes the irony of security‑through‑expansion, we see the hard‑right shift as a symptom of a self‑reinforcing cycle of inequality and violence. Addressing this cycle requires concrete policy shifts—halting settlements, funding joint economic cooperation, reforming electoral inclusion, and reallocating defense spending—that target the structural drivers identified across all eight dimensions.