Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu emerged satisfied from his Nov. 9 meeting with US President Barack Obama in Washington, but his coalition partners made sure to dampen his enthusiasm. At the meeting, Netanyahu had spoken about his commitment to a two-state solution. HaBayit HaYehudi Chairman Naftali Bennett, in competition with Netanyahu for right-wing voters, considers the concept illegitimate. Instead, Bennett supports the partial annexation of the occupied territories to Israel. “When the prime minister supports the creation of a Palestinian state, that is not a right-wing government,” Bennett reportedly told a gathering of party activists.

Bennett is not alone in his thinking. Some members of Netanyahu’s own Likud feel the same way. If, in the past, the political camps were divided over the question of how to realize a two-state solution and whether a trustworthy partner existed on the Palestinian side, today anyone who says the phrase “two-state solution” is viewed as a left-wing extremist by those on the right. This exemplifies the radicalization of Israeli society.

The public discourse in Israel leaves the impression that the society is divided between the two extremes on the right and the left, with an ever-widening ideological chasm between them. Nevertheless, there is a silent majority of citizens whose mouths remain shut, their voices absent from social networks and the public space — the Israeli mainstream, the centrists. 

“The range of what is permitted and forbidden to be said on the social networks has shrunk greatly since Operation Protective Edge,” said Karine Nahon, an information politics expert at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya and the University of Washington. “In my eyes, the networks are the looking-glass of reality. There are some reflections of this, for example, in the call to dismiss people from their jobs as a result of things they write on the networks. We have also seen the seepage of violence from the networks to the streets. During the Protective Edge campaign, right-wingers went to demonstrations against the war and hit protesters.”