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The Netanyahu Era
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01 December 2026

Tells the story behind the rise of national-conservative populism in Israel across multiple arenas, including the judiciary, foreign affairs, and the media, and the cultural battle over Israeli identity, all of which are rooted in the struggle over Israeli democracy.
This book offers the first in-depth ideological exposition of the makeup of Benjamin Netanyahu's rule, highlighting the profound transformation of the once-shared worldview featuring Israel as both Jewish and democratic. The Netanyahu era took Israeli society from a representative democracy, an egalitarian state with universal welfare and public education based on a collective Israeli identity, to a neoliberal, polarized Jewish state. Israel is perhaps a "startup nation," but it is also a fragmented, ethnically divided society. Netanyahu's creation of the National Camp as an anti-Zionist revolution rolled back secular nationalism to reincarnate Jewish religion as state ideology. It facilitated the dominance of Jewish supremacy engulfed in a full-scale regime change from a national-liberal democracy to a national-conservative populist autocracy in his sixth government. Netanyahu did not just follow the authoritarian protocol—he invented much of it, setting the stage for other populist leaders seeking to transform democracy from within. He executed the Deep State agenda before the term was coined. Under his rule, ideological transformation was cemented into structural changes in diverse arenas, transforming Israeli democracy beyond recognition.
"This is an outstanding assessment of Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's years in power. Talshir is very knowledgeable about the ideas propelling constitutions, institutional policy, and philosophical issues of democratic liberty, rights, and due process. But what makes this study unusual is her command of the everyday political struggles and uncompromising ideological feuds among a range of stakeholders within a theoretical framework. The combination of informed and intelligent scholarship give this work a clear edge in the field of recent Israel studies." — Michael Freeden, University of Oxford
Gayil Talshir is the head of the Social and Education Leadership Program and a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Political Science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is the author of The Political Ideology of Green Parties: From the Politics of Nature to Redefining the Nature of Politics and coeditor, with Mathew Humphre and Michael Freeden, of Taking Ideology Seriously: 21st Century Reconfigurations.