Why do Israeli “left” and “right” argue not about “politics” but about “morality” itself

In Israel, the dispute between the left and the right has long gone beyond the usual disagreement between parties, programs, and election slogans. On the surface, it looks like a conflict over war, security, Arab-Israeli relations, the role of the court, the state, and religion. But if you look deeper, it becomes clear: often it’s not just about different views on the same events, but about two different ways of understanding the world, justice, and human loyalty.

That is why the same fact in Israeli society provokes not just different assessments, but almost incompatible moral reactions.

For some, the main thing is not to betray their own. For others, it is not to abandon a universal principle, even if it is inconvenient and painful.

And as long as this internal conflict is not called by its names, the country will continue to argue as if it were about numbers, although in reality, the dispute is about what to consider good, what is duty, and what is betrayal.

Not just two platforms, but two coordinate systems

It is customary to say that the left and the right are people with different political programs.

Some advocate for tougher security and national cohesion, others for human rights, limiting state power, and more universal moral rules. But in the Israeli reality, this explanation is no longer sufficient.

The right-wing worldview in its mass form is most often built around belonging.

In such logic, the world is divided into ‘us’ and ‘them,’ and morality does not exist separately from this division. It begins to work differently depending on who is being discussed. Our own can make mistakes, behave rudely, be unjust, but they still remain our own. The outsider is initially perceived as someone who cannot be trusted, who should be feared, and whose suffering does not have to evoke the same reaction as the suffering of our own.

In Israeli political culture, this manifests itself especially sharply because the country lives under real threat, memories of wars, terrorist attacks, and a constant sense of siege. In such an atmosphere, the division into ‘us’ and ‘them’ becomes not only an emotional reaction but also a way of self-description. Moreover, outsiders can be not only Arabs or Iran. Within Israel itself, ‘leftists,’ judges, officials, the Ashkenazi elite, secular liberals, Russian speakers, ultra-Orthodox, migrants, human rights activists easily fall into this category — the set changes, but the mechanism remains.

A common enemy in such a system is often more important than a common positive goal. It is not an idea that unites the camp, but an object of irritation. Not an image of the future, but an image of danger.

Why in a warring society justice seems like a threat

That is why in times of war or acute crisis, the attempt to talk about equal moral standards for everyone is perceived not as honesty, but as hostility.

When a person says that compassion, law, and measure should also be applied to outsiders, their words are easily perceived as undermining collective defense. It seems as if they are not just arguing, but breaking the internal psychological shield on which communal solidarity rests.

This is one of the main features of the Israeli political dispute.

For many people, morality is primarily loyalty to their own. If our children are killed, it is absolute evil. If our actions lead to the death of other people’s children, it is explained by war, necessity, collateral damage, the enemy’s guilt, or the inevitability of conflict. Symmetry here seems not like humanism, but almost like sacrilege.

For another part of society, morality is arranged differently.

There, the center is not loyalty, but justice. Not the tribe, but the principle.

This approach requires that the same rules work against both the enemy and our own. If it is unacceptable to kill civilians, it should be unacceptable always. If there is a right, it should not become a privilege only for one’s own camp. If there is compassion, it cannot end at the border of identity.

On this line, the main Israeli rift is born. Some believe that universal morality in a real war is a luxury that a society under threat cannot afford. Others are convinced that it is the refusal of universal morality that destroys the country from within because it turns it from a community of citizens into a camp living by the rules of emotional mobilization.

NANews — Israel News | Nikk.Agency has repeatedly shown through examples from Israeli public life that this crack runs not only between parties in the Knesset but also through families, work collectives, universities, the military environment, and even ordinary conversations in bomb shelters, where fear, anger, and a sense of common destiny often prove stronger than any rational arguments.

Why this dispute is almost impossible to end

In the Israeli discussion, it is often mistakenly thought that the issue can be resolved with the right facts.

That if you explain better, provide numbers, remind of chronology, show cause-and-effect relationships, the opponent will definitely change their position. But this does not always work precisely because the dispute is not about facts as such.

When one person perceives the discussion as a search for truth, and another as a test of loyalty, an almost insurmountable chasm arises between them. For the first, admitting one’s own mistake is part of honest thinking. For the second, it is a risk of weakening their own and giving an argument to outsiders.

And in conditions of conflict, it is often the second type of behavior that proves to be socially more advantageous: it gives a sense of belonging, security, and emotional warmth within the group.

Therefore, a leftist in Israel often seems not just naive to a rightist, but dangerous.

And a rightist to a leftist looks not just harsh, but morally deaf.

Each sees in the other not only a political opponent but a bearer of a different human structure.

This does not mean that all rightists are the same or that all leftists truly live by high universal standards. Reality is always more complex than any scheme. Among the right, there are people for whom moral constraints and the human dignity of outsiders are important. Among the left, there is enough cynicism, arrogance, and double standards. But the general difference in priorities still exists, and it explains a lot in today’s Israel.

The dispute between the left and the right here increasingly turns out to be a dispute not about how to better govern the country, but about what makes a person moral at all.

For one side, it is moral to be for one’s own, even when it requires turning a blind eye to inconvenient questions. For the other, it is moral to ask these questions even when it makes you an outsider among your own.

And as long as Israel remains a society living under the pressure of war, memory, trauma, and constant fear, this conflict will not disappear. Because it concerns not only elections, not only Netanyahu, not only judicial reform or the war in Gaza. It concerns the very foundation of the social contract: is the nation built on common justice or on common loyalty.

The answer to this question determines not only the language of political polemics. It also determines what Israel wants to see itself as in the future — a state that knows how to protect its own without abandoning moral constraints, or a society where the very idea of justice will increasingly seem like a weakness.