From Counter-Hegemony to Habitus: Emergence and Resilience of Populism in Israel

Populism is a complex and variegated phenomenon. In order to understand it better, we can consider it as comprising two main types, inclusive and exclusionary populist movements. Inclusive populism emerges in societies in which exists a conflict around the inclusion/exclusion of subordinate groups, where class is not the main or sole ground for the constitution of social identities. In such situations, left out social groups may challenge their exclusion appealing to their belonging to the "people", intertwining the meaning of "people" as the whole nation with the meaning of "people" as plebs. The present paper will discuss the causes for the emergence of the Likud as an inclusive populist movement in Israel in the 1960's and 1970s. Building on a neo-Gramscian approach to hegemony, the paper argues that this populist inclusive movement emerged as a counter-hegemonic challenge to the labor movement's hegemony, building on the claim to inclusion of Jewish immigrants from Arab countries, incorporated to the existing hegemonic model as a subaltern group. The paper analyzes the ways in which the Likud party partially included this subaltern group at three different levels: the symbolic (presenting a narrative in which the subaltern group became central to "we the people), politically (by allowing the emergence of a political elite from the subaltern group) and –once in government – through redistributive measures. The paper further claims that the strength of the Likud as a populist movement, combined with the specific characteristics of the Israeli polis and its conflation between "demos" and "ethnos", contributed to the conformation of a "populist habitus". This populist habitus not only explains the Likud's ongoing political strength, but also the emergence of other populist movements, such as the radical right populist "Israel Our Home" and the religious populist "Shas".