Smotrich and the Naked Grammar of the State
Bezalel Smotrich should not be defended, but he should not be misunderstood. That distinction matters. To defend him would be to become an apologist for a politics of dispossession. To denounce him only as an extremist would be easier, but also less serious. The word “extremist” allows us to imagine that the problem stands outside the house. Smotrich is more disturbing because he stands inside it, with a ministry, a map, a budget and a stamp.
He is not merely a man with radical opinions. He is a politician whose ideas have acquired institutional form. In the 2022 Israeli election, Religious Zionism won 14 seats and 10.8 percent of the vote. Netanyahu’s right-wing bloc won 64 seats, enough to form a government. That means Smotrich is not an accident outside democracy. He is a product of democratic admissibility, coalition arithmetic and the willingness of others to treat his project as a manageable price of power.
This is why the question is not simply whether Smotrich is dangerous. Of course he is dangerous. The deeper question is why he is functional. He functions because he understands something many liberal observers prefer not to see: states are not born clean. They define territory through war, compromise, settlement, displacement, recognition, demography, administration and later narration. First comes force, or the threat of force. Then comes the map. Then comes the textbook. Then comes the national holiday. Then comes the scholar explaining that the process was “complex.” It usually was complex. So is an axe.
This is not a defence of force. It is a refusal of innocence. Smotrich’s scandal is not that he invented the old grammar of statehood. He did not. His scandal is that he uses it too openly, with too little shame, in an age that still pretends international legality has abolished the older grammar of territory.
Smotrich did not invent this grammar. Europe, which today often lectures Israel from the highest moral platforms, built many of its own states in precisely this language, only in far more brutal forms and on a far larger scale. France, Germany, Poland, Hungary, Spain, Britain and Russia were not formed by clean seminars in mutual recognition. Their borders and internal homogeneity emerged across centuries of war, expulsions, forced assimilation, religious persecution, dynastic violence, colonial conquest, mass killing and cultural destruction. Modern Europe’s relative ethnic homogeneity is not a natural fact. It is the result of a long and violent history of homogenization, including forced assimilation, resettlement and mass killing.
Spain expelled Jews in 1492 and Moriscos between 1609 and 1614. The latter operation affected hundreds of thousands of people and was carried out through state secrecy, coercion and deception. France’s religious wars, including the massacre of Huguenots, showed how confessional consolidation could become political violence. The partitions of Poland were not a regrettable footnote but a laboratory of imperial statecraft. The Balkans, repeatedly, displayed the lethal link between national form and population management. Europe’s colonial empires carried this grammar outward with devastating consequences in Africa and the Americas. After the Second World War, the continent again reordered itself through mass expulsion and forced transfer: millions of Germans, Poles, Ukrainians and others were driven from their homes in East-Central Europe between 1944 and 1948.
Then came the narration. It was complicated. It was the context of the age. It was the necessity of national consolidation. It was the tragic birth of modern statehood. It was regrettable, but historically understandable. The same countries now look at Israel and suddenly forget the grammar by which they themselves became recognizable political units. They expect Jews, after the Shoah, after repeated wars, after decades in which powerful Arab and Palestinian actors rejected Jewish sovereignty in any form, and under persistent existential threat, to behave according to standards those same states did not apply to themselves at the decisive moments of their own formation.
This is not marginal hypocrisy. It is the structural hypocrisy of a civilization that completed much of its brutal consolidation earlier and now wants to prohibit others from using the same instrument. That does not make Smotrich right. It makes Europe’s innocence false.
Nor should this argument require silence about Palestinian maximalism, rejectionism or terror. The slogan “from the river to the sea,” when used as a program of eliminating Jewish sovereignty, belongs to the same world of territorial absolutes. Hamas’s violence, the long history of rejection of Jewish sovereignty, and the refusal by many actors to treat Israel as a legitimate political fact are not marginal details. They are part of the field in which Smotrich becomes admissible to many Israelis. But that is precisely the point: one maximalism does not morally cleanse another. It helps explain how the other becomes functional.
His 2017 “Decisive Plan” was not an accidental eruption after October 7. It was a doctrine. Its premise was that between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea there should be only one national self-determination: Jewish self-determination. Palestinians could remain as individuals, abandon national aspirations, emigrate, or be treated as enemies if they resisted. The plan proposed Israeli sovereignty over Judea and Samaria, massive settlement expansion and the arrival of hundreds of thousands of additional settlers. That is not a peace plan. It is a plan for the organized exhaustion of another people’s political future.
The point is not that Smotrich wants territory. Every state wants territory, because every state is partly a machine for producing borders. The point is the method: create irreversible facts on the ground until Palestinian political existence becomes geographically, administratively and demographically inoperative. A settlement is not only a home, a road is not only infrastructure, a demolition is not only enforcement, and a budget is not only accounting. Together they form a machine that makes one future possible and another future impossible.
That is why the recent reports concerning the International Criminal Court matter, even while their procedural status remains unclear. Smotrich has claimed that ICC prosecutors are seeking an arrest warrant against him; the prosecutor’s office has not publicly confirmed or denied the claim. But Smotrich’s reaction was already revealing. He framed the matter as a “war” by the Palestinian Authority through international legal channels and moved against Khan al-Ahmar, a Palestinian Bedouin community in the occupied West Bank.
This is Smotrich in miniature: the court speaks, and the village pays. The eviction order for Khan al-Ahmar still requires further approval, but the political logic is already clear. External legal pressure is answered by internal administrative pressure on a weaker Palestinian community. International law produces accusation; the state produces terrain. The court produces categories; the minister produces evictions, budgets, roads, settlements and facts. One works through qualification, the other through material rearrangement, and the terrifying fact is that material rearrangement often wins first.
This is why the question “Is Smotrich guilty?” is too narrow. Legal guilt is not a metaphysical substance. It does not descend from heaven already armed. It requires jurisdiction, evidence, enforcement and political conditions. Without an apparatus capable of imposing consequence, legal guilt remains a file, a category, perhaps an archive. Smotrich appears to understand this perfectly. His wager is that local executive power can move faster than international legal consequence.
For that reason, to speak about him only as an accused man is insufficient. He is not merely the object of possible prosecution. He is also a successful operator within the political grammar that makes such prosecution difficult, delayed and possibly ineffective. This is the uncomfortable part: Smotrich is not losing, at least not yet. He functions. He shapes policy. He helps define the coalition. He turns theology into planning, planning into administration, administration into terrain, and terrain into future constraint. He may never lead Israel, or he may one day become far more central than many now wish to imagine. The serious question is not whether that would be shocking. The serious question is whether we are already watching the conditions of admissibility being prepared.
Extremism does not always arrive as a coup. Sometimes it arrives as a coalition partner. Sometimes it enters through the budget committee. Sometimes it takes over the grammar before it takes over the highest office. This is why comparisons with the past must be handled carefully but not avoided. The lesson is not that every radical politician is Hitler. That is historically lazy and morally inflationary. The lesson is sharper: destructive politics often becomes powerful not because a majority is fanatical, but because enough non-fanatics decide that fanaticism is useful, tolerable, controllable or preferable to their enemies.
Smotrich’s power is not simply the power of his voters. Ten percent does not automatically rule, but ten percent can become decisive when the rest of the system does not form a real barrier. The remaining ninety percent are not automatically an opposition. Between support and resistance lies a vast zone of fear, fatigue, resentment, tribal loyalty, religious solidarity, security panic, hatred of the left, coalition calculation and the old temptation to believe that brutality can be useful if someone else performs it. That zone is where Smotrich wins.
The liberal mistake is to imagine that because he does not represent everyone, he represents only a marginal pathology. He does not. He represents a threshold. He shows how a political system can normalize what it does not fully endorse. He shows how a minority project can become state technique. He shows how extremism becomes acceptable without becoming majority opinion.
That is why treating him as a monster is inadequate. Monsters reassure us because they stand outside civilization. Smotrich is more dangerous because he is legible within it. He has force, narrative, territory, democratic admissibility, coalition leverage, biblical vocabulary, administrative technique, budgetary instruments and the patience of settlement politics. In short, he has the full package by which states have often made history: power first, narrative second, legality third.
The task, then, is not to pretend that international law is pure, or that states are innocent, or that borders descend from moral clarity. They do not. The task is harder: to deny Smotrich the right to transform the oldest violence of state formation into a contemporary administrative program. The real danger is not that Smotrich stands outside the state. The danger is that he may understand the state too well.
He understands that a border is not only a line. It is a cumulative arrangement of roads, houses, permits, military orders, budgets, courts, evictions, delays and memories. He understands that a people can be defeated not only by being killed, but by having its future rendered impractical. He understands that if enough facts are built, politics will one day be asked to call them reality.
That is why the proper response is neither defence nor theatrical accusation. Defence would be obscene. Theatrical accusation would be weak. What is needed is diagnosis. Smotrich is not merely an extremist. He is a diagnostic image of the state without makeup. He tells us that naked force still wants narration, that territory still wants theology, that democracy can admit forces that will use democracy to narrow the future of others, and that international law may name the act while the bulldozer still arrives first.
Still have a problem? Good. But let us be precise. If the problem is only Smotrich, then the solution is biographical: remove the man, condemn the faction, denounce the extremist. That may be necessary, but it is not enough. If the problem is the grammar he exposes, then the indictment is wider. It concerns the way states convert force into legitimacy, the way democracies make dangerous minorities operational, and the way political systems learn to live with what they claim to reject.
Smotrich should not be defended, but he must be understood at the level at which he actually operates. He is not a scandal outside the state. He is the state’s old grammar, spoken too clearly.
Yochanan Schimmelpfennig
