Israel's rightward shift
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Israel's rightward shift is John Kiriakou's explanation for what he treats as a structural rather than a personal problem in Israeli politics, one he raises unprompted, as "a very big part of the problem" alongside the questions of Gaza and the West Bank.

The claim

His framing is that the shift is recent and measurable in decades: the Israeli government "in recent times, like in the last 20 years, let's say, has moved so far to the right that that is also untenable."

The cause he assigns is demographic. "It's moved that far to the right because of the influx of refugees and immigrants from Russia, Ukraine, and the United States. Those Jews coming from those three countries have been conservative to a point that the Israeli populace had never seen before."

What it displaced

The comparison he draws is with the politics of the earlier European migrations, which he characterises as the founding temperament of the state and as thoroughly gone. "Long gone are the days when German Jews, Polish Jews, French Jews moved to Palestine, and then Israel after 1948, and had a socialist government, all sang Kumbaya around the campfire. Those days are gone."

He states the consequence he draws in absolute terms: "these Russians and Ukrainians that run the country now will stop at nothing short of pushing every Palestinian out."

The regional-origins argument

Kiriakou extends the point into a broader and more speculative claim about the part of Europe those arrivals came from, in a conversation that ranged over Ukraine, Austria and the early Zionist movement. Asked what accounts for the region's history of ultranationalism, he grants the scholarly explanation and then declines to accept it as sufficient: scholars, he says, will tell you it was a reaction against Bolshevism, and "that very well may be true, because the Bolsheviks brought famine and pestilence and war." His own response is impatience rather than analysis, "but come on, people, it was a century ago. It's time to move on."

The contrast he uses is between postwar Germany and its neighbours. Germany, he says, has always had a grievance with Austria for not doing more to acknowledge its role in the Holocaust, and he offers a statistic as the measure of the failure: "Austria has the smallest percentage of Jews in Europe and the highest percentage of people who blame their problems on Jews." His judgement of Ukraine on the same test is shorter: it "did nothing to root out their Nazi past. They did absolutely nothing." That argument connects to his reading of Operation Paperclip, where he holds that neither of the states in a position to demand a reckoning had any interest in one.

The coalition consequence

Revisiting the argument in August 2026, Kiriakou tied the demographic change directly to the composition of government rather than to opinion in general. "The political makeup of the country has changed dramatically with the influx of so many ethnic Russians and Ukrainians", a shift that "pushed the whole thing to the right" and, in his account, is "why we have the likes of Ben-Gvir and Smotrich and some of these other extreme rightists."

He set that against the ceiling on Netanyahu's own vote and the elections he expected in October, treating the far-right parties as the price of assembling a majority rather than as an expression of one.

Codified in law

John Kiriakou marks the Knesset death penalty law as a change of kind rather than degree. Apartheid South Africa, as he accepted the comparison on the DeProgram show, did not maintain a separate legal code for whites and blacks, the discrimination was in practice. In the Israeli case "they're codifying racial discrimination within the areas in their control."

Asked what remained of the country's liberal and kibbutz traditions, the framing put to him was that there was "no left at all" and "no moderate at all", and his answer proceeded from that premise without contesting it. His explanation for the direction of travel is at the logic of radicalization.

See also

- Israel,United States relations
- Operation Paperclip
- Proposals to relocate the Palestinians
- John Kiriakou
