Hard bargains
The dilemmas of Israel's democracy

By Bernard Avishai, 2/2/2002

HERE'S A PUZZLE for you.

Poll after poll demonstrates that 75 percent of Israeli voters support, or are at least reconciled to, the positions that Labor Party candidate Amram Mitzna openly advocated during the recent election campaign there. Because of security concerns, argued Mitzna, scattered Jewish settlements in the territories ought to be uprooted even before a peace agreement with the Palestinians is reached. The biblically-inspired hawks who've settled there shouldn't get any more economic bonuses, or hold army reservists hostage to their dreams. Also, the absence of political stability is what's responsible for Israel's tanking economy. Most Israelis, it seems, want a fence - not an occupation. Why, then, in the Jan. 28 elections, did 69 of the seats in the new, 120-member Knesset - about two-thirds of the Jewish Israeli vote - go to Likud and other parties in Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's right-wing bloc committed to "historic" claims to the territories, halakhic tests for Jewishness (and by implication, citizenship), and harsh retaliation against all expressions of Palestinian resistance?

There are three possible explanations. One, this was not really an overwhelming vote for rightist ideas, but rather a mandate for Sharon. Two, voters don't really believe that their leaders determine the scope or pace of peacemaking. Three, intractable demographic trends in Israeli society are making Likud the leading party in Israel much as the Democratic Party is the leading party in Massachusetts.

Vexingly enough, all three explanations are true. And the record low turnout - 68 percent in a country where voters get the day off and turnout is usually around 80 percent - suggests that Israelis are losing their confidence in electoral politics itself as they contend with social pressures and fractures nearly unimaginable to Americans. Perhaps the most salient fact of this election - and the hardest thing for those who've followed Sharon's militant career to accept - is that the prime minister is now perceived as the last of his generation's moderate statesmen. He owes this change in reputation largely to Palestinian terror.

Official sources have calculated that, since the start of the Al Aqsa intifada in September 2000, there have been nearly 14,000 separate attempts on the lives of Israeli citizens and security forces. More than 700 are dead, and nearly twice that number seriously injured. Every restaurant and supermarket in Israel posts a guard one is required to pass, suppressing the thought that the explosion will get him first. Of course, the Palestinians have suffered worse - much worse - and not merely in grim statistics. Since Israel's incursion into the West Bank last April, the Palestinian Authority is defunct and the territories have become a virtual prison - with schools and universities often closed, near-daily curfews, and youth gangs controlling streets vacated by the Israeli Defense Forces. Nevertheless, since that operation, many more attempts on Israelis have been foiled than have succeeded. In the surreal world of terror and counter-terror, Sharon has provided a semblance of control. As my dry-cleaner puts it, " Hichnis lahem" - he messed them up.

What Sharon has not messed up is relations with Washington. Indeed, getting the Bush administration to tilt toward him has perhaps been Sharon's most impressive feat - the trick that makes the victory of his Realpolitik seem, for now, unimpeachable.

Most outside observers tend to overlook it, but Israeli elections are not generally about choosing a peacemaker. Voters typically end up voting for a hard bargainer, someone who will show up at someone else's peace talks and concentrate on getting Israel the best possible deal. (The election of Ehud Barak in 1999 may be the exception here.) This time, voters were thinking ahead to the moment after an anticipated war with Iraq, when America might rediscover its interests in a united Europe, and in holding onto, or winning back, Arab clients - a moment, that is, when America might be expected to force Israel back to the bargaining table.

The priorities of Israeli voters became clear in what proved to be the most curious moment of the campaign. Just a few days after revelations of links between various candidates in the Likud primaries and organized crime, word leaked out that Sharon's sons had allegedly engaged in illegal election financing. Labor swamped the country with political ads, mandolin music playing sotto voce, in which Sharon was depicted as the Godfather.

The ads fells so flat, one wonders if Likud should have paid for them. For the Godfather is exactly what Sharon was running to become: the head of the family, the sadder-but-wiser buttress against naivet, the other side's nightmare, the bender of rules and prince of sacrifice - the scarred, stout man who knows how worldly power is exercised. Few Israelis, least of all Sharon, imagine the status quo can be sustained indefinitely, congenial as it may seem to Israel's most strident American supporters - evangelical Christians, pro-Israel lobbyists - who are far removed from the unbearable tension. Eventually, some kind of plan for Palestinian statehood will be offered up again. In part, voters were punishing those leaders who appeared to have identified with the Palestinian cause since Oslo. The ones who seemed sucker enough to have sided against the family in public.

But even if there were no prospect of an American peace plan, it is hard to imagine that the rightist parties would not have won anyway. Israeli politics are more like that of a big city than a country. Political identity here is personal, tribal, and it runs deep over many generations.

Like my dry-cleaner, Sharon's core supporters are largely descended from North African immigrants living in development towns or urban projects, contending with a country where the managerial, professional, artistic, and technical elites are still largely of European origin, and where income inequality - once among the lowest in the world - is now among the highest. They still think of the Likud as an insurgent force sticking it to a European establishment, much like South Boston politicians relish sticking it to Beacon Hill.

The hard-right parties, for their part, are supported largely by Russian immigrants who in a time of peace would tend toward Western cosmopolitan ambition, but in a time of war expect Jewish national interests to be protected by a strongman. Together with ultra-Orthodox and settlers' groups, many of whom have been heavily subsidized by the state, they flirt with the idea of "transferring" Palestinians across the Jordan, and want the state to thwart the growth of Israel's Arab sector. Time is not on democracy's side. In 1980, about 11 percent of public spending went to social insurance and welfare. Today, that figure is
well over 25 percent. Hunger and homelessness have become real threats to civic life. The center will not hold, as government money runs out. Tempers are hair-trigger, and hope is wearing thin.

Meanwhile, Israel's Arab citizens watch their youth react to these trends by drawing close to the ideas of Islamic radicals. And the over-taxed, more successful Europeans, from which Labor and the secularist Shinui party draw most of their support, mull over polls suggesting that fully 50 percent of Israel's best-educated youth are considering leaving the country. An Israel at peace, Shimon Peres used to say, stands to become a Middle-Eastern Singapore. He neglected to add that, without peace, Israel may become a Middle-Eastern Serbia where unrestrained nationalism will compensate for unresolved social tensions.

So Sharon's unity government, whether he joins with Labor or Shinui or both, will not initiate progress. But what may seem like its skepticism, even its hard-line obstructionism, should not be misunderstood. Paradoxically, a new Israeli majority is emerging under Sharon, and his leadership - which will be comparatively short-lived given his age - may provide an unprecedented opportunity to sell serious concessions to a chronically divided public.

But nothing will happen until the Bush administration or its successors take the lead, map the future, provide hope. Trust between Israelis and Palestinians has become unthinkable. They need a third party to trust. A settlement freeze, as proposed in the current Euro-American "roadmap" to peace, is no longer imaginative enough. Former American ambassador Martin Indyk's idea of a NATO-enforced trusteeship, overseeing Palestinian reforms in areas Israel evacuates, is just one example of the new ideas that must come to the fore. But if nothing happens soon, Israel's internal rifts, exacerbated by its economic distress, will
transform it into a country where democracy will seem a luxury - and not only because Arab birthrates may threaten the existence of a Jewish majority.

The erosion of Israeli democracy in the face of continuing violence, escalating charges of betrayal, and widening class divisions presents a serious long term danger to Israel and its allies. One wonders if that risk is making it into President Bush's morning security briefing.

Bernard Avishai is dean of the Raphael Recanati International School at The Interdisciplinary Center, Herzliya. An updated edition of his book "The Tragedy of Zionism" has just been published.

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