Israel votes with its fists

January 30, 2003

If Palestinian supporters of the 28-month intifada believed that a suicide-bombing campaign was going to frighten Israel into a peace agreement, they got an emphatic answer on Tuesday. The intifada has only hardened the people of Israeli into believing their only course at this time is to fight and to defend themselves.

Israeli voters just held an election that was, in essence, a referendum on Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. Here is a prime minister who faces serious allegations of campaign ethics violations, who has failed to protect Israeli citizens from terrorism, who has brought his nation no closer to the long-elusive peace.

And with all that, Sharon just won a resounding vote of support. His Likud Party nearly doubled its support in the Knesset. The Labor Party and other Israeli leftist parties were routed.

This should be a sobering moment for the Palestinians. In the course of the intifada, Israel has rejected a Labor government that was prepared to offer peace terms to the Palestinians, elected a right-wing government under Sharon, and now opted to strengthen Sharon's hold on power.

Election results and polling leading up to voting indicate an Israeli public deeply divided and exhausted. Voters were not enthused about the prospect of continuing the two-year-old, Sharon-led status quo. But they share Sharon's view that negotiations with the Palestinians at this time would be fruitless.

That is likely to make it even more difficult for the Bush administration to press Sharon to negotiate peace terms unless the violent intifada ceases.

Likud is still short of a clear majority in the Knesset, so Sharon will have to cobble together a coalition government. Labor, which triggered the election by bolting a unity government with Likud in October, has vowed not to join another coalition. The next largest party, the centrist, secularist Shinui, which won 15 seats, has vowed not to enter into any coalition with religious parties.

That leaves Sharon with the prospect of having to form a government with rightist, ultra- nationalist and ultra-orthodox parties, a sure formula for an even tougher Israeli line concerning the building of Jewish settlements in occupied Arab lands--and for pushing the prospect of a peace settlement further into the future.

A likely coalition of Likud and right-of-center parties bodes ill for a breakthrough in the search for peace between Israel and the Palestinians, and for U.S. interests in the region regardless of whether it goes to war with Iraq.

By any standard of measurement, Sharon's two years in office have been disastrous. The intifada has left more than 1,800 Palestinians and 700 Israelis dead, and led to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank. The fighting and terrorist bombings have flattened whatever there was of a Palestinian economy and inflicted heavy losses on Israel's own, which now reports a jobless rate of nearly 11 percent.

And yet, the terror campaign has enabled Sharon to retain power. There is no justification for the blunt military tactics Sharon has employed--except the justification the campaign of suicide bombings has provided him.