Elections 2006: With a Whimper, Not a Bang
Kadima wins, but not before peaking too soon.
By Yehudah Mirsky
The breathtaking events of late 2005 and early 2006 promised
an extraordinary shakeup in Israeli politics.
In November 2005, Amir Peretz's surprise win over Shimon
Peres in the Labor party primary, and his decision to pull Labor out of the
government, precipitated a series of dramatic changes. Until then, two
bottlenecks were stopping up the system: Ariel Sharon was stuck in a party,
Likud, that he had founded but had long since outgrown, while across the aisle,
Peres' stubborn refusal to yield his personal ambition paralyzed Labor. So
determined was Peres to make his way back into the Cabinet Room--maybe even the
Prime Minister's Office-- that he had crippled one generation of successors and
threatened to do the same to another.
A New Party is Born
The eclipse of Peres set in motion a stunning realignment.
Sharon defected from Likud and, with centrist defectors from Labor, created a
new party: Kadima. With Kadima, Sharon could pursue the policy trajectory he
had already introduced and, in what long-time Labor MK Haim Ramon termed
"the Big Bang," resurrect a broad ruling center resembling the
historic MAPAI of Ben-Gurion, through whose ranks he and Peres had risen.
Sharon's stroke in January 2006 seemed to put Kadima in
danger (though it also helped it by removing Sharon's corruption scandals from
the public agenda). But Kadima, now led by Sharon's designated successor, Ehud
Olmert, survived, pointing to the underlying suasion of that broad consensus.
It finally seemed as though the Knesset would assume the rough shape of the
body politic it purported to represent. It would leave most of the territories
while retaining the major blocs, not out of love for the Palestinians, but to
distance Israel from them; and it would accept free markets sans Bibinomics--the
aggressive capitalism of Benjamin Netanyahu. At long last, the endless
horse-trading and thin coalitions that had bedeviled Israeli politics for so
long would be behind us.
The truth turned out to be more complicated.
Landslide Predicted
From the moment of its birth the media and the chattering
classes threw their weight behind Kadima. Poll after poll, article after
article claimed its invincibility, and the vast majority of journalists and
pundits (this writer included) assumed that it would indeed win big. After all,
wasn't a realist pullout from the territories and an embrace of free markets
what everybody wanted?
In the run-up to the Gaza disengagement, a leading
journalist freely confessed that the media was giving Sharon a pass on his many
corruption scandals for the sake of disengagement, comparing Sharon to the
communal etrog which must be
preserved at all costs. Kadima assumed that role, and this time the etrog blew
up in the media's face when it turned out that Kadima's support was broad, but
thinner than expected.
The chattering classes--overwhelmingly secular, urban,
native-born, and Ashkenazi--consistently underreported and underestimated the
strength of the Sephardic religious party Shas and Avigdor Lieberman's Yisrael
Beiteinu. In the end, Kadima garnered 29 Knesset seats, far fewer than
originally predicted, but enough to gain Olmert the premiership. Indeed, having
been told over and over that the election was a done deal, many voters simply stayed
home.
Social and Economic Issues
As for Labor, its top dozen or so candidates did indeed
promise change, and as a group seemed more impressive than Amir Peretz himself;
yet none of them could provide the elbows that Peretz did to eject Peres and
finally make Labor at least seem like a Social-Democratic alternative to Bibinomics.
Though the 19 Knesset seats garnered by Labor were the same number gained in
the previous election, it was the first time in years that Labor didn't
actually lose seats, and, aided by the stunning collapse of Likud, Labor
re-emerged as a force to be reckoned with. Peretz proved to be nobody's fool
and a formidable political force. Whether his self-proclaimed role as tribune
of the masses has any grounding in economic reality will eventually be put to
the test.
Early commentary on the election suggested that economic
justice, or as it's known in Israel, "social issues," were a deciding
factor, accounting for the strong showings of Labor, Shas (12 Knesset seats),
and the Pensioners (7 seats), each of whom made it a feature of their
campaigns. That, however, seems something of a misreading. Peretz, during his
time as head of the Histadrut, the national labor federation, never seriously
engaged the genuine and well-documented shortcomings of socialism and the
challenges of globalization. His strikes and work actions failed to yield even
cost-of-living allowances.
Shas forcefully called attention to the economic travails
afflicting much of Israeli society, yet it offered no concrete program for
macroeconomic growth. To the contrary, it's hard not to see its call for
economic justice as ancillary to, if not a fig leaf for, its religious agenda.
Still, Shas could justly revel in the utter evaporation of its former nemesis,
Shinui, which went from fifteen seats to zero, perhaps a proper reward for its
rabid (possibly even racist) anticlericalism.
And then there was the biggest surprise--the seven seats won
by the Pensioners Party. This was in essence the protest vote of generally
better-off middle class voters and of young people put off by what they saw as
the hopeless torpor of the established parties. That the head of the
Pensioners' Party, Rafi Eitan, was a hard-as-nails Mossad operative responsible
for the Pollard debacle who became a wealthy man, in part through lucrative
deals with Fidel Castro, and that nobody had the slightest idea what he or the
other new MKs on his list thought about any public issue other than pension,
seemed not to have crossed voters' minds.
Most everybody voted against Bibinomics (Likud garnered only
12 Knesset seats). Yet there's still been little intelligent debate about
appropriate economic policies for a country like Israel, a world leader in
hi-tech whose breathtaking disparities in wealth run directly counter to the
strong social solidarity of traditional Zionist ideology.
The Territories
One major policy debate, however, has been settled. A solid
consensus emerged among Israel's Jewish polity for leaving the territories, in
whole or in part, sooner rather than later. This view spread along a spectrum
from, on the left, Meretz, which advocates a full return to the pre-1967
borders and is willing to negotiate on the Right of Return, all the way
rightward to Yisrael Beitenu, which advocates not only leaving much of the
territories but many of Israel's Arab citizens, as well. In between are Labor
and Kadima, who differ on whether to leave the territories unilaterally or as
part of a negotiation (an option made less likely by the ascendancy of Hamas).
The Arab parties (9 seats), for better or worse, will not be
part of this national conversation. The Likud and the merged National Religious
Party-National Union have failed to present a scenario whereby Israel could
hold on to the territories and still maintain its Jewish and democratic
character.
The ultra-Orthodox parties, as always, will accommodate
everyone else's chief priority (defense and security) in exchange for
consideration of their's: funding for their growing networks of institutions
and a rolling-back of Netanyahu's welfare cuts.
Kadima will not be the magic bullet that will, at a stroke,
redraw Israel's borders and ensure the country's future for the foreseeable
future, but real change is on the horizon. For years there has been a silent consensus
in favor of leaving most, if not all, of Judea and Samaria, but it never found
expression as an electoral mandate. Now it has. Not in dewy-eyed hopes for a
New Middle East, but as a necessary excision that will enable Israel to meet
the multiple and unending challenges--military, diplomatic, economic, and
cultural--still lying ahead.
Yehudah Mirsky, a
former US State Department official, lives in Jerusalem and is a Fellow at the
Van Leer Institute and Harvard.
