Israel Goes to the Center, but will the Center Hold?

The Financial Times has an interesting analysis of the Israeli elections by Avishai Margalit of Hebrew University. Margalit notes that the 31 parties did boil down a big surprise when the votes came in, the virtual annihilation of the Likud with 11 seats just ahead of the Pensioners Party. He also makes the cardinal description of what Israel is all about:

The politics of Israel is neither ideological politics nor interest politics: it is predominantly identity politics: various ethnic and religious groups fight for authentic self-expression and with it, recognition – or at least grudging recognition – from other groups. Israel is a country of immigrants, and the politics of identity is the politics of immigrants and immigration, as many European countries have recently learned. On top of this, Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs are locked in bloody, intercommunal strife, which is as much about elusive identities as it is about land and water. The politics of identity used to be the politics of the underdog but now, the top dogs in Israel have joined in. Thus, after the recent election of Amir Peretz, a Moroccan Jew, to head Labor, many party old-timers from the Ashkenazi community deserted, complaining he was not "one of us". Russian new immigrants voted overwhelmingly for a rightist party led by a Russian-born Israeli, as an expression of strong identification. They did well and became the fourth-largest party. Arab Israeli citizens, very much engaged in identity politics, even tried to promote the idea that voting for any Jewish-led (“Zionist”) party is taboo.

Not only did the election give the Laborites to the Sephardics who already had Shas, which came in third, after Kadima and Labor, and the ethnic Russians its own rightist party, but there was, Margalit asserts, a new alignment across the board. The new identity politics, he says, is

the Jewish identity of Israel. The elections turned into a referendum about the plan of Mr Sharon and then, Ehud Olmert, his successor, for further withdrawal from the West Bank to retain the Jewish identity of Israel – an identity threatened by the occupation. Mr Sharon’s legacy consists of three propositions: first, there is no partner on the Palestinian side able or willing to reach a permanent agreement with Israel that would stick. Abu Mazen, Palestinian president, is willing but unable and Hamas is able but unwilling. Second, Israel should unilaterally determine its de facto border for demographic reasons with overt or tacit acceptance by the Americans. Third, the borders should run along the separation wall and include the major Jewish settlements in the West Bank while resettling some 70,000 settlers residing outside those blocs. Under this plan, Israel would give up direct rule of the Palestinians but not indirect rule.

Mr Olmert boldly announced his plan in his election campaign in a way that Mr Sharon never did, and perhaps paid for it in votes. Why he was so explicit is unclear. I guess that after Mr Sharon’s disappearance, he had to establish an independent authority. Winning merely in Mr Sharon’s shadow became untenable and the Kadima party that Mr Sharon founded started losing ground in the polls. Mr Olmert decided he might as well turn the elections into a referendum on his pullout plan. By publicising his plan, Mr Olmert cannot be accused in the future – the way Mr Sharon was accused during the Gaza pullout – that he did not get a mandate for his plan.

What is amazing is that after 40 years of occupation in which no one who really aspired to power in Israel ever dared declare a pullout, Mr Olmert finally did so, and apart from some necessary noises by the right, the reaction was as if he had muttered commonsense banalities. This is a marked change in Israeli politics. Before the Gaza pullout, Israelis believed that the left hated the settlers and the right hated the Arabs. Mr Sharon discovered that the centre in Israel hates both the settlers and the Arabs. Mr Sharon isolated the settlers and turned them into a sect that is alienated from mainstream Israel; their supporters in the jingoistic rightist bloc shrank considerably, now consisting of a quarter of the parliament, at most.

Mr Peretz achieved the unbelievable. He ousted Shimon Peres from the leadership of the party and breathed social democratic life into the dry bones of Labor. He resurrected it as a politically relevant party by making its social agenda the agenda of the country – and the country started speaking Laborese. The election result is that Israel has moved from the right to the centre.[emphasis mine] Yet, Kadima and Labor together did not do well enough to secure the centre-left hold on the country. Besides, Israel’s political clock is synchronised with the Palestinian political clock in pre-established disharmony. When Palestinians move to the centre, Israel moves to the right; when Israel moves to the centre, the Palestinians move to the right – this time to the Islamic right. In the tale of the two elections, the Palestinian and Israeli chapters have just started to unfold and only pollsters may be stupid enough to risk a prediction on how it will all end.

With the Arabs and the settlers outside the pale, the Fence/Wall/Barrier will become a symbol of defense and defiance if Olmert and his allies bring the country under their sway.