Marcus Halaby looks at the results of the Israeli elections, which will only create a right wing, conservative government.<\/p>\n
Israeli elections have a habit of bringing out into the open those unsavoury aspects of Israel\u2019s politics that its apologists in the West generally wish could be kept hidden from view. This election has been no different. It should, of course, hardly come as a surprise that an election campaign that involved the bombardment of Gaza and the destruction of much of its social and economic infrastructure should have seen a huge swing to the right.<\/p>\n
However, it is definitely a sign of the times that Israel\u2019s Labor party, traditionally seen as the founder of the state and the party of the Zionist establishment, and which the Israeli \u201cpeace camp\u201d have consistently promoted illusions in, should have finished in fourth place, behind the ultra-right Yisrael Beiteinu party of anti-Arab racist Avigdor Lieberman, and only just ahead of Shas, a religious party supported by the marginalised \u201cOriental\u201d Jewish community. Another irony is that all three main parties now belong to the same right-wing Revisionist Zionist political tradition, and are led by people who made their political careers in the Likud or its predecessors.<\/p>\n
The provisional results of the elections leave no clear victor, and the next two or three weeks may see a complicated game being played as Benjamin Netanyahu, leader of Likud, and Tzipi Livni, currently foreign minister and leader of Kadima, each try to construct a viable ruling coalition. Kadima, with 28 seats in the Knesset has claimed a victory over Likud with only 27; Netanyahu, on the other hand, argues that the overall increase in the vote for \u201cright-wing\u201d parties (giving them 70 seats out of 120, compared to 55 after the last elections in 2006) entitles him, as the leader of the main right-wing party, to become prime minister.<\/p>\n
It is theoretically possible that there could be a Kadima-led government excluding both Likud and Yisrael Beiteinu; a coalition with Labor, Shas, Meretz (a Zionist party to the left of Labor and its perennial partner in coalition governments), and one or another of the small religious parties could just about hold a majority.<\/p>\n
A factor in favour of this outcome is the strong enmity between Shas and Lieberman\u2019s party, which draws most of its vote from recent immigrants from the former Soviet republics. Shas leader Rabbi Ovadia Yosef even said that voting for Lieberman would be \u201chelping Satan\u201d, on account of Yisrael Beiteinu\u2019s support for civil marriage, a measure supported by the largely secular (and often only tenuously Jewish) \u201cRussians\u201d. However, this coalition would be subject to the same centrifugal forces as similar Labor-led coalitions in the past, like that of Labor leader Ehud Barak when he was prime minister between 1999 and 2001.<\/p>\n
In any case, both Kadima and Likud are courting Lieberman and other parties to their right. This therefore leaves three likely outcomes: a Netanyahu-Lieberman coalition, a Livni-Lieberman coalition, or a Kadima-Likud government of national unity designed to keep Yisrael Beiteinu out.<\/p>\n
For those for whom Kadima, Likud and Yisrael Beiteinu equate simply to the \u201ccentre\u201d, \u201cright\u201d and \u201cextreme right\u201d, the first of these three outcomes might seem the most likely. However, Lieberman, who advocates \u201cloyalty tests\u201d as a condition for citizenship for Israel\u2019s Palestinian minority, and who warns that this Arab one-fifth of Israel\u2019s citizens pose a danger to Israel\u2019s existence, also advocates handing over some Arab-majority districts in pre-1967 Israel to Mahmoud Abbas\u2019 Palestinian Authority in return for annexing Jewish settlements in the West Bank, in order to reduce this existential threat.<\/p>\n
He has therefore gone further than Kadima has on the principal issue that separates it from Likud: namely, the idea that some form of \u201cdisengagement\u201d from the Palestinians, unilateral or otherwise, will be necessary to preserve Israel\u2019s Zionist and majority-Jewish character. It was, after all, then prime minister Ariel Sharon\u2019s \u201cunilateral disengagement\u201d from Gaza that led him to split Likud and found Kadima in the first place.<\/p>\n
Netanyahu, by contrast, is likely to suspend all negotiations and try to put off any future cosmetic withdrawals in the West Bank for as long as possible. For his supporters, the rise of Hamas and the war on Gaza are signs that Sharon\u2019s disengagement plan was a mistake, one that they do not intend to repeat. He has also pledged to \u201cfinish the job\u201d in Gaza and hinted at a military strike on Iran.<\/p>\n
It goes without saying that, whoever forms the next Israeli government, the outcome will be a negative one for the Palestinians and for the region, especially as the United States becomes more strategically dependent on Israel\u2019s unique position as its enforcer in the region following President Obama\u2019s planned troop withdrawal from Iraq. Israel\u2019s \u201cunfinished business\u201d with Hezbollah may well lead it to a new aggression on Lebanon, as part of a proxy war against the \u201cSyrian-Iranian axis\u201d that Israeli politicians hold responsible for Hamas\u2019 continued defiance.<\/p>\n
What is new, however, is the specific threat posed to the future of Israel\u2019s Arab citizens. Persecuted and discriminated against since the founding of the state in 1948, and subjected to military rule until 1966, they have of late become much more vocal in their support of their Palestinian co-nationals in the territories occupied in 1967. The attempt to ban their two most prominent parties \u2013 Balad and the United Arab List \u2013 from standing in these elections, and the hysteria raised about the threat posed by their \u201cdisloyalty\u201d, in which racists like Lieberman merely vocalise obsessions held by the whole of Israel\u2019s political class, should be seen as a foretaste of things to come.<\/p>\n
Notably, while the \u201c\u201948 Palestinians\u201d (as they prefer to be called) have supported the demand for an end to the occupation and the creation of a Palestinian state in the 1967 territories, they have never demanded their own inclusion in it, preferring to fight for the idea that Israel should become a state \u201cof its citizens\u201d, and not an ethnic-Jewish state. This in itself is a back-handed admission that a two-state solution, even one based on the 1967 borders, would merely create a ghetto for the Palestinians. And while they can sympathise with the demand of Palestinians under occupation that, if they are to live in a ghetto it should at least be self-governing, but they have no intention of joining them there.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Marcus Halaby looks at the results of the Israeli elections, which will only create a right wing, conservative government. Israeli elections have a habit of bringing out into the open those unsavoury aspects of Israel\u2019s politics that its apologists in the West generally wish could be kept hidden from view. This election has been no […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7724,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[104],"class_list":["post-2987","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-archive"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fifthinternational.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2987","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fifthinternational.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fifthinternational.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fifthinternational.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7724"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fifthinternational.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2987"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/fifthinternational.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2987\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fifthinternational.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2987"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fifthinternational.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2987"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fifthinternational.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2987"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}