Thursday, March 28, 2024 -
Print Edition

Report from Israel: Peace not expected

Abraham Diskin, left, and Steve LindeJERUSALEM — As recently re-elected Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gets down to business this week, beginning what is likely to be an arduous process of building a political coalition, Israelis are pondering how the January elections are going to influence the political landscape of their country.

A press tour comprised of members of the American Jewish Press Association, including the Intermountain Jewish News, arrived in Israel late on Jan. 22, just hours after the polls closed on a significant election.

In coffee shops and hotel lobbies in Jerusalem, on local TV and in the nation’s newspapers, any number of politically-oriented questions dominated the conversations of Israelis as they went about their otherwise ordinary days:

• Will Netanyahu be able to forge a broader alliance than his previous one, a right-wing, religiously-dominated coalition that emphasized state security but had little flexibility on many critical domestic issues?

• What effect will the surprising ascendancy of the newly energized “center left” faction — most obviously illustrated by the surprising showing of the new Yesh Atid party and its newcomer chairman Yair Lapid — have on the ultimate governing coalition?

• Will Israel’s economic and social challenges — including the ultra-sensitive issue of the haredi population and its potential participation in the military draft — play a major role in the coalition-building process?

• Is the question of peace with the Palestinians even relevant today, given the current political realities, particularly on the Palestinian side of the table?

While the victory of Netanyahu’s Likud-Beiteinu party was correctly considered all but a sure thing, even weeks before the election, the Knesset pie chart that emerged from the voting — 42 seats for the right-wing parties, 48 for the center-left, 18 for the haredi and 12 for the Arab parties — seemed to surprise many Israelis.

The results suggested that the center and left wing points of view, at least on domestic issues, are on the upswing, and projected a palpable sense of potential change for many Israeli political observers.

Among those observers are Professor (Emeritus) Abraham Diskin, of The Hebrew University’s political science department, and Jerusalem Post editor Steve Linde, both of whom led and moderated a lively discussion with AJPA reporters in Mishkenot Sha’ananim, a charming 19th-century neighborhood in West Jerusalem, where Israeli journalist Uri Drori is establishing a Jerusalem Press Club.

“Coalitions are really the name of the game,” Diskin said, explaining that in Israel’s parliamentary form of government, the true measure of an effective government is not necessarily the complexion of the single victorious party, but the compromise and deal-making with other parties that give that victorious party the ability to govern effectively.

While Netanyahu’s victorious party — actually a pragmatic merger of two parties, Likud and Yisrael Beiteinu — narrowly captured the center and center-right portion of Israel’s political spectrum, Diskin pointed out that Netanyahu’s considerable challenge will be the delicate balancing act he’ll need to perform in negotiating with both the center left and the haredi factions.

FOR the first time in years, those negotiations aren’t likely to dwell heavily on state security, even though Israel is facing daunting threats from Hamas in Gaza, from both rebels and the government in Syria, perhaps from the ruling party in Egypt and certainly from Iran.

The upshot is that the need for strong state security is more or less a given in such a tenuous environment, Diskin said, and there is little disagreement, even among the major leftwing parties, on its priority and necessity.

By extension, the idea of approaching the Palestinian Authority with a peace overture seems hardly realistic to most Israelis, especially since Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas is widely seen by Israelis as a do-nothing leader at best and a saboteur of peace initiatives at worst.

“The Palestinians are not ready to come to the table,” Diskin said. “This remains the existential issue.”

While Diskin believes that most Israelis, including Netanyahu, still support the two-state solution, there is likely to be little progress in that direction until the Palestinians show at least some willingness to compromise.

Linde was considerably less optimistic even than that.

“I personally don’t see much hope for the peace process,” he said, “and the two-state solution looks dead to me. I think the only way it will move at all will be as a result of pressure from [President] Obama.”

With state security largely a non-issue during the 2013 campaign, and with Israeli voters seemingly much more interested in such domestic problems as the cost of living, food costs, housing, taxes and the haredi draft, Linde strongly urged Netanyahu to position himself squarely in the center, between the left-leaning Yesh Atid’s Yair Lapid and the right-leaning Jewish Home’s Naftali Bennett.

Lapid and Bennett — both of whom concentrated on domestic socioeconomic issues during their campaigns — are potential powerbrokers in the new government, and the “new superstars” of the Israeli political landscape, Linde says.

Netanyahu would be wise not to face either of them from a point of opposition.

Diskin more or less agreed with Linde, emphasizing that Netanyahu “doesn’t want to be the most left-wing in his own government.”

He suggested that the prime minister needs to be heedful of the emerging voice of the center left and try to incorporate at least some of its socioeconomic points of view into his own government.

The problem, of course, is that based on the complex parliamentary mathematics so crucial to Israeli politics, Netanyahu will still likely need to forge pacts with at least some of the haredi parties in order to create even a semi-solid coalition, able to survive the challenge of no-confidence votes.

That, Diskin and Linde agreed, is where things are likely to get tricky. Given the current political make-up, newly dominated by both right-wing and left-center parties that are, if not openly anti-religious, at least unsympathetic to haredi concerns, the usual quid-quo-pro of coalition building will be unusually difficult.

That fact, coupled with the precariously close balance between right-wing and left-wing or left-center parties, doesn’t bode well for a solid coalition.

Neither Diskin nor Linde, in fact, are confident that the current makeup of the Knesset will be conducive to a secure coalition. The likelihood, they said, is that whatever coalition Netanyahu is able to form is not likely to last very long.

WHILE it could be wrong to characterize the mood of the Israeli electorate as cynical or apathetic, American Jewish reporters in Israel did not observe a great deal of obvious enthusiasm about the election.

While several Israelis on the street expressed hope for progress on socioeconomic issues — an attitude verified by the electoral success of Yesh Atid and Jewish Home — nobody voiced optimism that meaningful peace talks with Palestinians are likely to take place anytime soon, nor that any of the regional threats facing Israel are going to fade away in the near future.

Overshadowing those hopes and concerns was a sense of frustration that the emerging Israeli government would likely not be a secure one, and that it might face a form of political gridlock not unlike that currently dominating the US government.

That concern seemed almost universal. Even in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, arguably the most un-Jewish site in Jerusalem, the potential shakiness of the new government was a topic of conversation.

Speaking in English, a Franciscan friar was talking Israeli politics with a Coptic monk as they watched a procession of priests pass through the ancient church during Vesper prayers. He was describing the challenging options facing Netanyahu as he tries to navigate the tricky political waters of coalition-building.

“It’s going to be difficult for him,” the friar said.

Copyright © 2013 by the Intermountain Jewish News



Avatar photo

IJN Assistant Editor | [email protected]


Leave a Reply