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By Micah D. Halpern
September 15, 2004
There's talk of a civil war in Israel.
It's made headlines, been at the top of some news broadcasts, become fodder for editorials. But is it a reality, will there ever be a civil war in Israel, among Israelis? Most probably not. Is it about to happen now? Absolutely not.
Right now, there is no chance of a civil war in Israel.
So what is this about? It's about hype. People are upset, tens of thousands maybe even a hundred thousand people are upset. But while they are a significant minority of Israeli voters who are angry with the prime minister and his stated policies, they are a small minority. And despite their best efforts, despite their energy and the heart and the soul that they put into their cause, in the end, it will have no effect on the current government.
So will they take up arms in an organized attempt to overthrow the government? No, of course not! They will do what they always do and what they do best. They will make demands, they will continue to demonstrate, they will perpetrate acts of civil disobedience.
But just because you demonstrate well doesn't mean that you lobby your cause effectively. And that's a lesson that Israelis are hard put to learn.
So what do we have now -- we have a group of very vocal and active citizens on the political right peeved at the prime minister and his policies. And we have a prime minister who is totally ticked off that people are calling into question his patriotism as well as his commitment to Israel. Ariel Sharon was, after all, an IDF general.
No doubt about it, Prime Minister Sharon is very uncomfortable being critiqued by his natural constituency, the right. And his discomfort spikes when the critique calls for soldiers to refuse orders. And when Sharon lashes out, his style is to exaggerate the points of criticism in order to further marginalize his critics in the eyes of the mainstream Israeli voter. That's where the cry of civil war came from.
In calmer moments, though, the prime minister knows what every other successful Israeli politician knows. In Israeli politics, the winning game is in the middle. Get that mainstream middle of the road voter and you've got it all. That nondescript group swings either way. They're not Labor voters and they're not Likud voters even though, in the past few elections, they have sometimes voted Labor and sometimes voted Likud. No election is won without them.
Despite what most people think --- politics in Israel is relatively stable. And the vast majority of the citizens of Israel are in the middle of the political spectrum. That is what Sharon is counting on.
Do not be misled by analysts waxing on and on about party referendums. The Likud votes and referendums we have been hearing and reading about, the results of which were not supportive of Sharon's move to dismantle are of little value. And -- this is the important part -- Likud members do not represent Israel. They just represent Likud members. Likud voters are not Likud members. Likud voters are those in the middle who might easily vote for someone else.
In Israeli politics, a party only has influence in decision making from the inside. That means that even small party coalition member have clout. Once you are out of the coalition you are sidelined. No power and no money. If you can get 40,000 people to a demonstration, you have made the headlines for one day but you have made negligible to no impact on the decision makers. Even with 100,000 voices and bodies at a demonstration your impact is non-persuasive. The National Religious Party (NRP) knows that, that's why they're fighting their constituents to remain within. Shas has learned it the hard way. United Torah Judaism is in the process of learning it.
Despite the protests and protesters, there are significant changes on the horizon. Jewish settlements in Gaza will be uprooted and the face of the settlement campaign will look very different. The West Bank may also be seriously changed as plans are drawn up to strengthen certain settlement blocks and evacuate more remote ones.
Threatening civil discord will not create change. Neither will a pulsa denura -- a Kabbalistic curse that invokes a death wish upon another -- as one rabbi has threatened to bring on Ariel Sharon.
So if it doesn't happen through organized protest, might there be another Jewish terrorist out there ready to target this prime minister much as Yigal Amir did to Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin on November 4, 1995? The assassin scenario is more likely than the civil war scenario, but still highly unlikely. Today there are stopgaps and safety measures that just weren't there before and were put in place precisely to prevent a catastrophe of that magnitude from ever occurring again.
Israel is undergoing change, but the political process will prevail. Have faith in the process.
Views expressed by the author do not
necessarily reflect those of israelinsider.
 
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