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Avi Davis is a freelance journalist based in Los Angeles.
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Israel's polls reflect and influence elections, but they're more uncertain than ever |
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By Avi Davis
March 29, 2006
As Israelis went to the polls today in the most significant election in the country's history, numbing questions overhung the electorate: Where are the leaders among the candidates? Who can be counted on to subsume narrow personal and political interests for the good of the country? Which one of the candidates has sufficient breadth of understanding that Zionism is not a dead ideology at all but a vision, still largely unfulfilled, that if harnessed correctly, could propel Israel's journey through the 21st century?
Not Ehud Olmert. The leader of the nascent centrist party Kadima is the true successor to Ariel Sharon in that he has placed his own political fortunes and potential popularity above the welfare of the State. His platform, deigned falsely "unideological" is, in fact, an ideology of retreat and surrender. There are few prominent military men who will agree that, short of a comprehensive and workable agreement with the Arab world, dismantling settlements can ever lead to security for Israeli citizens. Yet the adamantine attitude that this is the only solution to Israel's existential dilemma of Palestinian revanche has been defied by the vacuum left in Gaza where Hamas has busily set about creating a springboard for attacks on Israel.
After the completion of Kadima's proposed withdrawal from the West Bank, a similar enterprise can be expected to develop there -- but this time under the guidance of seasoned operatives belonging to Hezbollah and al Qaeda. The entire political platform of Kadima is based on a spurious demographic threat -- which employs discredited figures produced by the Palestinians themselves.
Kadima's considerations are therefore not economic, social nor military, but political --designed primarily to appease foreign opinion and to play on domestic skepticism about peacemaking. Moreover, in adopting such a policy, Olmert has transformed Israeli settlers -- tax-paying citizens whose children have died defending the country -- into enemies of the State. No more cynical or irresponsible an approach to governing a country, whose very existence remains threatened by its neighbors, can be imagined.
Nor is Amir Peretz such a leader. The moribund Labor Party chose as its candidate an unreformed socialist who does not only eschew concerns about Israeli security but insists that the process of privatization and liberalization, which successive Israeli governments have instituted over the past ten years, has been a failure. His platform is designed to turn back the clock to a more benign era when Israelis believed in self sacrifice and economic redistribution for the good of the country. In this world view Judaism plays little role. The irony is that he represents a constituency that wants more benefits than the State can handle and for whom the particularist vision of Theodor Herzl of a Jewish state capable of absorbing Jews from around the world and defending their lives is an atavism. For Peretz and those of his ilk, the need for Israel's very Jewishness is not only questionable but represents a tortured past, best departed at the earliest convenience.
Benjamin Netanyahu does not fare much better on the leadership scales. Although his three years spent as prime minister should have equipped him to become Israel's foremost statesman, he seems to have learned nothing in the intervening period, displaying the pointed arrogance, indecisiveness and lack of mettle that characterized his earlier stewardship. Once the golden boy of Israeli politics, he has been unable to convert his acknowledged charisma and communication skills into a warm understanding of citizens' concerns. He has failed to project a commanding vision of Israel's future and his initial support for disengagement coupled with his diplomatic failures as prime minister, still rankle his would-be followers. The collapse of his Likud Party at the polls was therefore a reflection of not only Ariel Sharon's treachery, but Netanyahu's own disingenuousness, leading those who might have once supported him to question his integrity and honesty.
Then there is Avigdor Lieberman. As the one time Likud stalwart and Netanyahu aide, Lieberman's star has risen as those on the right have searched desperately for a voice who can project a vision of Israel that is militarily and socially secure. His party, Yisrael Beitenu, representing many Russian immigrants, has staked a claim to the political space vacated by Sharon and the Likud. But the one time bouncer has transformed into little more than a political strongman who has even suggested using his electoral muscle to engineer a comfortable place in a Kadima-led government -- an act which will ultimately compromise the values and principles of his own party.
Shas and United Torah Judaism are two religious parties which will likely be the kingmakers in any new coalition. But the fact that their leaders, Eli Yishai and Yakov Litzman are faceless to many Israelis is an indication of the shallowness of vision and absence of conviction within their ranks. Selling themselves to the highest bidder, they scavenge the spoils of a fractured political system, instead of modeling their conduct on the greatest leaders from the Jewish past.
Greed, the urge for fame and an unfettered opportunism seems to seethe in such men. There is a whiff of fraudulence about them, as distasteful an odor as any politician has ever exuded. Absent in their rhetoric is a profound sense of Jewish mission and of connectivity to the land. Gone is the true self-sacrifice of men such as David Ben Gurion and Menachem Begin, who, although divergent in both personality and political philosophy, understood these basic facts: Israel is not, and never will be, a state like any other. It is surrounded by enemies that will always wish it gone. It is confronted by a majority of countries at the United Nations who use any opportunity to excoriate it and would be pleased to see its demise. It is Zionism and the Jewish yearning it is based on -- and not materialism nor the desire for individual self-fulfillment -- that drives the need for a Jewish state. Wars cannot be won by military power alone but by an inner conviction that the cause for which one fights is worth profound sacrifice.
With only mere politicians to guide it and not leaders of either commanding vision or Zionist commitment, the future is truly a depressing one for the State of Israel.
Views expressed by the author do not
necessarily reflect those of israelinsider.
 
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