The Timeline between Rabin's assassination and Bibi's election
Netanyahu's Israel:
A Sad New Chapter
In A March
Of Folly
Do not be fooled by articulate talk of peace.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's plan is to labor
mightily to forestall a final settlement with the
Palestinians while avoiding the consequences: diminished
U.S. support, renewed Arab hostility and economic
slowdown in Israel.
His four-year term will be a sad and frustrating
spectacle for many,
because only three months ago - a century after Zionists
began settling Palestine and less than 50 years since
the establishment of the Jewish state - the end of
conflict between the Arabs and an increasingly
prosperous Israel seemed truly at hand.
Arab leaders have actually been prepared for over a
decade to
establish cool peace with Israel in exchange for the
territories it captured in the 1967 war. Four years ago,
Israelis elected a Labor Party government essentially
ready to cut that deal.
But Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was cautious, and
politically
weak, and he could not bring himself to finish the task
in one term. The deals he struck with the PLO set up a
five-year interim period in which the Palestinians get
only partial autonomy in part of the territory they seek
- a down payment toward a final deal whose completion
required a Labor reelection.
This amounted to a virtual invitation to Palestinian
rejectionists to try to bring Labor down. In this light,
the resultant Islamic fundamentalist campaign of suicide
bombings was one of history's most stunningly effective
uses of terrorism: the Hamas and Islamic Jihad attacks
that killed over 200 Israelis are the main reason the
hardline Likud is now back at the helm.
Had Shimon Peres been elected in May, the result
would have
been a demilitarized Palestinian state in about 90
percent of the West Bank and Gaza, some sort of
Palestinian foothold in east Jerusalem and Muslim
control of the Old City holy sites; this is the essence
of the blueprint worked out last fall by Peres' peace
maven Yossi Beilin and Mahmoud Abbas (a.k.a. Abu Mazen),
the No. 2 man in the PLO.
Such a painful partition of the already minuscule
slice of
land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River
is the only way to achieve peace and avoid perpetuating
Israel as a binational state where Jews dominate Arabs
by force and no one is safe.
But in an election that may be remembered as one of
the most
sorrowful turning points in the history of Zionism,
Israeli voters - some deliberately, others with amazing
indifference - scuttled this scenario by the narrowest
of margins.
To understand how Israelis vote, it is important to
remember
several things:
The Likud, while ultimately wrong, has a point.
The
pre-1967 lines mean that Israel at its narrowest point
is 19 kilometers wide and that the future Palestinian
state sits astride Jerusalem, within 25 kilometers of
Tel Aviv and a stone's throw from Ben-Gurion airport.
While there is hope the Palestinians will establish a
relatively advanced Arab state, it will nevertheless
remain a poor and potentially unstable. Its
demilitarization will be difficult to enforce given the
dense population of the West Bank and the
miniaturization of modern weaponry. So Israel would have
to guard its borders well, do everything it can to help
Palestine economically and hope for the best. Sound too
idealistic or enthusiastic about all of this, and you
will lose votes.
Terrorism works. Israelis hate it, and they
expect the
government to prevent it. In 1992, a campaign of
knifings in Israel by nationalist Palestinians helped
bring down Likud after 15 years, succeeding where
hyperinflation, an utterly mindless Israeli occupation
of Lebanon and the Palestinian uprising failed. Islamic
fundamentalists' suicide bombings brought down Labor in
1996. Netanyahu's policies could create an irresistible
temptation for more terrorism, this time by secular
Palestinians wishing to bring Labor back.
This is the Middle East, where (like in the
Balkans)
nothing is simple and little is as is seems, or so many
people believe. And so, astoundingly, many of
Netanyahu's voters want peace and expect him to produce
it. In fact, candidate Netanyahu promised little else
besides "a secure peace," and one free of annoying
compromises at that. Clearly, voters who bought this
line are not rocket scientists; but they are more
numerous than rocket scientists, and their ballots count
no less.
There are important factors at play that have
nothing to do
with the Arab question, and they amount to a
considerable built-in electoral problem for Labor. The
ultra-Orthodox, with about 10 percent of the Jewish
vote, will vote overwhelmingly against the Labor
candidate no matter what because they correctly believe
that Labor is far more dedicated than Likud to secular
values like the preeminence of the rule of law over holy
scripture. Modern Orthodox Jews, with another 10
percent, will also vote for the Likud candidate because
they have come to value preserving Jewish control over
the biblical Land of Israel above almost anything else.
Another 10-20 percent of the Jewish public are
"traditional," mostly Sephardi Jews inclined to vote
against Labor because they dislike its secular Western
orientation.
Netanyahu is aware of these factors, and he wants to
get
reelected in 2000.
So after some posturing he will undoubtedly meet
with Arafat,
shake his hand and smile for the cameras. And the army
will pull out of most of Hebron because existing
agreements commit Israel to this, and Netanyahu will not
blatantly violate them.
But - in contradiction to what
many voters believed - the accords commit Israel to
little else except for talk. So Netanyahu will talk.
Still, barring a colossal disaster - measured in
many
hundreds, perhaps thousands of Israeli lives - Netanyahu
will not seriously proceed on the Palestinian track.
There is scant chance Likud will agree to anything
resembling the Beilin-Abu Mazen plan. And there is no
chance the Palestinians will accept any less.
It is possible that Yasser Arafat will agree to drag
out peace
talks in hopes of a Labor victory - probably under Ehud
Barak - in 2000. But Netanyahu's government is already
(albeit hesitantly) resuming settlement of the West
Bank, which will further complicate any future Labor
partition efforts. Meanwhile, Arafat's regime will
gradually weaken (if not collapse), and Israel will
probably suffer more terrorist attacks.
With the Palestinian track disintegrating, Netanyahu
will be
increasingly likely to seek peace credentials elsewhere.
Already he is striving to end Israel's useless
occupation of the "security zone" in south Lebanon. In
the future, despite his current hardline stand, he might
be dragged into a land-for-peace deal with Syria on the
Golan Heights as well.
Had Peres been elected, he would have almost
certainly reached
a deal with Syria in which Israel pulled out of south
Lebanon and the Golan Heights. As opposition leader
Netanyahu lobbied so fiercely against this that he might
now feel compelled to hold out. But on the other hand,
Israel's stand in the Golan is forever weakened by Likud
founder Menachem Begin's agreement to return the Sinai
to Egypt in 1978.
Still, a Golan capitulation is not very likely, and
not the
main issue.
The real dilemma, and the main difference between
Labor and
Likud, involves the strategic, politically explosive
West Bank.
Keeping it, and preventing any peace deal
with the Palestinians that would sacrifice it, is
Likud's raison d'etre; anyone doubting this should read
Netanyahu's book, "A Place Among The Nations," an
eloquent argument for keeping the West Bank at virtually
all cost.
So the brightest hope is that Netanyahu's tenure
will amount to
no worse than a delay to be followed by another Labor
term. Sadly, it will almost certainly also be a time of
political malaise, declining economic fortunes, violence
and, in contrast to the Rabin-Peres era, few hopes and
little diplomatic progress.
Last November's assassination of Rabin by a
religious
ultranationalist adds a measure of cosmic tragedy to
what would otherwise be mere folly.
Some will laud Netanyahu supporters for not allowing
the act of
one man (assassin Yigal Amir) to affect their beliefs on
larger issues. Others will blame the Labor Party for its
anemic campaign that ignored the killing almost
entirely.
But there is a nagging feeling that the
assassination should have been a watershed moment, and
it is difficult to escape the conclusion that something
has gone terribly wrong if Netanyahu, whose party
oversaw the hysterical campaign of vilification that led
to Rabin's slaying, was able to win an election a
half-year later.
It is interesting to note that with few exceptions,
Israel's
intelligentsia opposed Netanyahu. Much has been said of
the country's "leftist" media. But the media is
pro-Labor simply because its members are mostly
literate. The mathematicians, interior decorators,
dentists and poets of Israel are equally "leftist."
Studies consistently show that support for Labor is
directly and powerfully related to education. It is true
that European-descended Ashkenazim support Labor far
more than the Middle Eastern Sephardim, but the causal
factor is education: educated Sephardim support Labor,
and the minority of lower-class Ashkenazim support
Likud.
It is possible that the intelligentsia is wrong. But
don't put
money on it.
D.B. Solomon is the pen name of a veteran Israeli
correspondent.
