by

Ami Isseroff

Blank Minds

by

Ami Isseroff

Ariel Sharon will probably be the next Prime Minister of Israel. So what else is new? This prospect should arouse the deepest forebodings and galvanize action among friends of peace and sanity in Israel, but it only arouses apathy for some strange reason. The political world as we know it may be about to end, in the words of T.S. Eliot, "Not with a bang but a whimper." We are living a historic tragicomedy that will be inexplicable to those who view the current events in the future.

Barak

Two days before the crucial election, even Ehud Barak seems to be going blindly to his fate, still dreaming that he can galvanize support for his cause while pollsters give his opponent a 20% margin and Sharon adviser Arthur Finkelstein decreed his candidate would win 57% to 43%.

PM Ehud Barak withdrew from Lebanon, ending a divisive and pointless involvement. He restored Israel's shattered prestige abroad. Until recently, the economy was booming buoyed by foreign investment that had been scared off by Benjamin Nethanyahu's warmongering. It was refreshing to have a government that was at least committed to peace in name.

It is not enough. Barak's sorry record of broken promises, and his penchant for antagonizing all sides- religious, secular, settlers, Arabs and Jews- had already put him in trouble last summer, when the Knesset voted for new elections. The situation was made worse by the Intifadeh, party infighting and poor campaign strategy. Barak ruled out competition for the nomination within his own party, antagonizing the supporters of alternative candidates. Barak has also inexplicably failed to apologize to Israeli Arabs for excessive use of force by Israeli police in the recent riots in which 13 civilians were killed. Arab leaders are boycotting the elections, and say they will not tell their constituents to vote for him unless he apologizes.

Unlike Barak, former PM Shimon Peres ties Sharon in the polls, so the disaffection with Barak is almost certainly not due to disaffection with the peace process. But in fact, Peres\s economic and social policies are not more liberal than those of Barak. His record is not better on any issue. He did not do very well in controlling violence when he was Prime Minister, and his record in Operation Grapes of Wrath was not any more humanitarian than that of Barak in the present Intifadeh. Perhaps Peres's popularity is an expression of the desire of some people in the Israel labor party to punish Barak, to settle accounts.

Sharon

Sharon is not Barak or Peres. Barak may be hypocritical about supporting coexistence with the Palestinians as equal partners. Sharon is not hypocritical, he is unashamedly against it. Sharon is not a moral coward, because he is beyond good and evil. In the Israeli series T'kumah, he claimed the murder of civilians in his 1950's reprisal raid on Qibieh was a justifiable strategy, not an error or an operational necessity.

Sharon's style is reminiscent of those twentieth - century leaders who brought out the worst in their nations' psychic makeup. The Hebrew idiom "uvdot bashetah" is Sharon's slogan. It is mistranslated literally and poorly as "facts on the ground." It means "fait accompli." For a man like Sharon, "fait accompli" replaces legality and morality. New settlements, annexation, repudiation of national responsibilities, can all be achieved by "fait accompli."

Sharon tells audiences that Israel won his war in Lebanon in 1982, but was stabbed in the back by a leftist fifth column at home. Many years ago, he ran an election campaign ad that read "One Nation, One Party..." For some people, that kind of talk is reminiscent of another age, best forgotten.

Some insist Sharon is not as bad as all that. "One never knows. He might not start another war." Maybe he won't and maybe he will. We will let a man become our leader on the chance that he might not start another war.

Sharon's government and advisors will include friends from the Likud and other right-wing parties. Friends like Avigdor Lieberman, who wants to reconquer Beit Jala and bomb the Aswan High Dam, friends like Shaul Yahalom of the National Religious Party, who helped bring down Bibi Nethanyahu because he was too generous to the Palestinians. If there is a unity government as Sharon promised, Barak and a few others will function as technicians carrying out the will of a right-wing majority. It will be a government for those who want unity, order, a "national reawakening," a tame press at home, and a free field for adventure abroad.

Politics and politicians alone cannot bring peace, because politicians and governments cannot legislate what is in people's hearts. Politicians, however, can make peace impossible, and can move society in a direction farther and farther away from sound national goals.

Fifteen years of Likud government raised a new generation of Zionists. Many of them think that living in subsidized housing in the West Bank is heroic pioneering, that the goal of Zionism is exactly what its worst detractors claim it is - to steal real-estate from our neighbors, and that anyone who is not a Sharonist is a traitor. It will take many years to correct the damage. Four years of Ariel Sharon - or any other right-wing government - may make the damage irreparable.

However, Sharon represents a danger of a different magnitude than his Likud predecessors, though the ideology is formally similar. Menahem Begin, after all, was a gentleman. He could not bring himself to back Sharon's "solution" in Lebanon. Itzhak Shamir was so boring, so unable to stir up enthusiasm for the cause of Greater Israel that he could not do much harm. Nethanyahu was "promising" as a demagogue, but proved so inept that got his own partisans to despise him as much as the opposition did, and tripped on his own shoelaces. Perhaps people were right in more ways than one when they said that Barak was a Bibi-clone.

Sharon has none of these impediments. He is never boring. He is a spell binding rabble-rousing orator. He has captured the essence of mob mentality, and he can project it back to the mob in catchy slogans. "Who is for eliminating terror? Follow me!" "National Camp over here, the other camp ..." Good guys and bad guys. Simple answers to complex problems, delivered in a stirring oratorical style - and he is not stupid enough to believe his own bumf.

As unpredictable and original in action as in speech, Sharon keeps his opponents off balance. He is not one to worry about the fine points of honor. However, he is a master of political maneuvering. When necessary, he puts away his pork cutlets and shrimp cocktail, puts on his Yarmulkeh and courts the favor of the ultra-orthodox rabbis, promissing to grant an early parole to jailed Shas Party leader Arieh Deri, by backing enactment of a special "Arie Der'i law. To secular audiences, he becomes a champion of drafting Yeshiva students. Like Barak, he talks out of both sides of his mouth on most issues. Unlike Barak, he manages to have both sides believe him and plays off one against the other. He buys off Israeli Arab leaders, and smiles and charms. To the capitalists, he is a champion of free enterprise. To the workers, a friend of the working class. He will not make changes in the system. He won't need to. He will bob and weave and work around the system and make it irrelevant. When he wanted to build housing in the West Bank, it got built, regardless of whether or not it was approved or budgeted - fait accompli.

Sharon is not incompetent. He gets things done. In 1970 he put down unrest in Gaza where others had failed. If Sharon decides to put down unrest, it is put down. In 1973 he bent the rules and snatched victory from the jaws of defeat during the Yom Kippur war. Had he failed, he would have been chastised, but he wasn't going to fail. A brilliant fait accompli. When he took over leadership of the broken Likud party 16 months ago, he promised to lead them to victory. Everyone thought it was nonsense. If Sharon decides Israel needs living space in the East, then living space we shall have.

The Blank Balloteers

The Israeli left and center are paralyzed in the face of disaster. For them it is business as usual, each hawking their own ideological wares and trying to gain a few political points here and there, little realizing that it may all be irrelevant when the rules of the game change.

The far-left, the anti-Zionist Jewish leftists, almost always vote blank ballots because they are opposed to the existence of Israel and could not really support any candidate that was opposed to national suicide. But this time, their peculiar ideas have taken hold and been echoed and discussed as though they are a realistic and important alternative. Commentators write as though Barak is really worse than Peres or Rabin - not just more inept. The willingness to allow Sharon to come to power is unfathomable. Even if Sharon were just another Likud politician, were Bibi and Shamir and Begin so good?

Nonetheless, people want to teach Barak a lesson - he cannot ignore the left. They are building a left-alternative.

In the Middle East we always get movies after they have played in the US. Americans only recently enjoyed the same fine cinama. The purists all voted for Ralph Nader and explained that they were building a left alternative and teaching Al Gore a lesson. It couldn't make a difference, they explained. It did make a difference. They built nothing except the Republican party. The stakes were lower. Sharon is not George Bush. He is not just another politician.

The paralysis of the left, and the excuses offered for not opposing Sharon, are eerily familiar. "He cannot really be as bad as he seems, leaders mellow when they come to power." "At least he believes in what he says." "He will make things so bad that they have to get better."

As often happens before a historical crisis, people cannot avoid the obvious because they cannot see beyond the petty routine of their ideological boundaries. The mind simply refuses to contemplate the unthinkable. Thanks to apathy, the pettiness of small minds and brittle, outmoded ideologies, we are about to take a great step forward, though we are poised on the edge of an abyss. People with blank minds mouth slogans about blank ballots, and the rest of us follow where they lead, oblivious of the consequences.

Aftermath In Israel

Sharon or Barak's election may not bring stability to Israeli government. The reality that both Sharon and Barak understand is that Israel will have to make concessions to the Palestinians, and that a government that makes such concessions will probably not have a majority in the Israeli Knesset (parliament). This proved to be the downfall of Benjamin Nethanyahu and of Ehud Barak, and it could prove to be Sharon's downfall as well. The Likud and Labor each hold only about 20 of the 120 seats in the Knesset, so even a unity government cannot exist without outside support. Concessions will drive away the religious parties and the Russian immigrant parties. Inflexibility will drive away the Arab parties and Meretz, which together account for more than twenty votes. The Ultraorthodox Shas party accounts for 17 votes. Barak found out the hard way that it was not sufficient to pay off Shas one time in funds for religious schools, and that as in any such proposition, payment only increases the appetite for further payments, and does not guarantee support.

Aftermath in the Middle East

Sharon's election would be just one more step in the deterioration of the fragile peace initiative that began with so much hope in 1993. As usual, the extremists have come to dictate the agenda in our region, using the violence and pigheadedness of the other side as an excuse for their own violence and pigheadedness. The sides, who were once approaching each other, have now about-faced. Palestinians have returned to insistence on absolute implementation of the right of return, which would destroy Israel, and even to implementation of UN resolution 181. Israelis are willing to elect a candidate who wants to bottle up the Palestinians in 40% of the land of the West bank, about 10% of the tiny land area of Palestine, and some protest that even that is too big a concession. Powerful forces on each side pull toward "consensus" and unity around basically insane propositions. In the Palestinian camp, anti-normalizers draw up black-lists and hunt those guilty of fraternizing with the enemy. In Israel, Sharon and his people will soon be dividing the electorate into the National camp (aka "Us") and the "Other Camp" (aka "Them"). The "Other Camp" includes me, and everyone else who does not agree that Netzarim and Tapuah and Yitzhar and their 100 or so families of settlers are part of Israel vouchsafed to the Jewish people by Jehovah on High in days of yore, and worth fighting a nuclear war to save.

Ami Isseroff
Rehovoth,
Israel

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