Israel’s politics of dreams

ON PREVIOUS election days, the street outside my polling station would be crowded with booths staffed by passionate activists from Israel’s three-dozen-plus parties seeking one last opportunity to persuade voters. The sidewalk would be littered with leaflets from right-wing parties promising peace through strength and left-wing parties promising peace through concessions, from secular parties opposing Israeli theocracy and religious parties bemoaning godless hedonism.

But Tuesday, there were no booths, no activists. The street was depressingly clean of campaign debris. When I arrived, the security guard at the entrance was telling a woman that he didn’t think people should vote at all.

Apathy is antithetical to the Israeli character, but this year it is understandable. After all, the leader the country really wanted, Ariel Sharon, is lying in a coma, and no one has managed to take his place. Also, Israelis are disgusted with growing political corruption. A dozen members of the outgoing parliament -- fully 10% of the Israeli Knesset -- either have been convicted or face corruption-related charges.

But even more important is the fact that Tuesday’s election marked the end of the two visions that together animated Israeli political debate for the last three decades: the left-wing dream of a negotiated agreement with the Palestinians that would bring Israel the first real peace in its 58-year modern history, and the right-wing dream of a “Greater Israel” that would fulfill an ancient longing to return to the biblical land and, at the same time, give Israel the safety it needs to survive.

This was the first campaign in memory in which talk of peace was nearly absent. Previously, even right-wing politicians felt obliged to argue that their hard-line politics would bring a more durable peace. But now, with the rise of the Hamas in the Palestinian territories, even the left couldn’t manage to sing the old peace songs.

A slogan imprinted on a giant balloon over Labor Party headquarters in Tel Aviv promised to “Fight Against Terror and Defeat Poverty,” but it said nothing about bringing peace, which few Israelis believe is possible.

On the right, it was the word “settlements” that was largely missing from campaign 2006. Only one right-wing party -- the small National Union-National Religious Party -- urged support for settlements as its major goal. And even then, its message to voters wasn’t the need to build new settlements but only to save existing ones from the unilateral withdrawal plan promoted by the front-running centrist Kadima party.

Likud, once the standard-bearer of the settlement movement, no longer opposes territorial withdrawal in principle -- only unilateral withdrawal. Why cede territory, argued Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu, without demanding reciprocal concessions from the Palestinians? That pragmatic argument is a bare echo of the old ideological fervor of former Likud leader Menachem Begin, who viewed a withdrawal from the West Bank, to which Jews had longed to return for centuries, as a betrayal of Jewish history.

The victory of the centrist sensibility marks the end of Israel’s extravagant dreams. But for all the gloom here, the collapse of utopian ideology is a sign of the country’s maturation. The settlement movement ignored the moral corruption of occupation and the demographic threat to Israel’s identity as a Jewish and democratic state posed by the forcible absorption of several million Palestinians into Israeli society.

For its part, the peace movement ignored the refusal of the Palestinians -- not just Hamas but Fatah too -- to repudiate the dream of a “greater Palestine” from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea that would supplant and destroy the Jewish state. The end of our fantasy politics has produced a more realistic Israel, capable of facing its existential dilemmas without the distortion of ideological blinders.

Still, however destructive they may have been, the ideological dreams of the left and the right infused Israeli politics with optimism and faith. And however opposite their visions, both were committed to the transcendent politics that aspired to be worthy of the centuries of hopes and prayers that helped dream a Jewish state into existence.

In the end, both visions were unattainable. The old slogan of the peace movement, “Peace is better than Greater Israel,” turned out to be more a taunt than a promise. Israel will almost certainly find itself without Greater Israel -- and without peace.

For a nation that still can’t take its survival for granted, an inability to dream is, in its way, as great a threat as the delusional politics of ideological certainty. Arguably no people are required to sacrifice more for their state than are Israelis, who serve three years of compulsory military service, followed by years of reserve duty.

Confronted with the possibility of a nuclear Iran committed to Israel’s destruction and with a terrorist state emerging in Gaza and the West Bank, Israelis need the sustenance of dreams.

In the past, the capacity to dream helped this country overcome seemingly overwhelming threats. No doubt Israeli society will again generate visions of greatness, if not through politics -- which may not, after all, be the best vehicle for utopian hopes -- then perhaps through spiritual and cultural renewal. For now, though, Israelis recall their lost passions and feel the depletion of their dreamless state.