‘Beautiful Israel’ Wanes, Youthful Dream Is Shed in a Hard Shift to Right

The 1988 Israeli elections, and their aftermath, will be a thunderous sea change in the 40-year history of Israeli politics.

Even though the early polls seem to show a virtual deadlock, very much reflective of the American election, the end result will be the culmination of a trend that will mark a solid turnabout in Israeli politics and society.

The era of the “beautiful Israel”--dominated by such symbols as the kibbutzim, the pioneer spirit, the leading political and philosophical tenets of socialist Zionism--is on the wane, if not over altogether.

That era reached its apogee with the 1967 war, but it was the results of the war that also laid the seeds of its decline--a decline that began in the wake of the 1973 war, continued into 1977 with Menachem Begin’s startling electoral victory and remains on a steady downward pace to this day. The values of socialist Zionism are no longer dominant. Instead, one can find in Israel today the new values--a spirit of continued territorial expansionism, shrill patriotism, an exaggerated confidence in the military might of the Israeli Defense Force, a rigid fundamentalist belief in Israeli moral righteousness and a deep suspicion that amounts to a denial of the peace process, especially after Camp David and the disastrous invasion of Lebanon. “Complete Israel,” not peace with the Arabs, is the determining political issue.

The outright cynicism that prevails about the peace process seems to be justified by ongoing events. The strongest proponent of negotiations and the peace process, Shimon Peres, was dealt an embarrassing and perhaps mortal blow by King Hussein’s decision to abdicate from the process. That decision only emphasized that the Jordanian option was never really there and that Peres, as one critic wrote, “was playing chess with himself.”

Likud leader Yitzhak Shamir’s message, on the other hand, is clear and unequivocal--complete Israel. After all, he says, “they”--meaning the Palestinians--still want Haifa and Jaffa. “We have won,” he told me in an interview several weeks ago, saying that Israel has won all of its wars with the Palestinians and Arabs since 1936 and will continue to do so. He sees the intifada as merely another case of misplaced Arab euphoria. That fairly well sums up the Shamir-Likud position.

But within the ranks of Likud there also lurks Ariel Sharon, who still yearns to fulfill the dreams of the past. Sharon is a bitzuist , or doer, in the Labor tradition, but his plan dovetails with the prevailing nationalist sentiments in Israel. Sharon’s plan would have, after the election, a proclamation announcing the end of military government in the West Bank. The proclamation would be accompanied by the annexation of all the non-populated eastern part of the West Bank and the positioning of the Israeli Defense Force along the Jordan River. In the heavily Palestinian enclaves, Israel would declare the old Camp David Palestinian autonomy plan. These enclaves would be all but surrounded by Israeli settlements and the IDF, effectively isolating them. Sharon’s motivation is to end once and for all the dream of an independent Palestinian state, a dream excited by the intifada and maintained by the Palestine Liberation Organization, by Yasser Arafat and by his allies in the Western world.

The Sharon plan and the Shamir message may seem brutal. But in my view they coincide with the electoral mood in Israel today. The Western media have covered the uprising extensively but have ignored one of its results--the deep-seated resentment engendered among Israeli citizens, many of whom feel that, psychologically, they have retreated to the atmosphere of 1948. A bus driver in Tel Aviv told me that he felt Israel would have to conquer Jaffa all over again, just as in 1948. The passion of the nation has been aroused, and the hatred runs deep on both sides.

The uprising has also had the result of offering ripe ground for political opportunists who are very much to the right of Likud, which is basically a right-of-center party. They have gone so far as to advocate the transfer of Arabs from the West Bank.

The difference between the extremes in the Labor and Likud parties is that the Laborites want to somehow extricate themselves from the West Bank and the Palestinians while the Likudites want to transfer the Palestinians bodily out of the occupied territories and move them to Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley. There is no love held for the Arabs in Israel. The suspicion is growing about the loyalty of Israeli Arabs who themselves, in the uprising’s wake, have undergone a Palestinization process.

The uprising, the bankruptcy of the peace process, the daily atrocities and violence have helped accelerate the change of direction in Israeli politics. Israel’s electorate appears to be moving to the right of center, and the 1988 election may institutionalize that change, taking the last giant leap--begun in 1981 and continued in 1984 --of establishing a Likud hegemony for the next three decades.

A huge shift--demographic, intellectual, political and ideological--is taking placeas a new Israeli generation--different in leaders, ideas, orientation and action--takes over.