Young Israeli Voters: Hawks on Unrest, Doves on Friday Night Movies

Mark Volovic, a student fresh out of Israel’s army, wrestled with his election-day dilemma: to vote for a party that promises to crush most quickly the Palestinian revolt against Israel, or for one that will protect his right to take a date to movies on Friday nights.

In the end, a liberal inclination for movies overcame a hard-line urge for a solution in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Volovic said he will vote for the Citizens Rights Movement, a party dedicated to secular rights and opposed to pressures in Israel to conform to religious strictures, including an entertainment ban on the Jewish Sabbath.

150,000 First-Time Voters

Volovic, 21, is one of 150,000 first-time voters in Israel’s general elections, to be held Nov. 1. As such, he belongs to a group that is considered a key to victory in the race to control the country’s 120-seat Knesset, or Parliament. The party that wins the most seats will get the chance to form a government and take power. Along with Arab Israeli voters, the young people represent a wild-card swing vote in this election.

Political observers say that Israel’s young voters lean heavily to the right, sometimes by a 2-to-1 margin. They could, the experts predict, mean victory for the Likud Bloc of Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir over Israel’s other main party, the Labor Alignment led by Foreign Minister Shimon Peres.

The reasons are varied, experts say. The young Israeli population of North African descent, an ethnic group that consistently supports Likud, is growing faster than the population of European descendants, a group that usually supports centrist Labor.

Also, young people carry the burden of Israel’s persistent conflicts with its Arab neighbors through military service and tend to prefer clear-cut solutions while on the firing line. All Israeli youth, except those with religious exemptions, must serve in the armed forces.

The youngsters are also brought up in a world where Arabs are seen as implacable enemies, and Labor is considered soft on Arabs.

“The kids have to serve in the army, and so they develop a world picture to justify their sacrifice, and that means an anti-Arab attitude gleaned from the general environment,” said Alouph Hareven, a social researcher at the prestigious Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem, a public-policy think tank. “They look for a simplified solution, and that is currently offered by the right wing.”

Rachel Yisraeli, director of research at the Modin Ezrahi polling organization, said, “Older people vote for the left, the younger for the right.”

‘Stop Messing Around’ on Unrest

It is not hard to find sure rightist voters among the young, who gain the right to vote at age 18. Ziggy, who is now serving in the army, told why: “If I had any doubt about who to vote for, I don’t now. We have to stop messing around and end the uprising.”

Ziggy, who would give only his first name because the army forbids soldiers to talk to reporters, said he will vote for Tehiya, a party dedicated to annexing the West Bank and Gaza Strip and putting them under full Israeli sovereignty.

Even voters who do not favor right-wing parties sometimes reveal streaks of anti-Arab attitudes.

“It would be nice to move the Arabs away. To another country. But that is probably unrealistic,” said Dafne Michaeli, 20.

So who will she vote for? “Citizens Rights, because the religious people criticize me for wearing pants.”

Some experts consider that the 10-month-old Palestinian uprising has contributed to a youthful rightist swing. But, because the experience of putting down the Arab rebellion seems to have different effects on young soldiers, even that conclusion is open to question.

Not long ago, Israeli newspapers ran back-to-back accounts from youthful reservists who gave sharply opposing views of their military service.

One trooper, British-born Jonathan Kestenbaum, said that his fellow soldiers became brutal during service in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

“Among the soldiers, there is a depressing routine of almost wild abandon. Everybody here makes up their own rules,” Kestenbaum wrote in a published diary.

He quoted a sentry as asking, upon seeing him detaining a group of teen-age Palestinians: “How many dogs have you brought?”

Kestenbaum lamented: “Once the man opposite you is a dog, anything goes.”

American-born reservist Louis Rapoport countered that “the Israeli army remains one of the most decent in the world. I doubt whether any other army in the world would act with more restraint.”

Rapoport did cite a case of an Israeli soldier fashioning his own firebomb with the intention of throwing it at demonstrators, but he characterized such a case as among the “accidents and misjudgments” that occur under pressure.

Deep fissures in Israeli society also disperse the youth vote as much as the votes of their parents.

Some Relatively Unaffected

For example, some religious youths, living in the relatively cloistered setting of ultra-Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods, are relatively untouched by the uprising.

“We are more interested in education and the morality of the nation than the question of land,” said Moshe, 21, a resident of the religious Mea Sharim neighborhood in Jerusalem, who declined to give his last name.

And, like the youth of Europe and the United States, not a few Israeli young people disdain politics as a whole and political leaders in particular.

“The Knesset is 120 below zero,” quipped Dorya Lifshitz, 20, an undecided voter.