Israeli Election Debated in Southland

Transfixed by the closeness of the Israeli election results, Southern California’s Jewish and Israeli emigre communities Thursday pondered the results of Israel’s election with a mixture of joy, fear, uncertainty and--above all--passionate interest in how the complicated politics of the small democracy will affect its security and economy.

“A country that is so divided is going to require extraordinary leadership to bring it together,” said John R. Fishel, executive vice president of the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles. Like many local Jewish leaders, Fishel monitored CNN reports through Wednesday night and Thursday morning as Likud candidate Benjamin Netanyahu gained a tiny lead over incumbent Labor Party prime minister Shimon Peres.

Those results were studied, celebrated and mourned in various ways around Southern California, home to an estimated 600,000 Jews.

In Orange County, both Jews and Arabs struggled to interpret the vote’s meaning. For some, the possible election of a hard-liner was seen as the rejection of a peace dearly bought with Israeli lives.

“My personal reaction is that the Israeli people--a very small plurality of people--have established that their personal security is paramount to nearly any other issue, including . . . peace,” said Rabbi Lawrence Goldmark, a member of the Orange County Board of Rabbis.

“The people are saying, ‘Hey, these are wonderful ideas, Mr. Peres,’ but I still gotta get on that bus tomorrow morning,” Goldmark said, referring to the wave of terrorist bombings that struck Israel in February and March. “What’s happened here is it’s shown maybe we’ve gone too fast.”

Jews in Southern Californian reflected the split in Israeli society “with all the debates and some of the rancor,” said Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles. And on both sides of that divide, some Jewish Angelenos were following Knesset parliamentary seat tallies the way some of their neighbors track Dodger batting averages.

“The range was from severe depression to ecstasy. But most people were more moderate in their feelings,” Baruch S. Littman, executive director of the California Israel Chamber of Commerce, said of election reaction expressed at a trade-oriented breakfast held Thursday morning at a Westside hotel. He predicted that Israeli economic growth fueled by Mideast peace will continue no matter who heads a new Jerusalem government.

Rabbi Yitzchok Adlerstein, director of the Jewish Studies Institute at Yeshiva of Los Angeles, brought a bottle of Scotch and cookies to the Orthodox school on Pico Boulevard to toast the apparent Netanyahu victory with other faculty members.

“It’s a triumph of common sense over blind optimism,” Adlerstein said. “I think finally the word will get out that the vast majority of Israelis are pro-peace, but they want peace with a tad more security than Peres and Labor have been offering.”

But Rabbi Gary Greenebaum, executive director of the American Jewish Committee’s Los Angeles chapter, which has backed Peres’ peace efforts, was worried. “At the very least, it sets the time frame back for peace with the Palestinians,” he said.

Nabile Dajani, a Palestinian who is a member of “Cousins,” an Orange County alliance of Jews and Arabs, sees the right-wing Likud Party’s apparent victory as more than just a setback. Only the return of land to Palestinians can bring lasting peace to Israel, Dajani said, and Netanyahu’s vow to forswear land-for-peace policies is tantamount to giving up peace itself, he said.

“I can see more violence and more suffering to the Palestinians,” Dajani said. “Right-wing extremists in Israel have won. This group, the Likud, they want a state that’s all Jewish. What they want is not peace, they want p-i-e-c-e, meaning a piece of land.

Like Dajani, Muzzamil Siddiqui, director of religious affairs for the Islamic Society of Orange County, said Netanyahu’s probable election shows that Palestinians will continue to live without “dignity and honor.”

“The point is that . . . it looks like the majority of Israelis are not for peace,” Siddiqui said. “How much security do they want? They have taken so much land already.

“What this means is that they don’t want to give any rights to the Palestinians. But Israelis have to realize they are an island in the midst of Arabs. A hard line is not going to help them very much.”

The terrorist bombings of Israeli buses continue to echo in the election results, suggested Rabbi Stephen Einstein of Congregation B’nai Tzedek in Fountain Valley.

“They have to get on the No. 18 bus and fear whether a bomb will go off before they get to there,” Einstein said. “But I think we shouldn’t despair over this. I do believe that in the long run, with God’s help, we will see peace come.”

The bombings’ psychological effects were also mentioned by Rabbi Cooper of the Wiesenthal Center. But Cooper predicted that the real winners in Israeli politics will be the center moderates and that Netanyahu will put together a Cabinet “reflecting more to the center, rather than the extreme right.”

For many, the election will remain a sign that Israel is moving to the right.

“I think if Netanyahu does win, it’s definitely a blow to the peace movement,” said Ruth Shapin, a Jewish member of Cousins. “It’s a little surprising, because with the assassination of Rabin, I thought the population was turning to reject the extreme right wing.

“In a sense, they are letting the assassin become the victor in his attempt to quash the peace process,” Shapin said.

But ultimately peace is inevitable, Shapin said.

* Times staff writer Lisa Richardson contributed to this report.