29,500 Israeli Votes Expose a Riven Land

Oversized umbrellas shaded the crowded cafes along Ben Yehuda Street from a searing sun Friday morning, but they could not dim the fiery political debate still raging two days after national elections bared the country’s deep schism.

At table after table, customers shared a weekly ritual of coffee, pie and newspapers. Otherwise, they remained bitterly split over the questions of how--or even if--they should make peace with their Arab neighbors and whether the victory of right-wing Likud Party leader Benjamin Netanyahu is a blessing or national tragedy.

“Half of the public in Israel is now going around with a feeling that redemption is at hand, and the other believes it is trapped in a hell on Earth,” wrote columnist Hemi Shalev in Maariv, a newspaper many patrons were reading. “One part praises its deliverance from a great nightmare, and the other is apprehensive about night terrors lurking just ahead of it.”

Netanyahu played to this split during his campaign and now acknowledges that he must work to heal it. Like the man he beat in Wednesday’s elections, Prime Minister Shimon Peres, Netanyahu will have to govern with half the country against his policies.

The country’s political divisions leave little room for compromise.

The left, which calls itself the peace camp, views the right as racist and warmongering. The right, or “nationalist camp,” sees the left as naive and sometimes anti-Jewish.

Political splits are compounded by class and ethnic divisions. Poorer Israelis and Sephardic, or “Oriental,” Jews tend to favor Netanyahu, while support for Peres and his Labor Party is heavier among better-off Israelis and European, or Ashkenazi, Jews.

Each side claims to represent the majority, although the narrow victory for Netanyahu and a newly fractionalized parliament confirm that there is no clear majority.

Such is the case in the cafes. At the popular Atara cafe on Friday, Dan Vered, 30, a contractor, sat at a table of Likud supporters who saw Netanyahu’s election as a kind of liberation from Peres’ view of a new Middle East at peace and in business with its Arab neighbors. He and his friends said that is not a vision but an illusion.

“I have no vision of the future--I have reality. The reality is that you must have the respect of your enemies. I don’t believe Peres has the respect of the enemies of the Jewish people,” Vered said.

“What new Middle East?” asked Aharoni Naftali, 77, a retired musician. “Is there a new [Libyan President Moammar] Kadafi? A new [Syrian President Hafez] Assad? A new [Iranian President Hashemi] Rafsanjani? We have a peace treaty with Egypt, but it is unacceptable for Jews to live in Egypt.”

Naftali rejected Peres’ claims that his recent trips to Oman and Qatar and the “peacemakers” summit he attended in Sharm el Sheik, Egypt, with more than a dozen Arab leaders--to protest Islamic terrorism--represented progress.

“He can go to Qatar. I cannot,” Naftali said.

“The Arabs respect us only as long as we are strong,” he insisted.

Joseph Lichtman, 68, changed chairs and moved into the discussion. “These people [for peace] are naive or ignorant. They want to live the moment. They want peace now, like instant coffee. Well, there is no such thing. . . . The new Middle East is a bluff, like [former British Prime Minister Neville] Chamberlain [in 1938] with a paper from Hitler,” Lichtman said.

The idea that someone would consider Peres to be working against the Jews was beyond the comprehension of Carine Libermann, a Labor supporter discussing divided Israel with a friend over coffee and cigarettes at another cafe.

“To suggest that Peres wants to kill the Jews--I have no answer to that. It simply does not make sense,” Libermann said.

“I think Peres’ view is right,” she said. “It is a very mature view. . . . I had thought the Israeli people were ready to get into the track of peace.”

The 28-year-old sales trainer said the view that Arabs understand only force is “ignorance” and “racism.”

“My belief is that Arabs are normal people with normal aspirations who want to get up and get their children to school, to buy a house and a car, go to pray in churches and mosques, go to the cinema and travel abroad,” she said. “They told us for 50 years that Arabs were bad and only wanted to kill us. For the last four years, we have been told they are normal people. It will take more than four years to change.”

Although commentators such as Maariv writer Shalev assert that Israel has never been so divided, split elections and heated debates are not new here. One of the most famous was in 1977, when it became clear that Menachem Begin had led Likud to its first victory after 29 years of Labor rule. Labor official Yitzhak Aharon warned gravely at that time: “The sun will not shine tomorrow.”

Begin went on to make peace with Egypt. Peres, who was acting prime minister before that election, lost several more races before initiating his Middle East peace plan under Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.