A Schizophrenic State

It’s nice to see Israelis celebrating again. They’ve been through a bad patch, and three precious years in the country’s short history have been wasted. No wonder they are glad to fete Monday’s electoral victory of Ehud Barak, who is open to at least a few new ideas; the close-mindedness and narrowness of the last three years were stifling.

Identity and security have always been the twin axes of the Israeli psyche, and this election was about forging a new identity in a world where peace will help guarantee security. In 1996, Benjamin Netanyahu was elected prime minister of Israel on a wave of concern about both of those issues. For better or worse, the peace process posed the problem: Who were the Israelis, if they were no longer simply a unified nation engaged in eternal war? Though Netanyahu paralyzed the process, the quagmire of his administration was not exclusively his fault. It was a prickly time in the history of this prickly nation.

There was no meaning to one’s identity as an Israeli if one was not fighting, and so Israelis, in preparation for the day when there might no longer be an Arab menace, turned on each other. The signal example of that familial battle was the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin by another Jew, which opened the path for Netanyahu’s victory. Rabin was perceived by his killer as a threat to the national identity because in forwarding the peace process--in conceding land to the Palestinians--he was implicitly calling into question what it has meant to be an Israeli since the founding of the state in 1948.

Understandably, Netanyahu then presided over an era in which Israeli identity was shattered. No one in the ultimate land of immigrants could say what he or she was. A Russian? A Moroccan? Iraqi? Sephardi? Askenazi? Ethiopian? Religious? Secular? The demographics of the place are confounding. Just being Jews did not exactly make the Israelis feel at home with one another. Each ethnic and religious group struggled with the others for its political agenda and its small piece of the national economy. Nor did Netanyahu have the wit or the inclination to put the Israeli soul back together again. As head of an impossible coalition in harness to the religious right, he was hardly in a position to govern creatively.

So, in the end, there is not one achievement one can point to and say: Netanyahu did that. He did not stop terror; he did not find a solution to the Lebanese war; he did not better the economy; he did not reach out to the desperate Ethiopian community; he did nothing for national education (unless you believe educating the religious at public expense is a legitimate national goal in a secular state); he undermined the courts; and he supported one nefarious figure after another. Most important, he did not move forward on peace with the Palestinians. He might call that an achievement, of course, but it’s funny that the one thing he can regard with pride goes against the single tenet the majority of Israelis of all categories can agree on: Peace is necessary.

Now what will become of Israel? Prime Minister-elect Barak has a well-known past: beribboned general, keen undoer of terror, supporter of the Oslo peace accords, disciple of Rabin. He’s a tough fighter who knows the value of not playing by the rules. As a soldier, he was a known discipline flouter who ended up more respected after each forgiven infraction. But among the Palestinians, his future partners in peace, there are strikes against him: He is regarded as an assassin who stalked Palestinian Liberation Organization leaders in Beirut in the 1970s and organized the 1988 killing of the revered Abu Jihad, the PLO strategist, in Tunis. Barak was foreign minister when Israel mistakenly bombed a Lebanese refugee center at Qana in 1996, killing scores of men, women and children.

On the other hand, he has been a steady supporter of some kind of peace, and though he speaks slow English with a heavy Israeli accent, he speaks fluent Arabic. (Netanyahu was known for his flawless American English.) It shows how needy the Palestinians are, and how limited the selection of Israeli leaders has been, that they prefer Barak the attack dog to his predecessor. So odd to think of Arafat calling to congratulate Barak, the murderer of his right-hand man. But history is always at its quirkiest in the Holy Land.

Barak has a shrewd fearlessness that, combined with his personal landslide triumph, should work in his favor as leader of this impossible and fractious country. But his narrow parliamentary margin of victory is likely to contain his considerable political abilities and limit his ultimate accomplishments. In the end, Barak’s Labor Party, along with its ally, Gesher, won only 27 seats in the 120-seat Knesset. This means that, like his predecessor, Barak will have to paste together a coalition in order to command a legislative majority. With other like-minded parties, Barak can control 51 to 55 Knesset votes, still short of the 61 he needs for a majority. If he is willing to incorporate Palestinian Israelis into his government, he could reasonably expect to attract the two older Arab parties into his coalition, which would give him a vulnerable majority of 63, as long as all his friends remain in once the Palestinians are invited.

But on major issues like peace, such fragile coalitions can come apart, and Barak wants consensus when he moves to address the big issues confronting the country. Thus, he might choose to broaden the government’s base by including one of the other two major parties, the conservative Likud, formerly Netanyahu’s domain, with 19 votes, or the religious Shas, with 17, bypassing the Palestinians. Those of Barak’s allies who have a problem including Arabs in the government, however, might just as easily have a problem with Shas, which advocates religious law for Israel. It is hard to imagine the left-wing Meretz Party consenting to participate in a coalition with Shas, for example, and Barak would be reluctant to cast off Meretz and its nine votes. Each and every choice the new prime minister makes now will have an effect on how Israelis and Palestinians perceive the new government, as well as on how that government will operate down the road.

Some believe that Shas’ strong showing in Monday’s elections--this party of religious Sephardic voters won seven new seats--has to do with the Sephardi’s disaffection with Labor and Likud. But the gain has a demographic component. Thousands of Sephardi young people arrived at voting age between the 1996 election and this one, and they voted along ethnic lines. In addition, after their enormous influx in the 1980s, Israel’s Russian immigrants, slow to make their political clout felt, have finally come of age, with a total of 11 Knesset seats among two parties.

In other words, what has really changed the makeup of the Israeli Parliament is not ideology but demography. The Israeli identity is changing. What this election shows is that, unless politicians like Barak work to make the Sephardim, Russians and Palestinians welcome in the mainstream polity, ethnicity-based parties will continue to grow based on the growth of the group they are affiliated with, and Israeli politics will grow more and more fragmented, more and more polarized and--most frightening to the Ashkenazi elite--more and more Russo-Sephardi. And Arab.

Barak’s victory is unquestionably a victory for peace. First off, he has promised to withdraw from Lebanon, which has been a painfully cruel experience for the Israelis and for the Lebanese civilians who live within the Israeli “security zone” in southern Lebanon. The Israelis’ departure from this territory is long overdue, and the concept behind the pullout is the same as the concept behind the original withdrawals from Gaza and Jericho: If you’re not there, you can’t be the target. Only a general like Barak could have the courage to say simply, “I’m getting us out.”

Second, with Barak’s election, most Israelis and Palestinians are eager to get the wrinkles in the Oslo process ironed out and move on to final status talks and finish it up and have a Palestinian state (which, de facto and in its own peculiar form, already exists “on the ground,” as the Israelis would say) and begin a normal relationship with the new neighbors.

It seems so exhilarating to get out from under the depression of the Netanyahu years that people are finding themselves daydreaming even about the future status of Jerusalem, the “forever united” capital of Israel that is actually divided east and west, and includes hundreds of thousands of neglected Palestinians, who live almost exclusively on the east side, while the Jews live almost exclusively on the west. Barak, of course, has promised never to alter the Holy City’s status (even a whiff of this is anathema to many Israeli voters), but hey, things change. You never know. Then we will see what happens.

Over time, there are no absolutes in the relations between nations, and no one can be sure that a new generation, or even this generation, of Palestinians will not say, and one day soon, that Oslo is not enough. They’ve been saying it since Olso began, after all, in one guise or another, and they are right. But, at least, they should get what they were promised in the agreement everyone signed in 1993, and signed again in 1994 and signed again in 1995. No one can say either that the next generation of Israelis will not regret Oslo and try to impose greater limits on Palestinian sovereignty.

But a principle will have been legally finalized and irrevocably recognized, and that principle is the Palestinian people have the absolute right to a nation like any other people. The recognition of that principle cannot help but improve the economic, social and moral health of both the Palestinian and the Israeli peoples.*