Israeli Elections 2009

...A reflection

and a prediction at the end

So, another elections campaign is over, the 18^th in 61 years, which will determine the 32^nd Government of Israel. Sounds wired to Western ears, doesn’t it? Maybe not if you are an Italian. But in most other democratic countries, it is pretty odd, that there would be so frequent political changes. (Is Israel a democratic country?... well, that’s a whole separate topic, I don’t know if I want to go there right now. But in short, my answer is Yes, partially).

Yeah, especially when you are an American, it must be extremely strange to hear that the elections in Israel do not take place on a regular basis. I mean, in the US, elections happen on the first Tuesday of November, exactly every 4 years. In 233 years, four presidents have died while in office, another four have been assassinated, and one resigned. Nonetheless, all were succeeded by their vice presidents, but elections were never pulled in.

But maybe the hardest thing to comprehend, for a non-Israeli, is the fact that the winning party, Kadima, which won the most number of votes and parliament seats once again, will not form the next government.

Strange, ha?

Well, this is the way the Israeli system works. The Prime Minister has to win the support of the Parliament on every major item on the agenda, such as the Budget; so He (or, if Kadima really won, it would be She) must form a Coalition of parties which would constitute an absolute majority among the 120 seats in the Knesset, the Israeli Parliament. Kadima, with its 28 seats, just can’t do that, while all the rest of the “Left” parties combined have only 27 seats. When counting the 27 seats, I even included Shas, which is a sectarian, ultra-orthodox, kind of Right-Center party, and which will be in any coalition, Right or Left. However I did not include the Arab parties, because nobody takes them into account for a government – not even the Arab-Jewish party Hadash.

Following the elections, everybody loves to hate Evet (Avigdor) Lieberman. Well, maybe except for the 13% who voted for his party, “Israel is Our Home”⁽¹⁾. The Left is mad at him – because Lieberman, whom they see as a Right-wing, hard-liner racist, is the big winner of the elections in which everybody else lost, especially the Leftist flagship, Meretz ⁽²⁾. The Likud ⁽³⁾ feels uncomfortable with him, because the last thing that the Likud wants is to establish a conservative narrow coalition, which will have to carry out its ambitious lunatic ideology, with nobody else to “soften” its agenda.

Personally, I think that there is more than a bit of hypocrisy here. After all, as brutal and frightening Mr. Lieberman might seem, all he wants to do is what the Likud, Kadima and the Labor parties have actually been carrying out all along – to alienate and oppress the Palestinian inhabitants of this land, both citizens and occupied, to the point where they would just want to leave or give up their Israeli citizenship. The difference is that those more “moderate” parties never declared it as their policy. But that’s where the hypocrisy is.

Lieberman, formerly Netanyahu’s cabinet general manager, formerly a member of the “Transfer Party” ⁽⁴⁾, and further formerly, a Kahana ⁽⁵⁾ member, this time ran on a ticket that calls for revoking the citizenship of Palestinians who wont adhere to the notion that Israel is the State of the Jews; and for “exchanging land” with the future Palestinian state, in such a way that thousands of Palestinians would have to give up their Israeli citizenship.

Let’s take a look at the actual policy of former governments, regarding the Palestinians.

The Oslo Accord was signed in 1993, by the Yitzhak Rabin government. It was an attempt to establish a permanent solution to the conflict. But alas, since then, under the governments of Netanyahu (Likud), Barak (Labor) Sharon and Olmert (Kadima), the population of the settlers in the Occupied Territories has more than doubled (from 110,000 – to 219,000 in 2001, that’s even before the Sharon government!). In 2003, the Or Inquiry Commission, an official government-appointed commission that followed the violent incidents of October 2000, stated that the Arab citizens of Israel have been discriminated against constantly by all governments.

Therefore, I think that for most people in Israel, Lieberman serves as a scapegoat, or a Kaparot rooster; just like the custom in Yom Kippur (“Day of Atonement”), which is being practiced to this day: to take a live chicken and fly it over the head, and then send it for slaughter. This way, just like with the rooster, we project all of our sins upon Lieberman, and then we can feel clean and purified.

So, what happens next? Let me put my reputation at stake, and make a prediction: Netanyahu is the next Prime Minister of Israel. His party (27 seats) will form a coalition with Lieberman, Shas, “Judaism of Torah”, “the Jewish Home” and maybe “the National Unity”. That’s a total of 65 seats, enough to have a majority of votes in the Knesset. But past experience shows, that any government which is based on less than 70 Parliament members tends to by unstable. This is because at times of crises, sometimes small parties will quit, hoping to get better deals from the other major party, after the following elections. In addition, as I said before, a narrow right-wing coalition is Netanyahu’s nightmare. So, he is eager to have either Kadima or Labor join as well, to form what is known as a Unity Government (and usually turns out to be a Paralyzing Government). Well, the current Labor people have no ideological problem sitting with any of the Right-wingers, even the most extremists. But it seems that this time, they are afraid to completely loose face in the eyes of their voters.

Kadima, on the other hand, is not a real party. It was formed by former Prime Minister Sharon, for one purpose only – to carry out his “Disengagement” plan (= the pulling out of Gaza strip). Most of its members are just opportunists who will join whoever gives them a position in government. To be perfectly honest, I thought that Kadima would cease to exist after the Disengagement was over (in 2005), but Kadima, headed by Olmert, won the 2006 elections on a similar ticket – the “Convergence” plan, which was the plan Olmert devised to pull out of parts of the West Bank as well (needless to say, that never happened). As such, Kadima cannot stay in Opposition to the government; this takes some ideological tradition, and some partisan backbone, which even the Likud has, but not Kadima. True, Kadima has some dignified people (that’s in Politics standards), such as its leader, Tzipi Livni. But it consists of too many Likud and Labor deserters who have no problem crossing the lines again in any directions (whatever “lines” there are left between those three parties). Therefore, my wild prediction is that this party will break apart. Those of Kadima who must be in the government, headed by the party’s no. 2, General (Ret.) Mofaz, who took a quick “time out” from politics after losing the leadership to Livni (but he never meant to take the full, 1-minute time out, but rather the shorter 20-second one), will join the Netanyahu coalition. The former Prime Minister will thus get back in office for a while. In that short period (one to two years maybe), he will surrender to growing pressure from the Obama administration to make “concessions”, after which ideologues such as Benny Begin ⁽⁶⁾ will quit, for the second time. But Dr. Begin has nothing to worry about, as the next government wont lead the country towards any real peace solution. As weak as Netanyahu is personally, he will pretend to make compromises, just to stay in power for a few months more; however he will not go as far as needed to establish a real peace agreement. So he will just expose the simple fact, that the Right really does not have a real option to both keep the state of Israel democratic, and to maintain the occupation. So there is some good in all that evil after all.

And after that what? A total war? A nuclear war? A civil war? That I don’t know. What am I, a prophet?...

____________________________________________________________

(1) A secular, radically Right-wing party, mainly based on immigrants from former Soviet Union; got 13% of the votes, up from 9%.

(2) Won 3 seats, down from 5 in previous elections, and down from 12 in the past.

(3) The Right-wing leading party, headed by former Prime Minister Netanyahu.

(4) “National Unity”, a radical Right-wing party which at that time included Moledet, which advocated the Transfer of Palestinians to Jordan.

(5) “Kach”, the party of Rav Meir Kahana, a party so extremely to the Right that it was banned from participating in the elections.

(6) Dr. Benny Begin, an honest man (a species almost extinct from politics), the son of the late Menachem Bagin who was the first Prime Minister from the Likud.

Thoughts from the “Holy” Land

On the 3rd week of “operation Cast-Lead"

I am writing from Jerusalem now. All three major TV channels are broadcasting news casts almost constantly. The IDF decided not to “embed” journalists within the military forces, so most of the footage is from the towns which are occasionally hit by Hamas rockets; and tons of commentary. I will tell you about one “rare footage” shot from an Israeli Tank, in a moment.
As expected, most of the “reporters” are busy delivering the official or consensual version of this war, which is: they are the bad guys, they just hate us because they are Arabs and we just want to live in peace. This is what you will hear if you conduct a random survey on any city in Israel these days. The reporters usually read from edited versions of briefing papers they received from the military spokesman, although they make an effort to make it look more professional. There is a lot of critical commentary too, and also some pieces quoted from Arab reports about the casualties on the Palestinian side. But honestly, I don’t know which way this affects the Israeli public, because for some people it is certainly a reassurance for their self-righteous feelings. They can say to themselves, that overall we are “OK” if we are so nicely considering the suffering of the other side; and besides, which other country would show such images of the enemy being so terribly hurt by us, in a time of war?
The state of Israel is free and democratic, at least for Jews (sigh). As such, the media is open to different opinions, controversy and debate. But mostly, all this is done within pretty narrow boundaries. The real radical opinions, such as mine, are poorly represented by just a handful of publicists, such as Gideon Levy:
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1054578.html

One pathetic example of bad journalism appeared tonight on Channel 1:
http://www.flix.co.il/tapuz/showVideo.asp?m=3033341
A reporter was sitting inside a Tank, shooting a video of another Tank firing at a Hamas combat team. Now, I don’t want to undervalue the skills and courage of Israeli troops. I was a platoon commander in the Israeli armor corps, so I have an idea how a battle looks like from a Tank. It doesn’t take too much skill and courage to sit inside the most advanced Merkava Mark IV Tank, all doors closed, and to fire from machine guns and a 120 mm cannon on a bunch of unlucky Hamas militants. The reporter was fair enough to mention, that the mortar the Hamas guys were operating couldn’t do any harm to the heavy Tank. I can’t help it from appreciating the enormous courage shown by the “Hamasniks” for even trying to confront this platoon of Tanks. For me, to think that the IDF used to fight “Fully Exposed in the Turret” against real armies, and to see my people playing the role of Goliath rather than David – was very sad and disturbing. I felt sorry for the reporter for trying to elevate the morale of the Israeli public with such a lame story. By the way, this was the same reporter who covered the race where Israel won its one and only Olympic medal five months ago – I watched it live! Such a surreal situation.

Even some commentators whom I normally appreciate, tend to be more “patriotic” in times of war, for a number of reasons. For one, so far this operation is going pretty well, from the Israeli viewpoint (and I already mentioned what it does to Barak’s approval rating...). The arrogant declarations from the 2006 campaign in Lebanon, the lack of training due to long terms as occupying forces – are all gone. The military is fulfilling its tasks step-by-step, trying to avoid casualties as much as possible, and truth has to be said – that pertains to civilian casualties as well. The main problem is that as a campaign conducted in heavily populated areas, avoiding civilian casualties is impossible. This is where the debate begins – whether a warfare against a semi-militia, which engages its fighting from residential areas, is moral at all – or whether this by itself is characteristic to an occupying regime.
Another reason is that nobody wants to be portrayed as a “traitor”, even when he or she has reservations or criticism on the way the campaign is carried out, or even on its mere taking place. Who knows, maybe the goal of stopping the firing of rockets, or at least a big damage to Hamas capability of doing so – will be achieved eventually?... nobody wants to be the town’s fool.
But the main cause, in my view, to the fact that criticism of this war is so scarce, is this: in the eyes of each side, the “other” side is always inhuman, blinded by hatred, cruel and evil by nature; while “we” are the “nice guys” whose sole intention is to live in peace – and we completely disregard the terrible similarities between ours and their wrongdoing, bad reasoning and justifications. It’s easy to think of ourselves as victims of 8 years of shooting on peaceful towns – even when we are the most powerful country in the region, militarily, technologically and economically. But it’s very difficult to portray ourselves, as we are in the eyes of our enemies, as heartless aggressors. As unbelievable as it may sound, we are cruel beasts in their eyes, just like they are in ours!
The speakers in the Israeli media tend to be more “responsible”, “balanced” – this has much to do with the past failures of the military, especially in the Lebanon campaign two and a half years ago. But if you listen carefully, you will find our share of pathetic and “hot-aired” statements. Whenever I hear Hamas speakers say “we will fight to the end, we will meet you in Jerusalem!”, I can’t help of thinking how similar this is to the “we will bring the firing of the rockets to a complete stop, and all weapon smuggling will cease, and Hamas will be brought down.” I think that everyone who hasn’t lost his senses yet knows that this is impossible. I’m curious and troubled to know, how many more people will die or be injured before we realize that there are limits to the power of even the most powerful military force. From watching TV in Israel for the last five days, I am not very optimistic about that.

Thoughts of an Israeli ex-soldier

Following the campaign in Gaza Strip
New Year’s Eve, 2009

A good friend sent me one of those computer videos, accompanied by “A must see! Please watch and forward!” In the video, a little Israeli girl is counting from 1 to 15 before she uncovers her eyes in a hide-and-seek game. 15 seconds is the time that residents of Sh'derot and other towns in southern Israel have, in order to find shelter, before a Kassam rocket hits (hopefully) the ground.
A request followed that said “please sign the petition attached, so that people around the world would know how it feels to be a child in a town in Israel, well within the borderline of Israel proper”.
My reply was “sorry, but I can’t sign this, because children and other civilians in the Gaza strip don’t even have 1 second to hide”.
I am not saying this because I don’t feel compassion for the residents of the Negev (southern Israel). I am an Israeli, living in the Bay Area with my wife. My two sons are now in active duty in the Israeli military. On top of all, I grew up in Kiryat Sh’monah, a town on the northern tip of Israel, two miles from the Lebanese border. As a 7-year old, I still remember the first Katyusha rocket that hit my town, in 1968. Hundreds of similar rockets followed during my childhood and later on, when I was a soldier in the first Lebanon war.

The reason that I couldn’t sign this petition, was that it concentrated solely on the sorry fate of civilians in Israel, completely disregarding the full context of this conflict. By full context I mean – the Israeli occupation of Palestine. In particular, it disregarded the Palestinian side of the tragedy.
More than 300 people were killed in the first day of the Israeli campaign on Gaza. Many of them were police personnel, but many others were innocent civilians. “Who cares for those civilians, as long as people in Sh’derot and elsewhere can’t live in peace?” is a typical reaction among Israelis. Now, what kind of a society have we become, that we don’t care anymore for lives being lost? What kind of a country has to permanently be killing civilians to survive? Is this the country that the founders envisioned, when they strove to establish a normal country, where Jews would live in peace among their neighbors, like most other countries? Do we have to kill women and children to survive?
Some people would reply, “Well, you know, this is the Middle East. It’s a jungle out there. Those enemies of ours don’t understand talking. Violence is all they know.”
Those are tough arguments. But I think that there are good arguments to counter them.
The notion that all, or most, Arabs or Palestinians or Muslims, for that matter, are violent and cruel by nature, has a general term to classify it, and that is “Racism”. From all my experience in life, living in Israel and in the Bay Area, I developed a strong belief that we are all human beings. On average, under similar conditions, people from one ethnic group are not better nor worse than any others. It’s the particular situation that cause some people to behave differently.
The religion which used to be associated with so highly sophisticated and delicate culture, in the 350 years between the 10th and 14th century, namely the Islam, is now regarded as the most deadly and violent. It’s true, that many people living in Muslim countries today are living in poor, intolerant and violent conditions. But that has nothing to do with their religion – only with their political situation.
Check out the research of Dr. Philip Zimbardo of Stanford University and you will learn, that any group of people can be driven, under certain circumstances, to be cruel and evil.
And just as a side note, even if that was true, then what chance do we have, amongst hundreds of millions of “beasts”, to survive in the long run? The advantage of Israel over its neighbors has always been technological, and in my view, moral. But with moral values that are deteriorating, higher crime rates, and with an education system that is constantly going downhill, judging by its marks in international tests (I think that this is also related to the priorities set by the Israeli government) – do you really believe that we can maintain our edge forever?

Another common claim is this: we have pulled out of the Gaza Strip, haven’t we? What do they want now?
Well, I think they want what every normal nation wants – to manage their own lives. And we don’t let them, as long as the entire Gaza area is under siege. You can’t claim “the end of the occupation” when the people inside are not free.

But he Hamas is not willing to recognize Israel as a Jewish state! – one might say.
Yes, so? Did Israel ever recognize the right of a Palestinian state to exist? I mean with real actions, not just declarations. The fact is, that 250,000 Jewish settlers still live, in what all International bodies see as illegal settlements – in fact, the Israeli government itself declared a few dozens of them as illegal – but so far did practically nothing to evacuate them.

Now let’s leave the moral considerations aside for a moment, and just ask ourselves, on a practical level: what does Israel hope to achieve in this campaign?
The release of Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier held captive by Hamas for more that two years – was not even declared as a goal. At least that we have learnt from the previous, “Second Lebanon War”. That war started after three soldiers were kidnapped by Hizballa, and the campaign failed in bringing them back alive.
The official goal is, obviously, to stop the shooting of Kassam, Grad, and other, longer range rockets. This will not happen, everybody knows that. Ehud Barak, the Secretary of Defense, knows that. He has already been the military Commander in Chief and Prime Minister. He tried to calm down all those who demanded “an iron fist”, saying that most of them never saw how real war looked like. This week, he was forced to start the air strikes, after the number of rocket attacks has reached a breaking point (and eventually, a man was killed in Netivot). If Barak believes that there is a way to stop the shooting, even temporarily, then why did he wait so long? I am afraid that it was because at some point, the pressure on Barak caused him more political damage than the result of a military operation would do. Election day is coming up in February, and Mr. Barak, the head of the Labor party, is a candidate for Prime Minister.
How is the operation doing, you ask? Well, so far so good. Approval rate for Barak has risen 50%.
The sad reality, for both Palestinians and Israelis, is that none of them has any option to inflict violence on the other, without hurting their own cause. The Israeli military can kill many more people, but this would only cause more anguish, more hatred, and there will always be enough material and means for the rest of the population, to make more Kassam rockets. An oppressed population is like a dragon with multiple heads: unless you kill it in its entirety, it will have enough power and motivation to fight back, especially when they have nothing to lose but their misery.
The Palestinians, too, are hurting their own cause when they support the Hamas, which declares the annihilation of Israel as its goal. But this is where the symmetry breaks down: how can we judge somebody, who is so desperate as to support the only organization which puts some food on their table? Every side feels its own suffering, but fails to recognize that the other side suffers too. But in the case of Israel, being the more powerful side by far, the notion of being the victim is quite ridiculous, even considering the pain and fear that Israelis feel.
The Hamas has never been so popular before the Palestinian Authority was crashed by Israel. In many polls and programs, such as the Geneva Initiative (http://www.geneva-accord.org/) or the National Census (http://www.mifkad.org.il/), hundreds of thousands of people from both sides expressed their willingness to accept each other’s right for independence. This means that essentially, most Palestinians (who are not zealously religious), would not vote for Hamas if they had a decent alternative.
Unfortunately, they don’t. And Israelis don’t either. These two peoples, which posses so much talent in all areas of life, lack the one thing which could bring them hope for peaceful co-existence: brave and smart leadership. We need our own De-Gaulle, or our own Churchill, or our own Obama, for that matter. So that Jewish and Arab kids could play hide-and-seek, and wont have to worry about finding shelter in 15 seconds. Our own Obama is hiding somewhere in the academy, or in the high-tech industry, but he (or she) is definitely not in today’s political system.

אחת, שתיים, נסיון, אה אה, ואן טו

(זהו פיילוט, נא לא להתייחס ברצינות רבה מדי)

כמו כן, נא לסלוח לי על חסרונן של נקודות בסופי משפט, עדיין לא מצאתי איך גורמים לנקודה להופיע בסוף ולא בהתחלה, כמו במשפט הזה.