Israel: politics beyond Sharon
Why the Left is Israel's only hope for peace
AMNON KAPELIOUK
Le Monde diplomatique, January 2003
There is huge paradox over the campaigning for Israel's parliamentary elections, scheduled for 28 January. Israel's security, economy and morale is at an all-time low. Negotiations on any sort of settlement have failed; repression of the Palestinians and assaults on their institutions through the West Bank and Gaza Strip continue, countered by the intifada and suicide attacks on Israelis.
Responsibility for this catastrophe lies with the rightwing nationalist Likud party and its leader, Ariel Sharon, who has been prime minister for the last two years and is widely known as the father of all failures. Yet Sharon enjoys a commanding lead in the polls. In the run-up to the February 2001 elections he promised peace and security. Not including past wars, he holds the record for casualties: some 700 Israelis dead, almost all civilians (and Palestinian casualties are three times higher).
Israel's economy has also suffered badly under Sharon. For the second year in a row there will be negative growth, not seen since 1953. Unemployment is officially at 10% but is closer to 13%, if you include the desperate people who no longer bother to register for work. After several years of stable inflation the annual rate has climbed back to 8%. Tourism has dropped by two-thirds, a disaster for hotels and restaurants. A record 18% of Israelis now live below the poverty line. Ordinary people are so fearful of what the future may bring that thousands of young couples have moved abroad. Meanwhile immigration continues to fall, plummeting by 28% in 2000-2001. Israel is demoralised.
The peace camp should be gaining strength and popularity. Only they - despite their internal divisions - can bring about a just solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But the opposite is true: if the polls are to be believed, the peace camp currently trails in public opinion.
Israel's sense of paradox is compounded by the fact that two-thirds of the population and a majority of Likud supporters favour a Palestinian state; 63% back dismantling Jewish settlements in the occupied territories to resolve the current crisis. Sharon is opposed to this. Yet at the end of November, 55 years after the 1947 United Nations vote to partition Palestine, Yehuda Lancry, Israel's representative to the UN, told the General Assembly that the government supported a Palestinian state. This prompted Sharon to issue a denial, saying that Lancry's statement was his "personal opinion". Sharon sees military solutions as the only option and settlements as an essential part of national security.
To appease the international community and avoid offending the more moderate elements on the right, Sharon said that he would agree to a Palestinian state. But his definition of statehood means demilitarisation, with Palestine's security provided by lightly-armed police officers and its borders limited to the areas previously marked out under the Oslo accords as areas A and B (1). This represents only 42% of the West Bank, and the enclaves would be linked by tunnels or bridges; Israel would also control Palestine's external borders and airspace. The current Palestinian leadership would be shunted aside: Sharon's dream is that a new group of leaders will emerge, Palestinian collaborators amenable to the de facto perpetuation of Israeli occupation and colonisation.
Equally controversial is the presence of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat at the bargaining table. Of those surveyed, including supporters of Labour, Likud and the centrist Shinui (Change) party, 68% back negotiations with Arafat (2). Yet a majority of those surveyed intend to vote for Sharon. Ordinary Israelis explain the contradiction with "It's true that the current situation is impossible, but does the government have another alternative to resolve the deadlock? It doesn't, and that's why I'm voting for Sharon again." It is as though nothing has happened over the past two years. The reversal of the peace camp's fortunes really began during the first few years of the Oslo accords (1993-1996), when Labour and the left-wing Zionist Meretz party were in power, long before Sharon became prime minister.
In May 1996, six months after Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated, the Likud leader, Binyamin Netanyahu, was elected prime minister. He approved a number of controversial actions, including opening an archeological tunnel under the Haram al-Sharif (Temple Mount in Jerusalem) in 1996 and constructing the Abu Ghneim (Har Homa) settlement in 1997, and managed to scuttle the negotiations for three years. Even the tiny window of opportunity provided by the 1998 Wye River summit led nowhere. The peace camp mobilised and launched protests. And finally the long-awaited change came: Labour's Ehud Barak won the elections in May 1999.
The peace camp began to self-destruct about a year later. At the Camp David summit in 2000 Barak sought to impose a definitive settlement even though it failed to meet the Palestinians' aspirations and minimum requirements (3). If the Palestinians had accepted Barak's proposal, Zionism would have celebrated its most significant triumph. Together with Israel's founding father, David Ben Gurion, Barak would have become one of Israel's greatest leaders, the first to bring peace and security to a wounded land. But Barak feared that the Palestinians would reject his diktats, hence the campaign slogans about "removing Yasser Arafat's mask", with Arafat depicted as having "rejected the most generous proposal ever offered to the Palestinians".
During the negotiations Barak officially forbade his team from submitting anything in writing; the Palestinians, along with the public, were kept in the dark. The talks' failure came as a shock to the peace camp. But Barak said Arafat was "no longer a partner in the peace process". The propaganda influenced Israeli public opinion to such an extent that supporters of the Oslo accords - Shimon Peres foremost among them - remained largely silent.
In September 2000 Sharon (then opposition leader) made his infamous visit to the Haram al-Sharif esplanade. When young Palestinians gathered to vent their anger, Israel responded with excessive force: over three days police bullets killed 28 and wounded 500, including 13 Arab Israelis. As part of a campaign, the Israelis then accused Arafat of "provoking bloody riots in order to seize on the street what he couldn't obtain at the bargaining table." Some officials even claimed that he was "seeking to destroy the Jewish state". Again pacifists and moderates kept silent: the peace camp was a dwindling force.
As expected, Sharon won an absolute majority the early elections of February 2001. He then put together a national unity government that included Labour, giving himself the political legitimacy he needed to reoccupy formerly autonomous Palestinian areas and destroy the Palestinian Authority. Sharon even got President George Bush to describe him as "a man of peace". He then orchestrated an extraordinary campaign to denigrate, delegitimise and demonise Arafat. Again Arafat was called an enemy of Israel and a terrorist, as he had been before the Oslo accords.
On 13 December 2001, at the beginning of the siege of al-Muqataa (Arafat's compound in Ramallah), the Israeli government officially declared Arafat irrelevant and said that it would have no further dealings with him. The obvious objective was to isolate Arafat, the Arab world's only democratically elected leader, in the full view of 2,000 international observers. Incredibly, some of the media even debated whether Arafat should be killed or merely exiled. Eminent academics, politicians and journalists joined in the debate, with almost no one daring to denounce the criminal nature of the proposition.
With no response from the peace camp, the psychological war made gains in Israeli public opinion. Meretz's Yossi Sarid, the opposition leader, was acerbic in his criticism of Arafat, whom he even likened to Sharon. Even Peres, the father of the Oslo accords, ultimately joined the bandwagon. Yossi Beilin, the ex-justice minister, was the only Labour politician who displayed honesty and integrity and refused to disparage Arafat (4).
Israel's peace camp has two main parts: a moderate, social-democratic wing, including Labour, Meretz and the extra-parliamentary Peace Now movement, and a radical wing with various courageous groups such as Gush Shalom, headed by former parliamentarian Uri Avnery; Taayush (coexistence), a mixed group of young Jews and Arabs; and the communists, who unlike Gush Shalom and Taayush have members in the Knesset. The two wings are strikingly different. The moderates hedge their bets by speaking of modifying the 1967 borders and dismantling a number of the settlements, while expressing reservations about negotiating with Arafat. The radicals, some of whom have visited Arafat embattled at his Ramallah headquarters, have called on Israel to return to its pre-1967 borders and dismantle the settlements.
Many Israelis describe those in the peace camp as leftists, even though in social terms some of them are not remotely leftwing: many Labour and Meretz members have incomes in the top 30% and are not familiar with class struggles, red flags and May Day parades. In Israel today leftwing is almost exclusively a political epithet: the left just describes those moderates who hope to reach an honourable agreement with the Palestinians.
The Labour party is at a crossroads: it will continue to mark time unless it adopts a clear line of attack to re-energise itself. If Labour ever wants to be a guide to the peace camp again, as it was during the Oslo years, it must repudiate the three fundamental myths invented by Barak: "We gave Arafat everything and then he turned his back on us"; "The PLO leader has carried out a military offensive to wipe out more Israelis"; "Arafat is a terrorist, not a partner for peace." If Labour continues to dither, it will end up proving Barak and Sharon right.
Shattering people's confidence in the peace process was Barak's most grievous failure. Yet he persists. He told Amram Mitzna, the mayor of Haifa who was elected as the new Labour party leader (defeating Binyamin Ben Eliezer, Sharon's former defence minister, who resigned in October): "The left will only recover when it affirms Arafat is behind the current wave of bloodshed."
Mitzna scornfully rejected Barak's advice. In a recent interview a journalist asked: "Arafat is calling on you to make a peace of the brave. Will you accept the challenge?" Mitzna replied: "When I am elected prime minister, I will summon the Palestinians back to the bargaining table and I will speak with whomever they choose to represent them." "Even Arafat?" "If the Palestinians send Arafat, I will speak with him" (5).
Palestinian suicide attacks have been a major setback for the Israeli left. Everyone knows this, including the PA, which has condemned them and knows that criminal activities harm its cause (80% of Palestinians polled called for a halt to such operations provided that Israel stops its attacks as well) (6). Mitzna's leadership may well help to end the bombings and improve the fortunes of the peace camp. Mitzna faces pressure from all sides, including from within his own party. Labour's list of candidates, chosen in December, is riddled with hawks loyal to Ben Eliezer, while Yossi Beilin, Yael Dayan and Tsali Reshef were assigned low-ranking and unelectable positions on the party list. Beilin and Dayan have since rejoined Meretz, which has included them on its list.
But Mitzna continues to be forthright. He openly opposes Sharon's policies. He has called on Israel to withdraw immediately from the Gaza Strip and dismantle Jewish settlements in Gaza, and most of those in the West Bank. He says that he favours a viable Palestinian state. So it is no surprise that Arafat has hailed the election of the new Labour leader, urging him to follow in Rabin's footsteps.
Notes:
1) Haaretz, Tel Aviv, 29 November 2002.
2) See Alain Gresh, "Camp David's thwarted peace", Le Monde diplomatique, English language edition, July 2002.
3) See Yossi Beilin and Yasser Abed Rabbo, "The do-it-ourselves solution", Le Monde diplomatique, English language edition, April 2002.
4) Maariv, Tel Aviv, 23 November 2002.
5) Haaretz, 28 November 2002.