The Israeli Elections
by Tanya Reinhart
Dissident Voice
December 2, 2002
For quite some
time, public opinion polls in Israel appear to be contradictory. On the one hand, there is a majority of
60-70% for Ariel Sharon and an “iron-fist” policy in the occupied territories,
and on the other a majority of 60% for immediate unilateral evacuation of most
of the territories and most of the settlements. In fact, it is simple to reconcile this contradiction. Since at
least the nineties, a division to three thirds can be observed in Israeli
society: The ideological third on the left opposes the occupation on moral and
principled ground. The ideological
right supports Israel’s policy of expansion and the settlers. The middle,
non-ideological, third are people who just want quiet and a normal life. They don't care about the Palestinians, but
also not about the settlers. The polls reflect the confusion and despair of
this middle third: Most likely, their frame of mind is that if it is possible
to kill or expel all Palestinians, that's fine, but if it is possible to simply
get out of there, as Israel did in Lebanon, they support this as well. Thus, in
polls asking about immediate evacuation, the left third plus the middle say
yes. In polls regarding support of
Sharon’s policies, the right third plus the same middle say yes.
It is impossible
to conclude from these polls that Sharon’s victory in the coming elections is
guaranteed, as so commonly argued. The winner of the elections will be the
candidate drawing more of the votes of the middle third.
A prevailing
mistake is to call this middle third ‘center’. The word ‘center’ has
ideological content. It is associated with moderate stands, at the heart of the
consensus. The ideological center is afraid of absolute positions, like getting
out of the territories immediately, but it also does not like the idea of
transfer (mass expulsion). However,
this ideological center exists only in the political discourse. In real life, the middle third consists of
scared citizens whose life has turned to hell -- people who watch the
collapsing economy and wait anxiously for the next terror attack or for the
days of gas masks and sealed rooms. It is reasonable to assume that their
instinct will be to vote for whoever offers a clear rescue path.
The “iron fist”
platform of the right-wing is indeed sharp and clear. But its drawback, for the
middle third, is that it has been tried for two years already, and nothing has
changed for the better. The question for
them is what the left has to offer.
Up until now,
the left-wing offered only verbal solutions:
Let’s sit down and talk and discuss and negotiate -- has been their
message for years. That’s how the Oslo model was born -- a model of eternal
negotiations, while Israel continues to expand settlements and appropriates
more Palestinian lands. By now,
everyone in Israel knows where this road leads, and it is impossible to win the
elections with this message.
But Mitzna has
something new to offer -- a plan that started, at least, as a clear
determination to act, rather than just talk. Its roots are in the resolutions
of the Council for Peace and Security of February this year. As reported in Ha’aretz, “after four months of intense discussions,
the Council for Peace and Security, a group of 1000 top-level reserve generals,
colonels, and Shin Bet and Mossad officials are [sic] to mount a public
campaign for a unilateral Israeli withdrawal from all of Gaza and much of the
West Bank… Unlike some of the other unilateral withdrawal plans, like ‘Life Fence’, for example, the council’s
plan involves evacuating some 40-50 settlements” (Lili Galili, Ha’aretz,
February 18, 2002).
The Council for Peace and Security is
definitely a mainstream body, and its plan is heavily backed by business and
corporate circles in Israel. They are
not necessarily motivated by moral considerations of what Israel is doing to
the Palestinians, but by concerns regarding the dangerous implications of this
policy to the future of Israel. Although I do not share their world-view, I
believe that implementing their plan is a huge step forward.
The conception
underlying this plan is that the real disagreement between mainstream Israel
and the Palestinians is confined to three matters: The Right of Return, Jerusalem, and the fate of the big
settlement blocks in the center of the West Bank. These center settlements are built on land confiscated from the
Palestinians, but the sad reality is that there are already 150,000 Israelis
living in these blocks, who cannot be evacuated over night. However, in
territorial terms, the areas under dispute are no more than 10% of the West
Bank (1), and there is no reason to occupy the rest of the territories because
of this dispute. The 90 percent that are agreed upon can and should be
evacuated immediately, and the 40-50 isolated settlements scattered in these
areas should be dismantled.
Immediately
after the evacuation, negotiations should start regarding the three difficult
problems under dispute. Until these problems are solved, there will be no end
of conflict, and no one can promise a complete end of terror. However, when in 90% of the West Bank (and
the whole of Gaza) people have reason to wake up in the morning, the danger
that they will opt for suicide over the Right of Return is much smaller.
If Mitzna sticks
to this plan, which offers a real alternative and hope, there is a good chance
that he will be the next Israeli prime minister. But there are many dangers lurking on his way. From the
right-wing pole, pressure is exerted on him to “appeal to the center” and,
thus, become vague and meaningless. But
the bigger danger is from the pole labeled left, in his own Labor party. Yossi
Beilin and the other masterminds of Oslo are working against the idea of
immediate evacuation: Why evacuate immediately -- they say -- when we can
simply resume the road of negotiations.
Let’s sit down with the Palestinians; let’s talk and discuss. In the
meanwhile, the IDF (Israeli army) will continue to maintain order in the
occupied territories. Perhaps the Palestinians will give up eventually, and
allow us to implement the Beilin Abu-Mazen plan, which does not require the
dismantling of a single settlement (2).
Mitzna is
showing signs of surrender. At the eve of the Labor primaries, he spoke only
about immediate evacuation from Gaza. For the West Bank he proposed a year of
negotiations, which in practice means negotiations under the supervision of the
Israeli army. In other words, he proposed another year of the present lunacy,
but with some negotiations in the background. If, at in the end, what Mitzna
offers to the middle third would turn out to be an Oslo B plan, the middle will
vote Sharon.
Tanya Reinhart is
a Professor of Linguistics at Tel Aviv University. She is the author of Israel/Palestine:
How to End the War of 1948, (Seven Stories, 2002). This is an expanded
version of an article that appeared in the Israeli daily Yediot Aharonot, November
26, 2002. Reinhart’s webpage: http://www.tau.ac.il/~reinhart
=========
(1) This is the figure in the maximalist
approach of Barak, who demanded to annex these ten percent in Camp David. The actual land that the settlements sit on
is much smaller. However, Barak demanded to maintain territorial continuity
between the annexed settlements. In the Taba talks the Israeli side set the figure
on 8% - “6 percent annexation and an additional 2 percent under lease
agreement” (Ambassador Miguel Moratinos report, Ha’aretz, February 15, 2002).
The Palestinian side acknowledged “3.1 percent annexation [to Israel] in the
context of a land swap,” (there). For
more details on the land percentage and the Taba negotiations see my Israel/Palestine
How to end the war of 1948 (Seven Stories, 2002).
(2)
Here is how Beilin himself described the Beilin Abu-Mazen plan (which
was completed in October 1995) in an interview in March 1996: “As an outcome of
my negotiations, I can say with certainty that we can reach a permanent
agreement not under the overt conditions presented by the Palestinians, but
under a significant compromise [on their side]...I discovered on their side a
substantial gap between their slogans and their actual understanding of
reality, a much bigger gap than on our side. They are willing to accept an
agreement which gives up much land, without the dismantling of settlements,
with no return to the ‘67 border, and with an arrangement in Jerusalem which is
less than municipality level. (Interview
by Lili Galili, “I Want to Entangle the Likud with as Much Peace as
Possible,” Ha’aretz, March 3, 1996.
ISRAEL/PALESTINE: How To End the War of 1948 by Tanya Reinhart (Seven Stories Press/ Open Media Series
2002, ISBN: 1-58322-538-2) is available from Booksense.com (the order house of
independent bookstores), Amazon.com, or local bookstores. For the publisher's
information click on: http://www.sevenstories.com/openmedia/