Avigdor Lieberman, who heads a party called “Israel Our Home,” became the elections’ main attraction, advancing from 11 to 15 seats and shoving the venerable Labor Party back into fourth position. His campaign slogan went: “No loyalty, no citizenship!” If he weren’t Jewish, Lieberman would be an anti-Semite. Hatred for Arabs was his strongest card, pulling in thousands of the like-minded.

The Lieberman surge is largely a result of the Gaza War. His rival parties, Kadima and Labor, timed the offensive prior to elections largely in order to gain popularity, but Lieberman reaped the fruits. The intoxication of force, the abandonment of all restraint — sheer murder — well suited the party of Strong Man Lieberman, who means to teach the Arabs a lesson they won’t forget.

For Israel the election results signify a big step backward. In 2005, when PM Ariel Sharon broke from the Likud and established Kadima, it was a severe blow to the right-wing ideal of a Greater Israel. After disengaging from Gaza and dismantling the settlements there, Sharon held that the Right was stuck. He claimed to be moving toward the Center. In the 2006 elections, as a result (but also because the remaining Likud leader, Binyamin Netanyahu, had aroused resentment by welfare cuts in his term as Finance Minister) the Likud plunged to 12 seats.

Any prospect of peace through Kadima, however, quickly lost momentum. Sharon refused to work with the Palestinian moderates, preferring unilateral withdrawal. This spared him making concessions in the West Bank, where he wanted to strengthen Israel’s hold with American approval. Then he suffered a stroke. Olmert took over. In the 2006 elections, Kadima won 29 seats, far less than the 40 projected while Sharon was at the helm. Olmert, charged with corruption, could not complete his term. Cornered, stripped of political hope, he began to say things unheard of from an Israeli chief-of-state: that the alternative to withdrawal from the West Bank would be a one-state solution where Arabs would be the majority; that the maintenance of a Jewish State would then require apartheid; that Israel under apartheid would not be able to stand up under international pressure. On the ground, however, Olmert did nothing. The Annapolis program, to which he was partner, remained ink on paper. In the end, his many talks with PA President Abu Mazen produced nothing but “shelf understandings,” stored away for a more auspicious hour.

The strengthening of the Right leaves Israel more entangled than ever. With a Knesset majority that will fade at the slightest concession, the new prime minister faces an American administration seeking regional peace. The prognosis, in short, is for an intensification of Israel’s paralysis. Amid a global economic crisis, however, paralysis will not do. The need for external funding and investment will be greater than ever. This impossible situation will likely breed another round of elections.
Party by party

If Sharon, in his day, moved the electoral map to the left, the recent elections have shifted it back. The Likud recaptured voters disappointed with Kadima, while Kadima — claiming that only a big win could block the hated Netanyahu — took voters from Labor and Meretz. At the same time, Labor and Meretz lost most of their former support in the Arab sector. The result was a major decline. From 24 seats in the 17th Knesset, Labor and Meretz dropped to 16.

This decline reflects the contradictions in which the Left has been mired during years of violence against the Palestinians, as well as in Lebanon. Compare today’s 16 seats to the 56 that Labor and Meretz won in 1992! After the collapse of the Oslo Accords and the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, Labor began to take part in acts of oppression and warfare: “Operation Grapes of Wrath” (which included the mass killing at Kana in Lebanon), the murderous response to the Intifada in the year 2000, “Operation Defensive Shield” (2002), the second Lebanon War (2006) and now the war in Gaza. Labor’s Ehud Barak adopted Sharon’s slogan that “there is no partner.” He supported the concept of unilateralism, which created a vacuum on the Palestinian side that Hamas easily filled.

Meretz, for its part, offered no political alternative. It has supported all the unilateral steps, and now the cruel war in Gaza. Avoiding the need to cope with the difficult political questions, Meretz focused instead on bringing media stars to its fold and building the illusion of a new movement, social-democratic and green. The gimmick flopped. Meretz lost votes to Kadima. Among the leftists who opted for Kadima’s Tzipi Livni, it didn’t much matter that she had been one of the leaders in the Gaza operation. After all, even Meretz supported the war. On the other hand, hundreds of erstwhile Meretz supporters took umbrage at the party’s war position and voted instead for Hadash, which is chiefly an Arab party. In the Jewish sector, Hadash garnered 7500 votes, compared with 3000 in 2006. Thus Meretz lost votes on both sides, rightward to Kadima and leftward to Hadash.

The elections saw a limited achievement for the Arab parties, which raised their number of seats from 10 to 11. They could do so by fully exploiting the rage felt by the Arab sector after the Gaza War. The clan heads and vote contractors, who in the past worked for the Zionist parties (which won 28% of the Arab vote in 2006) found it difficult this time to market Labor or Kadima. Instead, they divided their allegiance equally among the three Arab parties (Hadash, Ra’am-Ta’al and Bal’ad).

The additional Arab seat reflected no increased faith in Arab leadership, but rather a cold calculation by the clan heads, who wanted to maintain their status with the public. These parties offer no realistic action plan for organizing the Arab sector. They shun the burning questions of poverty and unemployment. Avoiding platforms for action, they perpetuate clan-based vote patterns, which have nothing to do with raising consciousness and organizing the public. We can say, therefore, that their 11 mandates represent so many wasted votes, for they cannot influence the centers of decision-making, nor do they reflect real work in the field. The situation remains the same, which is to say that the Arab sector keeps slipping backward.

What’s more, the weakening of the Zionist Left will make it harder for the Arab parties to put through legislation. The Knesset and Israeli public opinion are today full of anti-Arab sentiment. This is fed in part by the development of an impassioned but narrow-minded intra-Arab dialogue, which seeks support by appealing to feelings of bitterness rather than by building social institutions.

The Organization for Democratic Action (ODA-DA’AM), known as the Workers’ Party, was also hurt by the shift to the Right. Nevertheless, the election campaign, headed by Asma Aghbarieh-Zahalka, managed to reach new sectors of the public. The failure to cross the Knesset threshold in no way weakens the determination of the party’s members to continue building a new kind of social and political power. In an open letter that the party published after the elections, it declared that, “ODA refuses to be drawn into clanlike patterns of voting.” The ODA election broadcast, produced on a voluntary basis by top professionals, won extremely positive responses. Although these achievements did not translate into sufficient votes, there was an influx of activists into the party’s ranks. The open letter also stated that, “ODA is determined to continue systematic action toward defending and organizing workers in Israel.” The party’s social agenda, moreover, is a bridge for common work between Jews and Arabs. It undermines the dangerous attempt to isolate the Arab population and deepen the hatred between the two peoples.

In the shadow of the crisis hanging over the world, including Israel, the issues of poverty and unemployment will stand at the top of ODA’s agenda in the coming year.

This is not a citation from a leftist visionary, but rather from Israeli attorney Yaakov Weinroth, interviewed by Gidi Weitz in Haaretz on May 9, 2008. Weinroth, an orthodox Jew and self-proclaimed Zionist, is famous for defending powerful figures accused of corruption. Is Zionism too, we wonder, an ideology camouflaging other interests? The evidence is now in the affirmative.

Zionists claim that Israel arose in order to provide the Jewish people with a national home. But decade by decade, it has become ever clearer that Israel is not a state of, by and for the Jewish people. It is rather a state of, by and for a sprinkling of families, 19 in all, whose income amounts to $70 billion — 88% of the national budget.

This budget is a stumbling block to the poor. All levels of education have been devastated. On the books there is universal health care, but many can’t afford to buy medicines. Israel’s socio-economic inequality, as measured by the UN Development Program’s Gini Index (0.0 = perfect equality), has worsened steadily from 0.222 in 1982 to 0.392 in 2005, making it the most unequal of Western democracies with one exception: the United States (Gini = 0.408).

Poverty is no longer confined to the jobless. The government has lowered the unemployment rate, indeed, to 7.6%, but there is a trade-off: working people make up 37% of the nation’s poor. The country’s much vaunted economic growth is way off kilter. It is high in high-tech, which supports very few, but scarce in traditional industries and services, where most people work.

This steady impoverishment of the population has not just “happened.” It has happened because of laws and decisions that sold the country’s assets to the 19 families at bargain-basement prices, all in the name of the free market. As Weinroth said to Weitz: “Power is no longer a separate entity. Money is power. Money rules all, it flows through every hidden vein of the society.”

But that’s not all. For Marx also taught us that capital has no sense of obligation. When the state gets a bit too small for it, it seeks foreign outlets. The 19 families used the state to get rich, buying up its privatized firms, and now they go cosmopolitan. Between 2001 and 2006, foreign investment in Israel grew by a factor of six, but Israeli investments abroad increased by a factor of eight. The Adva Center — whose reports are the source for all figures here unless stated otherwise — cites Nohi Dankner, whose family is among the favored 19: “I believe very much in Israel, and I believe greatly in the Israeli economy. Notwithstanding, it is clear that our development must be overseas.” Who is the “our” in “our development”? Not the unemployed, the poor, the people on the dole. What does the “our” care about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? Or the rockets of Hamas? The “our” are invested elsewhere.

For 60 years, the 19 families stayed beneath the camouflage of Zionism, but now it’s launch time. True, in 1993 they tried to bind the Oslo Accords to a narrative about peace called the “New Middle East.” Ten years ago, in an article called “The Hidden Economic Logic of Oslo” (Challenges 51-52) we explained the Oslo initiative this way: Israel understood that unless it normalized relations with the Arab world, it would not fit into the global economy. But the 19 families no longer need a thriving Israel. Reality faced the Oslo process with difficulties. It isn’t their task to solve them. Their task is to make profits, fast and big.

Most of the 5.5 million Israeli Jews, however, cannot zip off to Africa to steal diamonds or to Romania to finance skyscrapers or to China to exploit Chinese. They are stuck here, with a conflict that daily grows more dangerous. The leadership that sold itself to the 19 families — always the same leadership, whether it goes by the name of Likud or Labor or Kadima — is as deceitful as it is cruel. With one hand it impoverishes its citizens, with the other it squeezes the Palestinians.

Last June Israel celebrated 40 years of conquest. For two-thirds of its lifetime, it has occupied 3.5 million Palestinians. (Gaza must still be included: Israel hems it in by land, sea and air.) Its leaders hesitate to travel abroad, fearing arrest for war crimes. There have been innumerable opportunities to reach a fair peace with the Palestinian people, but there is neither the wisdom nor the largeness of spirit to make the needed concessions. Israel prides itself ad nauseam on the “Zionist vision,” but the moment it glimpses a chance for peace, that vision gives way to spins and gimmicks aimed at maintaining the general fraud.

The day is not far off, therefore, when the Palestinians will say, “Why, after all, should we part from you? In any case there’s not enough left to build a viable state. Forget about that, just give us our civil rights.” Then the conflict will enter a new phase. The citizens of Israel will be forced to decide: apartheid or democracy. If the Jewish population opts for apartheid, the leadership will continue to defraud, exploit and impoverish at the service of the millionaires — until catastrophe comes. The only other option would be democracy — a single democracy west of the Jordan, including reconciliation with the Palestinians. That would exorcize Mammon, along with his Zionist camouflage.