Site Presented By
Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
Why did he win, then? Three reasons come to mind: ethnicity, leadership and policy. The social factor is crucial in elections everywhere, since most people vote according to family, community and peer loyalties. And the current composition of Israeli society gives the advantage to the political right. Following decades of deadlock, the "Russians," the newly arrived 1 million immigrants from the former Soviet Union, turned the balance in the right's favor, joining with the religious, the settlers, and the Oriental or Sephardic Jews, who tend to make up the poor and lower-middle classes. The left is dominated by the Ashkenazis, or European-ancestry Jews, who form the middle and upper classes, and the Israeli Arabs. Israel was founded by Ashkenazis, who have always comprised the country's economic and intellectual elite, but their monopoly on power was broken in 1977 by the Likud's Menachem Begin, who drew much of his support from Oriental Jews, and ever since then the Ashkenazi domination has been challenged by the Orientals, the settlers and the religious. Labor remains popular with the elderly, but it has virtually no support among the young, Russian-speaking Israelis, who favor the Likud and its satellites.
The swing bloc in Israeli elections is comprised of middle- and upper-middle-class voters, who supported the left's peace agenda and economic platform during the 1990s, when Labor was led by the ex-military, security-oriented leaders Yitzhak Rabin and Ehud Barak. To woo these voters, both major parties tended to blur their ideologies and play the leadership card. This time, Sharon enjoyed the advantage of experience, conservatism and personal charm, all of which kept his approval ratings high. By contrast, his rival, Mitzna, is a rookie, who had no political record at the national level. Sharon's rise followed the failures of his predecessors, Binyamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak, who took office as great young promises and blundered. But even they were nurtured for years as future leaders in the public mind. Mitzna came too late to become a known entity.
Mitzna had also a policy problem. He started his campaign by pledging to resume the peace process with Yasser Arafat, picking up from the point at which it collapsed two years ago. That was the right note to win his party chairmanship, but the wrong one for the general public, which, after the peace process failure, views such positions as too far to the left. Barak and Sharon convinced Israelis that Arafat is "no partner" for negotiations, and there is no point in dealing with him. And if the war is going to go on anyway, the public wants Sharon, who they know will hit the Palestinians harder than any Labor leader.
As a result, voters who were disappointed by Sharon's failures and Likud corruption defected to Shinui, rather than vote Labor. For many Israelis, the faults of Likud were not a good enough reason to bring Arafat back as a negotiating partner. Lapid's team of unknown candidates, mostly lawyers and other white-collar professionals, presented a clean image, and shrewdly blurred their positions on security and foreign policy. Lapid had also kept his word from the 1999 campaign, when he pledged not to join a coalition with Shas, the Orthodox Oriental party. Shinui's platform was attractive to many voters who strongly disapprove of the growing power of the Orthodox parties, whose devotees are exempt from military service and live mostly on government welfare. That process deepened in the last decade, when Israeli society became much more secularized and Westernized.
Throughout the campaign, Sharon repeatedly complained about the "unnecessary" early elections, and for a good reason. He is acutely aware of the difficulties ahead. When Sharon's new government takes its oath of office, sometime between mid-February and early March (the deadline for coalition forming), its every decision will be dependent upon American support. Bush, and not Sharon, will be the final arbiter of Israeli policy.
Sharon needs every bit of American support. On the Palestinian front, Sharon seeks to avoid an internationally imposed settlement, which would force him to freeze settlement construction and accept an interim Palestinian state by year's end. Sharon told fellow ministers that he will move quickly toward a political process with the Palestinians. His platform is his hard-line interpretation of Bush's June 24, 2002, policy speech, in which the president demanded that Arafat step down and put the onus on the Palestinians to move the peace process forward. In Sharon's version, Israel will not make any concessions before the Palestinians stop fighting, Arafat is kicked out to a figurehead position, and a new, "reformed" leadership is put in his place. Sharon will ask Washington to ease Arafat out, and so buy more time, while enticing Labor into the coalition government with the promise of future Israeli concessions.
But Sharon's is not the only peace plan. The European and Arab states will press Washington toward a parallel process of mutual Israeli and Palestinian steps, as laid out in the "road map" proposed by the Quartet (the U.S., the U.N., Europe and Russia.) Bush will have to decide which approach to take.
On the economy, Israel asked for an unprecedented American aid package, with $4 billion in military grants and $8 billion in loan guarantees (in addition to its annual $2.34 billion aid bill). The White House hinted that it would respond favorably, to save Israel's economy from collapse. But final approval is still pending, and probably depends on Israel's behavior during the presumed war with Iraq. The United States, worried about inflaming the Arab world, asked Israel to stay out, even if Iraq attacked it, as it did in the 1991 Gulf war. American units have been deployed in Israel to strengthen its missile and air defenses. Washington has pledged to make great efforts to prevent missile launches from western Iraq. Sharon vowed to retaliate only to grave attacks, and even then, only after consulting the Americans.
Clearly, no decisions on the Israeli issues will be taken in Washington before the Iraq war. The "day after" question is contingent on many factors, such as the outcome in Iraq, the composition of Israel's new coalition, and possible escalation in the Palestinian crisis or along the Lebanon border. But most of all, it depends on the administration's postwar priorities. Israeli security officials and diplomats believe that Bush, facing reelection, will opt to ingratiate himself with American Jews rather than confront Israel as his father did in 1991. But the ever-suspicious Sharon isn't taking anything for granted. He has already appointed two policy-planning teams to prepare his new government's peace plan, based on the Bush vision.
But before planning for the future of Israel, Sharon will have to face the real election contest with his coalition partners, while keeping an eye on the investigation storm approaching him. The weight of the tasks facing him was reflected in his victory speech Tuesday night, a solemn address in which he declared that this was no time for celebrating. The conventional wisdom in Israel predicts that the new Sharon government will not serve its full four-year term but will fall earlier, ousted either by new elections or by a leadership change in the Likud. In the second scenario, Sharon's main rival and current foreign minister, Netanyahu, will be the first in line to take control of the nation.
