Netanyahu, the Arabs, and all of us
“Against all odds, we have achieved a great victory for the Likud party. We have achieved a great victory for the national camp headed by the Likud.” This was said by Benjamin Netanyahu after the exit polls, not the actual results; it is, therefore, his description of Likud scoring a miniscule plurality or possibly even a tie while enjoying the benefits of years of incumbency. But even the clear plurality that Netanyahu did eventually win was only surprising in that the last polls, several days earlier, had suggested his party would only come in second; and yet Israeli polls are apparently historically unreliable, and Likud seems to have done better than expected at the expense not of its opponents, but of its allies. Indeed, according to the final results, the “national camp” whose great victory Bibi extols saw none of its parties other than Likud crack the top five. Anyone else would call this a loss. Netanyahu is a politician, so perhaps we need to treat everything he says as meaningless spin. And he seems as cynical a politician as there is, willing to say anything at all to win, so a transparently-false claim of victory is far down the list of concerns. Just in the last day, he renounced the two-state solution, and raised an alarm to his supporters about the prospect of Arabs voting — Arabs who are citizens of Israel, and thus wholly entitled to vote. The Republicans in the US make heroic efforts to keep blacks from voting, but at least they have the PR sense not to admit it. Imagine a GOP governor exclaiming, on the day of the election, “Blacks are showing up to vote for Obama in record numbers, so all of you decent white folks had better get out to vote, too, or the blacks will actually have a say in their government, which is not the natural order of things.” But in all likelihood, Netanyahu will continue as prime minister, so his policies, his words, and even his spin have weight. Netanyahu can form a government by making a deal between his national camp, the Haredi (ultra-religious) parties, which are not “national”, and Kulanu, a new centrist-populist party that borders on “national” but is not a part of any camp led by Netanyahu. Alternatively, Kulanu (כולנו « Kūlanū », “All of us”) could support the center-left, which could then govern with support from outside (since it presumably must be so) of the Arab list; but it’s safest, when discussing Israeli politics, to assume the worst, or you will constantly be disappointed. Assume, therefore, Netanyahu. We don’t know what is in his heart; but the idea that he secretly harbors other intentions than he has just revealed is academic. He is cynical not just in words but in deeds, willing to do anything as well as say anything. We simply must suppose that his governance will now be more explicitly anti-Arab, since he will see that it has just won him an election. And there is a consistency to the worst of his assertions. He wants no rights for the Arabs of the West Bank, and no rights for the Arabs in recognized Israel. If Israel will retain all of Palestine forever, then the Arabs of Palestine will never have full rights. That is the Netanyahu plan, and the Jewish voters for his national camp have just endorsed it. I’m a supporter of Israel, its right to exist and its right to exist in Palestine, but neither Jim Crow nor ethnic cleansing can be tolerated in the modern world, which Likud’s Jewish voters surely feel themselves a part of. What the hell is the matter with them? That’s not entirely a rhetorical question, and it deserves an attempt at an answer. The least-flattering element to a comprehensive answer is that these Likud voters are caught up in the same mindless nationalism and territorialism as so much of the rest of the world, the pre-modern vestige of our self-centered, acquisitive worst. Some Jews believe themselves entitled, as a people, to all of Palestine, from the Jordan to the sea, and to settle matters there without reference to anyone else who also lives there, regardless of how long they have done so or by what manner they came to do so. This is nothing unique to the Jews, but it does suggest that their experiences have not made them a better people. On the other hand, there are some positive — or at least exculpatory — elements to the larger answer. Even the Holocaust enters the story, because it was the most egregious example of a much older phenomenon of hatred against the Jews, continuing to the present. Of course they’re wary of outsiders. Of course they’re hyperconcerned with security. And the aggressive behavior of Hamas seems designed to aggravate that concern, and it should, since it is clearly a continuation of the longer hatred; the Europeans have essentially taught the Arabs that it is acceptable in the modern global culture to hate the Jews. That is also why international institutions and US leftists bizarrely consider Israel to be the worst state in the world, or at least the only one deserving of serious attention and routine condemnation. What is surprising is that Netanyahu’s constituents believe, and he affects to believe, that their treatment of Arabs, whether citizen or neighbor, serves their security. The Jews of Israel, as represented in a democratic fashion by their state, are gradually alienating every potential partner and ally, even including the Jews of the United States. When US Jews abandon Israel, how long will US support for Israel last? Already we see bipartisanship on Israel collapsing, as the Israeli right and US right form an electoral alliance, using each other for short-term, shortsighted gain. Will the US center-left, including many Jews, want to condone that, want to aid in the self-interest of parties and the promotion of policies they don’t care for, here or in Israel? I want Israel to survive. I also want it to respect human rights and the principles of liberal democracy. I want it to stop colonizing — that’s the word — the West Bank, and negotiate the independence of a Palestinian Arab state. The other pole to this view in Israel, the “national camp”, is a minority even in the coming Knesset. And yet somehow the champion of that pole is likely to keep power, and to attribute his power to the purity of his embrace of that pole. Kulanu is a centrist party and supports a two-state solution; it needs to throw its support to the Zionist Union and save Israel from itself. — O.T. Ford