As nearly everyone knows, Israel's political system is parliamentary democracy
taken to a lunatic degree. I had hopes a month back that somehow the Likud with
Bibi Netanyahu at its head, Kadima with Tsipi Livni as its leader, and Labor
spearheaded by Ehud Barak would be able to forge a political alliance that was
Zionist and secular, egalitarian and capitalist, alert to its enemies and open
to peace. This last dyad is the most essential. But much of it hinges on the
Palestinians and, despite all of the frantic diplomacy in the Middle East,
nothing good is happening among them.
The last piece of news on which
the powers are trying to put a nice twist is actually disastrous. It is the
resignation of Salam Fayyad as prime minister of the
Palestinian Authority in order to smooth the way for a reunion of Fatah and
Hamas. Fayyad was the one person you could trust with money in the Palestinian
galaxy. So that is gone, just as a big load of international cash is scheduled
to arrive. And what is really expected from the hudna--if there is a
hudna--between Ramallah and Gaza? Let's pick odds. My (informed)
guess: more intra-Arab carnage within a few weeks of the proclamation of the
truce.
Anyway, the trio I had hoped for is kaput. And
Netanyahu, a reasonable man open to compromise, is stuck with a coalition that
won't coalesce. His most distasteful partner is Yisrael Beiteinu whose leader
is Avigdor Lieberman, under investigation by the police for what, alas, has come
to be quite common in the Jewish state: corruption at the top, sort of like with
Arabs. What can one say good about Lieberman? Well, he is not a fascist or
even exactly a neo-fascist. Still, the content and form of his politics are,
well, Putinesque. The Palestinians are to Lieberman what the Chechens are to
Putin. So if we can deal with Putin, and we seem to be very eager to deal with
Putin, we can also deal with Lieberman. But I would want to be the one pouring
the vodka. Actually, I'd prefer to be out of the room. On the other hand,
Lieberman and his band of cossacks are also not murderers or terrorists, which
is something you can't say about many of the Palestinians who are being enticed
to the table.
What's also not widely known about Lieberman is that he has
already been sitting in Ehud Olmert's peace-seeking government for several
years, and did not rock the boat. But, yes, when he speaks about Arabs he is
sometimes disgusting, although last week he announced that he'd leave his home
in a West Bank settlement for peace with the Palestinians.
Lieberman's
signature issue is not the Arabs but the cause of a completely secular society
in Israel. Since his electoral base rests on immigrants from Russia and other
countries in the former Soviet Union whose status as Jews may not quite be
religiously up-to-snuff, his party is the most reliable on issues of civil
marriage, pork products everywhere including the army, Sabbath observance and
orthodox intrusions wherever and everywhere they intrude. On these matters, he
and his party are even more trustworthy than the deep-into-decline left-wing
parliamentary faction Meretz.
The third party that will anchor but not
permanently stabilize Netanyahu's government is Shas, a group made up of
ultra-orthodox Jews who mostly descend from countries in the Arab world. They
tend to be poor and therefore dependent on government hand-outs for large
families (which also helps the Palestinians, of course. This is the binding
currency of the coalition, and it drives the Likud nuts. Shas is also blase about the territories, which does not especially endear it to its
partners.
Shas also has amulets and magic trinkets in its basket, and
reveres wonder rabbis both dead and alive. The most alive (at 88) is Basra-born
Ovadia Yosef who has uttered much nonsense in his career. During the campaign
he put an interdict on votes for Yisrael Beiteinu and labeled Lieberman
"Satan." This is rough stuff. How his adepts will sit at cabinet meetings with
Lieberman without being spooked... that's a problem for them to work out by
themselves.
And so let me write about Netanyahu. Bibi's desire to form
a government with Ehud Barak and Tsipi Livni tells you much more about him than
the dour circumstance in which he finds himself and his party now. Yes, he is
on the moderate right in economic matters. But his successors--Barak and
Olmert--were not enthusiasts of the state socialist model either, and the head
of the Bank of Israel (a Rhodesian-American immigrant, Stanley Fisher) did
scrupulous prophylaxis of the financial system, more or less barring sub-prime
mortgages and other (what we call in Yiddish) chochmes out of Israel's
money blood stream.
In fact, he was the only Israeli prime minister to
agree to a withdrawal from deepest Hebron, where 100,000 Palestinians live but
where Jews had also lived since Abraham bought land there until a massacre in
1929. (Don't get me wrong: this is not a final settlement of the Hebron
issue.) And he also agreed--until Hafaz Assad squelched the whole deal--to a
large withdrawal from the Golan Heights. The extent of this proposed withdrawal
is now mired in the different accounts of the various participants. Suffice it
to say, the least concession attributed to Bibi, very large indeed, was one of
which I would disapprove. And I suspect it was much greater than his partisans
now argue.
So the demonizing of Netanyahu is simply nonsense. He knows
that in a very existential sense Israel needs peace. But he will not make a
peace that would fail on the morrow. And peace can no longer be mapped along
the armistice frontiers of 1949, which is what the 1967 lines are precisely.
Sixty years of history cannot be reduced to an empty formula. Peace will be made when the
Palestinians agree among themselves that they truly want a state that will not
make war on its neighbor. Only when Israel can assume that land vacated for
the state of Palestine will not be used to launch rockets and missiles and
terror against its population will the settlement come, and then it could be
swift and final.