The Israeli elections

...In the meantime, Sharon and Levy will not surrender without a hard fight...

...Rabin's appointment of Itamar Rabinovich, a leading scholar of contemporary Arab affairs, to lead negotiations with Syria, suggests that he may be ready to modify his public stance on this issue...

...The chickens have finally come home to roost as far as the Likud is concerned...

...By dint of persistence, hard work, a careful act of balancing between the rival camps within the party, and (when necessary) sheer threats, he had managed to slot a series of reforms into place just in time for the election year...

...If this shift were to prove permanent, the sign of a maturing political climate, it will make it far easier for Labor and the left to defend their case in the future...

...Labor certainly has won an unusual chance to reshape the political culture of the country...

...It was, after all, possible to continue to have one's cake and eat it, too...

...In the meantime, while Labor was putting on this show of self-rehabilitation, the Likud, which had been riding a wave of popularity only a few months before, was doing the exact opposite...

...Once the Likud was firmly established in power, the period of such free and easy discourse came to an end, giving way to an era of ill temper, public disputes, and simmering violence...

...How is he going to handle Jewish settlers who state openly that they will not recognize the autonomous authority, not even as traffic police...

...Whether he is temperamentally capable of a truly bold breakthrough (and, of course, the same question applies to Assad) remains to be seen...

...The long hours of empty time characteristic of army reserve duty were often spent in political discussion...

...Rabin, moreover, had made it known long before that he would not include parties that openly declared their sympathies for the PLO, meaning the predominantly Arab parties, in any government of his...

...One of them pointed out on the long night following the elections that his party had promised to join the Likud in government, not in opposition...

...In retrospect, it may well be possible to see that, somewhere inside themselves, the less educated members of the public resented what they very probably saw as a certain arrogance among their more fortunately placed protagonists...

...What made these survey results particularly alarming was the fact that in the three previous elections (those of 1981, 1984 and 1988) Labor had enjoyed huge leads some months ahead of election day, only to see them whittled away...

...Finally, there is the question of the loan guarantees...

...Deals between Prime Minister Shamir, Defense Minister Moshe Arens and Housing Minister Ariel Sharon culminated in a series of defeats for David Levy and his followers so severe that he resigned his post as Foreign Minister in protest...

...Arens, Shamir's heir apparent until the elections, stunned his party by announcing his retirement immediately after them and by saying in interviews that he had never fully identified with the Greater Israel faith of his movement...

...After all, unemployment is running at close to 12 percent and it is much higher among the immigrants, whose reports back to the former Soviet Union are so negative that most of their families and friends have decided to stay put for the time being...

...Can they be bypassed...

...Voters from its natural constituencies defected both to Labor, which under Rabin's leadership directed its major effort to winning over disgruntled Likudniks, and to the radical right...

...When they did at last appear, it turned out remarkably that the exit poll had been wrong and the opinion polls, for the most part, right...

...Its candidates were selected by an entrenched system which had sometimes worked well in the past but proved disastrous this time...

...But everybody was struck by the degree to which the atmosphere this year differed from that prevailing in the campaigns since 1981...

...Labor did much better than originally expected among two swing groups—the recent Russian immigrants and the middle class in the main urban centers, professionals and business people...

...And Rabin went to great lengths to avoid appearing to be Bush's poodle—hence his insistence that he would not halt all building in the territories, whatever the President and Secretary of State might want...

...the memories of the humiliating failure, redolent with corruption, to set up a Labor government in 1990...

...This would have meant that Labor and Meretz, with exactly 50 percent of the Knesset, could have set up a coalition government alone, counting on the Arab grouping to join them in defeating votes of no confidence by a margin of 64 to 56...

...Nonetheless, Shach might well have prevailed except for a careless and costly slip which he had made shortly before the election...

...With growing astonishment, the public watched a succession of events which suggested that the Labor party, far from being moribund, was, if not alive and 438 • DISSENT well, at least alive and capable of kicking...

...the quick succession of decisions announcing a partial freeze on construction in the territories...

...The absence of such charismatic figures as Menachem Begin no doubt contributed to this development...

...First, the Labor party had to put its house in order or, at the very least, bring itself to present an acceptable front to the electorate—a task that for long had looked far beyond its capability...

...His whirlwind round of activity immediately after the elections, with visits to Cairo, Kennebunkport, and Washington...

...Of the many opinion polls published on the eve of the elections, only one had predicted anything like this...

...the predominantly Arab parties, 4 seats...

...Rabin's stated position is that the issue of the Golan Heights should be postponed to a later stage of the peace process...

...And there are those who go back further still...

...And it may well be that we shall eventually come to rank 1992, together with 1967 (the Six Day War) and 1977 (the start of the Likud ascendancy) as a year which opened a new, crucial stage in the history of Israel...

...But will he have the vision and generosity to build up the relatively moderate Palestinian leadership which is in grim competition with the forces of Islamic fundamentalism in the occupied territories...

...Given their single-minded concentration on obtaining government funding for their yeshivas and schools, it would clearly have made more sense to declare their neutrality, in order to sell their support to the highest bidder...

...The result produced some dramatic surprises—the young dovish maverick Avrum Burg in third place, for example—and received a good press...

...The hallmark of his three years then as prime minister was ultra-caution...

...Shamir would have been presented, and truthfully so, as the man who had stood up to the President of the United States and stared him down...

...It has been said in various circles (Clinton Democrats, certain American Jewish commentators, some Likud supporters in Israel) that Bush's denial of the guarantees played no significant role in the Israeli election...

...The Likud would have received an immense boost to its self-confidence...

...This was all the more true because neither of these parties is committed to the Greater Israel ideology of the Likud...

...But it did not work out that way...

...and the early renewal of the peace talks...

...The man is remarkably energetic for his age—he is in his nineties—and when necessary thinks nothing of traveling around the country to lobby in support of his very firmly held views...

...Filling a post held at various times by people with an unusual flair, such as Giora Rosenthal, Golda Meir, and Lova Eliav, it is Harish who, in his own understated way, may have achieved the most...

...The others had suggested, variously, a narrow (perhaps a one seat) victory for the bloc led by the Likud, an equally narrow victory for the left (including the Arab parties), or a dead heat...

...This was the beginning of the end for both Begin's Irgun and Shamir's Lehi (the "Stern Gang...

...The country's increasing isolation in the world was a related theme which cropped up during the campaign...

...People appeared eager to exchange views, listen, discuss...

...Labor made it a point to promise a reordering of national priorities and spelled out clearly that this meant far less investment beyond the green line (that is, beyond Israel's pre-1967 borders) and more in Israel proper, especially in job creation...

...A primary of this type in one of the major parties was without precedent...

...Two parties in this category competed in the elections, winning ten seats between them...

...But he is sometimes carried away by his own rhetoric...

...The chances are that, too powerful and too ruthless to be ignored, they will be able to sabotage plans which leave them out...

...It also has to be remembered that the Likud party (as distinct from the bloc of parties associated with it) took a terrible beating in the elections...

...It was at this point that the crack in the non-Zionist ultra-Orthodox ("haredi") camp became of key importance...

...The choice was made by the Central Committee of the party, a large body of a few thousand but one divided into rival camps...

...The Arab parties, in the end, by the skin of their teeth, won five seats: a grand total of 61...

...It took a most improbable succession of events to produce the final result...

...He aims to have an elected Palestinian authority and some form of autonomy in place by the 440 • DISSENT spring of next year...

...The entire world might criticize the policy of massive settlement in the territories, but that was, in the last resort, mere talk...

...He did so by a margin so close that the result remained uncertain throughout the entire night...

...and it won six seats, while the predominantly Ashkenazi party, Yahadut Ha-Torah, won only four, a net loss of three compared with 1988...

...At the time of the Madrid Peace Conference, some six months before the elections, the opinion polls were predicting that Labor would win a mere 22 seats...

...The bitter historic rivalry between Peres and Rabin, which had flared up again...

...True, it did not look like that at first...

...He knows, of course, that the Syrians will not agree...

...As the numbers came up on the screen, wild excitement broke out in the room...

...their leaders, a colorful combination of venerable Talmudists and streetwise (sometimes sleazy) politicians, include both doves and hawks...

...Is it to turn to the right as Sharon (and, in his own low-key way, Menachem Begin's son Benny) urge...

...For his part, Rabin is already seventy years old...

...Certainly, Likud politicians now made strenuous efforts to hold together their bloc of 59 seats in the hope of establishing an impregnable bargaining position...

...This position, incidentally, is criticized by many commentators in Israel, but nobody expected Rabin to change his mind now that he was situated in what could be seen as a position of weakness...

...A chain smoker and (as rumor has it) a heavy drinker, is he going to be able to lead the party into another election...

...It was no wonder that a mood of pessimism enveloped the opposition camp...

...They remind us that Rabin, as a young officer in the left-wing military unit, the Palmach, commanded the gun battery that sank the Altalena, a ship in which Begin was bringing weapons for the right-wing underground in 1948...

...Or a mere pause in the onward march of the right...

...In the final count, Labor received 44 seats and Meretz 12, leaving the so-called left five short of a majority...

...As the polls closed on Tuesday night, June 23, I gathered with friends to hear the results of the exit poll conducted by Israeli national television...

...Even in an era where public opinion in democratic countries is becoming ever more volatile and unpredictable, it is extraordinary for a party to double its strength in the space of six months...

...Taken together, the parties which positioned themselves to the right of Likud on the territorial issue (Tsomet, Moledet and the National Religious Party) went up from twelve to seventeen...

...It has become a strange case of the means justifying the ends...

...When Begin came to power, he did far more in a few months to achieve peace with Egypt than Rabin had done in his three years...

...Fortunately, the Bush administration stuck to its guns and defeated AIPAC, the Conference of Presidents, and the American Jewish establishment, who appear to have forgotten that what counts ultimately in politics are FALL • 1992 • 439 not intentions but consequences...

...In a widely reported phrase, he declared that the Israelis of North African origin (he was presumably referring to those who are Orthodox) had come a long way over the years but were still not ready to assume leadership positions...

...Meretz (the bloc of the three parties more dovish than Labor), 13 seats...

...and the party's ties to Histadrut enterprises tottering on the brink of bankruptcy, all combined to suggest that any changes would be too little and too late...

...But their ill-planned attempt in March 1990 to bring down Shamir's government and replace it with one under the leadership of Peres had ended in a fiasco, both humiliating and extremely unpopular among their supporters—hence, their penitent pledges of loyalty to Shamir before this year's election...

...It is true that it won by the narrowest of margins...

...The model to follow would have been that of the government set up in 1988, and not the one of 1984, meaning that there would be no rotation and that Rabin alone would serve as prime minister...

...all suggest that he's determined to act as a man totally different from the Yitzhak Rabin who found himself catapulted into the premiership in 1974...

...Given the photo finish result, it is hardly surprising that immediately after the elections there was some renewed talk of another National Unity government to be formed with Labor and Likud as the senior, or even the sole, partners...

...In order to defeat the incumbent, Shimon Peres, in the first round, Rabin needed to come first out of the four candidates with at least forty percent of the vote...

...Rabin was acting on orders...

...It was Shas which gave Rabin the votes he needed to put him over the top, enabling him to present his government to the country with all possible speed on July 12...

...At 10 PM, Israel's leading television announcer, Haim Yavin, appeared on the screen and, after a minute or two of preliminaries transparently intended to stretch the nerves of his captive audience, the nation at large, to the breaking point, declared simply, "Yes, there's been an earthquake...

...All this meant that he had to find extra coalition partners from within the enemy camp, the bloc of parties that had been grouped around the Likud...

...Are we witnessing a turning point in Israel's history...

...All this hinted at an election too close to call, with a new Likud, or a renewed National Unity, government as distinct possibilities...

...The shift of an infinitesimal number of votes would have resulted in a dead heat between the two blocs...

...This may have been a popular stance among the rank-and-file haredi voters, but it did not go down well with many of the political leaders, for whom wheeling and dealing is a way of life...

...Or is it to battle Labor for the middle ground, as David Levy and Moshe Arens suggest...

...On the face of it, this was surprising...

...And what of the Syrians...

...It is the accepted wisdom at the moment that the party leadership will pass to the younger generation, with Benjamin ("Bibi") Netanyahu as the clear favorite...

...He eventually retracted his resignation but the declarations he had made in the interval, accusing the party leadership of discriminating against Jews of North African origin, must have done the Likud immense harm...

...But one of the two ultraOrthodox parties, Shas, had been set up specifically to represent a North African constituency...

...Labor could well continue to benefit for a few years from the wild disarray in the Likud...

...The massive publicity given to her findings represented yet another devastating blow to the Likud just two months before the elections...

...Certainly he gives every sign of being a man in a hurry...

...What we saw was, in Israeli terms, a stunning landslide: Labor, 47 seats...

...The determination of Shamir to accelerate settlement in the occupied territories, even if it meant forgoing the loans, was in all probability crucial in alienating voters in both categories...

...it ended up with only 32 in this...

...It remains to be seen how much Rabin has really changed...

...Organized American Jewry, which once counted such figures as Judah Magnes, Louis Brandeis, and Nahum Goldmann among its leaders, has apparently opted for making loyalty (however blind) and unity (however artificial) its highest values...

...It is enough to consider for a moment what would have happened if Bush and Baker had given in...

...And it is true that there was little overt debate about the loan guarantees during the campaign...

...Fortunately, there were Jewish commentators who had the courage to point out the obvious—that a vote for the guarantees was a vote for Shamir—and Arthur Hertzberg, Anthony Lewis, Michael Walzer, Michael Lerner and Henry Siegman certainly earned their place of honor in this saga...

...Although nobody expected Rabin to opt for so narrow a coalition, his mere ability to toy with it as a theoretical possibility would have provided him with a parliamentary base stronger than that held by any prime minister since Golda Meir...

...Rabin had been prime minister in the period leading up to Labor's historic defeat by Menachem Begin in 1977 (resigning only a few weeks before because of a scandal...

...In November 1991, the party held a well-publicized conference in which a threatened walkout by the group of (relatively) young doves led by Haim Ramon was avoided...

...If the guarantees had been granted, there would be no Labor-led government today and Shamir would, in all probability, be prime minister...

...Now Rabin has the opportunity to turn the tables...

...On February 20, a primary election open to the rank and file (some one hundred thousand members voted) was held to choose the party leader...

...But the issue of the guarantees was always there just below the surface...

...In these elections, the overt excitement was gone, but so was the anger...

...For years, the general secretary of the party, Micha Harish, an unobtrusive man, anything but charismatic, had been quietly preparing something of an internal revolution in the structure of the party...

...a series of intense debates were staged...

...Of course, the true surprise is not that Labor won by the skin of its teeth, but that it won at all...

...With the results announced, the preeminent leader of the haredi camp, Rabbi Shach, insisted that the ultra-Orthodox Knesset members should keep their word and rebuff the overtures coming thick and fast from Labor...

...Both had pledged their support to the Likud FALL • 1992 • 437 during the campaign...

...The fact that Peres nonetheless almost won should probably be seen as an indication of how little chance the party was reckoned to have had even by its own faithful (as well as of the deep distrust felt by many for Rabin after his conduct as Minister of Defense during the intifada...

...It had 41 seats in the last Knesset...

...The ideological issue is combined with the fight for the succession...

...But even if that proves to be the case, it should not blind us to the fact that this was the narrowest of victories...

...Until the late 1970s, Israel was a country which luxuriated in heated but civilized debate at every level of society...

...In the end, thanks to Kissinger's endless shuttle diplomacy, disengagement agreements were achieved with Egypt and Syria, though Rabin rejected the suggestion of the Secretary of State to start a similar process with Jordan, a truly fateful act of political cowardice which hastened or even caused Hussein's abdication of responsibility for the West Bank to the PLO...

...It became the accepted wisdom that Labor would have to wait until 1996 for a chance to return to power...

...Few (the supporters of the Lubavitcher Rebbe apart) expect miraculous changes...

...Can he now, as a seventy-year-old man, finally refute the theory that native-born Israelis make excellent soldiers but blinkered politicians...

...Shach's insult, the catastrophic decline in the electoral strength of his closest disciples, and Shas's relative success, gave Shas —and its spiritual leader, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef (the retired Sephardic Chief Rabbi)—the courage to strike out on its own, something which in the final resort it had been unable to do in 1990...

...Shamir, in opposition to Sharon, decided in the end not to run the Likud campaign against the White House...

...Following the elections, many articles appeared in the Israeli press noting the apparent poetic justice in the recent events...

...It is not unusual these days to hear wholly secular Israelis, not in the habit of invoking the deity, forced to fall back on the traditional concept of the miracle when talking of what happened...

...As a final flourish, the primary system was also employed again for the first time on April 1 to select the list of party candidates for the Knesset election...

...To cap it all, on April 13, the formidable State Comptroller, Miriam Ben Porat, published an unprecedentedly sharp report on malpractice in government, particularly in Sharon's Housing Ministry...

...In Israel, because the soldiers' votes are counted separately, there is always a delay of a few days before the final election votes are announced...

...Shamir was clearly working to turn Israel from a democratic and largely mono-national, into an apartheid-type, binational state...

...and a dramatic show of unity put on at the end to round it all out...

...Those were dramatic events indeed, but the man in charge then was David Ben Gurion...

...If that turns out to be the case, he will prove a formidable opponent in the next election...

...The slightest tilt the other way would thus have ensured almost certain defeat in June—given the profound antipathy for Peres among significant sections of the electorate, especially those of North African origin...