Barak's dilemmas
Walzer, Michael
IFIRMLY BELIEVE that even Israelis who voted for Benjamin Natanyahu were relieved by Ehud Barak's victory last May 17. It was as if the whole country had been in a state of anxiety and...
...in this year of victory, it dropped again to 26 (with Meretz, 36...
...there will be roadblocks and detours along the way...
...This is the peace process coalition...
...it may not be a feature only of Israeli politics...
...they have little interest, so it seems, in the general welfare...
...it may even have been set back...
...Many ultra-orthodox Jews will support the peace process, but are determined opponents of liberal constitutionalism...
...The decline of Israel's Labor Party is quite extraordinary...
...Barak's coalition starts with Labor but ends six parties later...
...The fruits of political victory these days are very hard to reap...
...First we have to make peace, leftist politicians and intellectuals have been saying for years, and then we will worry about growing inequality, or discrimination against Arab citizens, or women's rights, or religious coercion, or environmental degradation, or...the list is long and getting longer...
...The nature of the incompleteness is worth examining...
...A third coalition, harder to put together than either of the first two, would be necessary to push the social-democratic agenda of the Labor party...
...The general truth is that not all good causes attract the same people...
...When Rabin won the 1992 elections, Labor controlled 44 seats in the 120member Knesset (with its left ally Meretz, it controlled 56...
...I only want to suggest that as parties get weaker (in Israel and also in the West generally), the problem gets more and more difficult to cope with...
...The peace coalition that Barak has put together includes neoliberals and free marketeers (some of them inside the Labor Party) and probably can't do without them...
...The Party's commitments to reduce unemployment and open new educational opportunities to the poorest Israelis figured more significantly in the campaign than they are likely to figure in the campaign's aftermath...
...This is in large part, but not solely, the result of the new electoral law that makes it possible to vote separately for prime minister and for Knesset representatives...
...One could feel the difference on the streets, in shops and cafes, on the phone with friends and casual acquaintances...
...Barak's path will be as difficult for him to walk as it was for Rabin...
...The Arabs will also support the peace process, though only from outside the government, since the DISSENT /Fall 1999 25 religious parties won't sit with them inside...
...No doubt, Labor won some votes on these issues, but the votes it should have won, the traditional working class votes that once provided its political base, went elsewhere— to right-wing populist or ethnic-religious parties...
...pOLMCS ALWAYS has its priorities, and for the Israeli left peace has long had the special priority that revolution once had for the international left...
...Israel's new electoral system, and the identity politics that it fosters, has so radically weakened the main parties (Likud, the leading party of the right, dropped from 33 seats to 19 last May) that the difficulties are particularly vivid...
...But at least one imagined a strong Labor Party dealing with these different things, one after another, even if it would have to look for different allies in each case...
...The years of meanness and deception, of incitement and division, which began with Yitzhak Rabin's assassination in 1995, were finally over...
...it's the leading element only by a bare plurality, and hardly able to take a strong lead...
...And precisely because the goal is so important, the demands of Labor's partners will be extortionist, and some of them, at least, will be conceded...
...No doubt, this is a cornmon problem in political life...
...I imagine the treaties being signed sometime after Barak's promised fifteen months and sometime before the revolution...
...while many supporters of religious freedom and even of disestablishment are hawkish on territorial questions...
...Because of the decline of political parties, which brings with it the virtual disappearance of loyalty and discipline in democratic politics, winning an election doesn't mean that one can enact a program (assuming that one has a program...
...A constitutionalist coalition could readily include significant sections of the secular right, but it would have to exclude the religious parties, without which it would be very difficult to make peace...
...It isn't a bad coalition, as such things go in Israeli politics, but it had to be designed for a purpose that is considerably more limited than Labor's election program...
...Arab votes went mostly to three different Arab parties—all of which could be part of a possible social-democratic coalition...
...In the months since, it has become clear that the great victory was partial and incomplete...
...As a result, there are more parties in the Knesset than ever before...
...everything else...
...The particular truth is that Israel today needs a different coalition for every issue, and the success of any given coalition is sure to require concessions to each of the partners that will make the work of the next one, with a different set of partners, much more difficult...
...What this means is that the coalition that makes peace may also make the constitutional and distributive issues harder to deal with than they would be if they were dealt with now by a different coalition...
...Once upon a time, all the projects of the Labor Party would have been funded, so to speak, from its working-class base...
...And yet, and yet, as Israelis overwhelmingly know, the value of peace is even higher...
...MICHAEL WALZER is co-editor of Dissent...
...and it also includes sectional parties, like the Russians and the Orthodox, who support welfare and educational programs, but only for their own people...
...He was in Israel in the first half of 1999...
...So if Barak succeeds in reaching peace agreements with the Palestinians and the Syrians, leftist supporters of economic redistribution or religious disestablishment are likely to find that their cause has not been advanced...
...26 DISSENT / Fall 1999...
...It was as if the whole country had been in a state of anxiety and depression, and now its mood suddenly lifted...
...defeated in 1996, Labor's total dropped to 34...
...Given the partners, this is a high price to pay...
...now its actual base is middle class and provides, at best, only qualified support for the core socialdemocratic program...
...They would probably disagree among themselves on constitutional questions...
...After that, the citizens of Israel will find a way to deal with...
...It rests on the assumption —entirely right, I think—that peace is the first priority of Israeli politics...
...Now the party is only one element in the necessary coalitions...
...Had Barak chosen to put constitutional (religion/state) questions first, as some of his supporters wanted him to do, he would have needed a very different coalition...
...The end was symbolically enacted when, late on election night, Barak went to the Tel Aviv square where Rabin had been shot and told the thousands of (mostly) young people gathered there: "I will walk in his path...
...Israelis were able to divide their votes, choosing Barak, say, and then looking for sectional (ethnic, national, or religious) representation...
Vol. 46 • September 1999 • No. 4
