Election 1988: Did Israel Move to the Right?
ELAZAR, DANIEL J.
Election 1988: Did Israel Move to the Right? Is Israel moving to the right, religiously and politically? The general impression, based on the election results, is yes on both counts. A closer...
...For the moment, it has succeeded...
...In short, the ultra-Orthodox camp is now very well organized and can turn out its voters like an old-fashioned party machine...
...Shas (the Sephardic Torah Guardians, the first breakaway from Agudat Israel four years ago and still its principal rival) also did well...
...The two centrist parties, Labor and Likud, are still neck and neck...
...No secular political party (not even the vaunted Mapai machine that still exists at the core of the Labor party) can match the efforts of the Lubavitchers and Shas...
...In the new Knesset they will be represented by 11 percent of the Knesset members...
...In 1988, there were three ultra-Orthodox parties (Shas, Agudat Israel and Degel haTorah), and they won a total of 13 seats...
...This may not be particularly comforting to those who do not believe that the answers to Israel's problems lie in religious fundamentalism of the ultra-Orthodox variety...
...Zionism has built a small but powerful state, saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of Jews, but, as such movements will, it has become the victim of its own success...
...Their outreach efforts during the campaign were of the same intensity and quality as their day-to-day religious outreach...
...Whether the country has moved to the right politically can be disposed of rather quickly...
...Moreover, both Shas and the Lubavitch movement have in the course of their outreach activities touched the lives of many Jews who are not ultra-Orthodox...
...The ultra-Orthodox parties doubled their strength, from six to twelve seats...
...Daniel J. Elazar...
...And the political far right gained only one seat in the election, won by Moledet, former general Rechavam Ze'evi's party...
...In the end, if the majority of Israelis do not want the ultra-Orthodox solutions to the problems of human existence, they can be contained by the democratic process...
...Until 1984, most of the ultra-Orthodox saw themselves as outside the Israeli political system—the Jewish state was simply another foreign overlord of no concern to them except insofar as they sought protection and benefits from it...
...Today, in Israel as in the rest of the Jewish world, the strongest single source of motivating energy among the Jewish people is Orthodoxy, particularly in its more extreme forms...
...Incidentally, the political left failed to make any gains, either...
...Whether or not one agrees with their message, one has to be impressed with their ability to mobilize effort, energy and commitment, and to use the latest technologies in pursuit of their goal...
...It is a matter of state institutions, bureaucracies, run-of-the-mill political parties...
...In this way, they tapped a larger electoral market of so-called non-obsetvant Orthodox, people who believe that the ultra-Orthodox way is the right way, even though they themselves do not live their lives that way...
...In fact, there was only an increase of one seat in the entire rightist bloc...
...The two far-left ON MY MIND parties that attract most of the Arab voters (the Communist Front and the Progressive List for Peace) together added nothing to their combined total...
...But this does not really reflect a move to the religious right...
...Agudat Israel, despite a split which shquld have taken seats from it, went from two to five...
...Now, for the first time they are represented in the Knesset in proportion to their share of the population, even a bit more...
...In addition, Rabbi Shach's Degel haTorah party also won two seats...
...The only real gains were among the ultra-Orthodox parties...
...In 1984, it split into two...
...Shas went from four to six seats...
...Something else is also at work here: For much of this century, Zionism was the motivating vision that provided the energy to mobilize Jews...
...It, too, works at outreach and provides many personal benefits to its constituency, day in and day out—between elections...
...They have found ways to bring their message to Jews in the farthest corners of the world in the most dramatic manner...
...As late as 1981, there was .only one ultra-Orthodox party (Agudat Israel) in the Knesset...
...This ultra-Orthodox bloc now represents the balance of power in Israeli politics with a vengeance...
...The results showed at the polls...
...Up to now we have seen most of that energy confined to the building of an ultra-Orthodox world within Jewish, especially Israeli, society—an imperium en imperio, as it were...
...Today, Zionism has become routinized...
...Then they discovered that they, too, could be part of it and gain as a result...
...No wonder these efforts in the campaign were successful...
...A closer analysis, however, belies this general impression...
...The remarkable thing is that the political right gained only one seat, despite the intifada, despite two terrorist attacks on the eve of the election—one on a civilian bus on the outskirts of Jericho in which a mother and her three children were burned to death, and a second that led to injuries on election morning in an outlying area of Jerusalem itself—and despite the fears of those who want to hold onto the entire West Bank that they were going to be "sold out" by a peace process they reject...
...Now that community has begun to claim its share of political power in the Jewish state, applying the same energy as it has to its internal affairs...
...They seem to thrive on internecine conflict...
...The strength of the Zionist left also remained about the same: The Citizens' Rights Movement held onto the same five seats it had in the last Knesset, and Mapam won three seats, far less than the six seats it had when it was part of the Labor alignment...
...It was as if they had spent 40 years preparing for this electoral campaign...
...The polls had forecast that, had Meir Kahane's Kach party been allowed to participate in the elections, it would have won three seats instead of the one it held in the outgoing Knesset...
...The religious right represents between 8 and 10 percent of the population...
...Observers have long noted that, at least among the ultra-Orthodox, the more divisions, the more power...
...In a sense, they have accepted the Zionist view that Jews have to enter politics to shape their own destiny and have abandoned the political passivity of the exile...
...The two together increased the number of seats in the ultra-Orthodox wing from four to six...
...It merely reflects the fact that in this election, the religious right got out their vote, as they had never done before...
...When Rav Eliezer Shach, the grand rabbinical leader of the anti-Chassidic wing of the Agudat Israel party, left the party as a result of a dispute with the Lubavitcher Rebbe and formed his own Degel haTorah (Torah Banner) party, the Lubavitch movement took over the Agudat Israel campaign, massively intervening in Israeli electoral politics for the first time...
...Now that they have transferred this curious growth technique (which those who believe in free markets could easily explain) to the political arena, they are getting the same results...
...In a few short years it has acquired many of the same skills as the Lubavitch movement...
...But it is important to remember that the ultra-Orthodox rose in strength through one of the most democratic of all electoral processes, that the elections as a whole showed Israel to be a healthy if perplexed democracy, and that the future of Israeli politics will be decided by the people...
...The Lubavitch movement has one of the most technically impressive outreach efforts in Jewish life...
Vol. 14 • January 1989 • No. 1
