Jerusalem
THERE’S A SONG that’s sung around the bonfire at every Jewish summer camp called “Hinei Ma Tov.” Its lyrics are taken from Psalm 133: “Behold how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell in unity.”
Maybe Jews love the song so much because they know so little unity in reality. Anti-Semites think Jews form a monolithic conspiracy. As if. In the Israeli elections last week, voters had to choose from 16 parties. In a country with 4.7 million eligible voters, those parties slice the ideological and demographic pie astonishingly thin. There are several parties for haredim, the ultra-religious Jews known colloquially in English as “black hats.” There are Arab Israeli parties. Two parties rose out of the emigration from the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. The once-cohesive Israeli Left has fractured into four parties.
While you could call the political debate refreshingly combative and freewheeling, that’s just a polite way of saying slanderous. One member of a haredi party declared that Tommy Lapid, the head of the aggressively secular party Shinui, “wants to turn us all into ash.” This would be repulsively rough if it were said about anybody; considering that Lapid is a Holocaust survivor, it was beyond imagining. But the rhetorical broadsides exchanged between Lapid and the haredim are so frequent that the story was considered nothing special here.
Shinui’s strong showing was one of the many surprises of this surprising election. Its representation in the Knesset soared from 6 to 15 seats. American conservatives, who have fought anti-religious bigotry on the part of the press and the elites for decades, might be inclined to think Shinui is an Israeli version of People for the American Way. But in truth, the religious parties Shinui opposes play a role in Israeli politics more akin to Al Sharpton than Ralph Reed. From the earliest days of Israel, they have demanded and received preferential treatment for their constituents from the government, including exemption from military service.
The black-nationalist analogy becomes even clearer in the case of the Shas party, whose appeal is explicitly tied both to religious and ethnic resentment. Its 1996 campaign slogan was “Shas: It’s not a platform, it’s an identity.” The identity is North African. Shas voters tend to be darker-skinned Jews of North African descent who feel that they are treated like second-class citizens by lighter-skinned Jews of European descent. Thus, the Sharpton-like statement of Shas campaign manager Itzik Sudri in the Jerusalem Post before the election: “Only a strong and powerful Shas can curb the blatant white aggression!”
Shas is under the control of Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, who was once the chief Sephardic rabbi of Israel. Rav Ovadia, as he’s known, is now nothing more or less than the Louis Farrakhan of Israel–only he casts the Ashkenazi Jews of European origin in the role of “white devil.” Rav Ovadia said the victims of the Holocaust were recipients of God’s justice. He compared leftist politician Yossi Sarid to Haman, the Hitler-like figure in the Book of Esther.
Opponents like these make Shinui’s Lapid sound almost like an Israeli Ward Connerly. Only he’s denouncing religious instead of race preferences: “We are not against . . . religious Jews. We are against the exploitation of religion for money and power. . . . We want equal rights for equal duties for all citizens.”
Last week, Shinui rose and Shas fell. Shas lost 6 of its 17 seats, and would have lost more were it not for a crass and complicated vote-buying scandal that beset Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s Likud party. Sharon’s single failure in this election was his inability to bring more Shas voters to his side.
Otherwise, the size of Sharon’s victory was astounding to his supporters and his foes alike. Sharon and Likud got twice the votes of its nearest competitor. Likud received 400,000 more votes than it had in parliamentary elections four years ago, and doubled the number of seats it will hold in the Knesset from 19 to 38. Five years ago, it would have seemed absurd to think that the most controversial man in Israel’s political history could ever achieve a landslide of this magnitude. Outside of Israel, the reality still seems inconceivable.
Forget Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong Il: If you had to name the most reviled leader in the world today, the winner hands-down would be Ariel Sharon. The views of the European intelligentsia are entirely congruent with those of the most radical elements in the Muslim world on the subject of Israel’s prime minister. Sharon is a Nazi, a genocidal maniac, a war criminal of limitless culpability. He wishes to subjugate Palestinians, to steal their land, to humiliate them and, for good measure, eliminate them from the face of the earth.
Sharon has it within his power to create a government that would only heighten Europe’s lurid fantasies about him. Overall, the election results have given him the option of forming a new parliamentary majority with parties of the Right alone. Likud and the Right Bloc together would have an eight-seat advantage, a very comfortable margin by Israeli standards.
Such a government would unite Sharon’s Likud with everybody in Israel who opposes the creation of a Palestinian state. Some on the Israeli right believe Israel’s sovereignty over the West Bank and Gaza is ordained by God. Others believe a “Greater Israel” is the logical fulfillment of the Zionist dream–that it’s the manifest destiny of the Jewish people to establish dominion over all the land west of the Jordan River. Still others believe the annexation of the territories taken in the Six Day War of 1967 is necessary because there will never be a time when an Israeli deal with Arab leaders will lead to anything but more Jewish bloodshed.
The demonic Sharon of European and Muslim fantasy would go for such an ingathering of the right in a heartbeat. After all, his enemies believe Sharon’s goal in life is the destruction of Palestinian aspirations. How better to achieve this aim than by making common cause with his own natural allies in Israel?
There’s one problem with this portrait of Sharon: Aside from its libelous and anti-Semitic overtones, it gets the man entirely wrong. Sharon already had his chance to form such a government last fall when the Labor party pulled out of his unity government (in a move so stupid it deserves to be classed with the Paul Wellstone funeral in the annals of self-inflicted political wounds).
Sharon could simply have added a right-wing party called National Union to the mix to keep his government going a few months ago. He chose new elections instead, for two reasons. First, he believed he could strengthen Likud’s position. Second, he believed that the electoral results would serve as a referendum on his conduct as prime minister–and on his startling acknowledgment last year that a Palestinian state was inevitable and was something he could live with.
For saying this, Sharon was immediately attacked within Likud by his chief rival, former prime minister Bibi Netanyahu. Sharon found himself in a surprisingly difficult battle to maintain his chairmanship of the party. The easiest way for him to fight off Bibi would have been to go back on his words about a Palestinian state. Instead, he repeated them on several occasions.
In other words, Sharon first appeared before his own party and then before the Israeli people in successive campaigns as a believer in Palestinian statehood. He is not an unconditional supporter of the idea. He will not move on it until Yasser Arafat is deposed and until there are democratic reforms in the Palestinian Authority. He will not permit the new state to have a military. He will not cede the entire West Bank to the Palestinians. And he will not give up an inch of Jerusalem.
This is what you might call the centrist position on statehood. The leftist position is statehood almost without conditions. The rightist position is no statehood at all. Sharon gambled that his views on this matter reflected Israeli public opinion more profoundly than any other view, and he gambled correctly.
The government he wants to form is a government of the center. He wants Shinui especially, because Shinui’s views on the Palestinians dovetail most closely with his. But Shinui and Likud together have only 52 seats. Add in the reformist Yisrael b’Aliya party run by Natan Sharansky, and you have 54 seats. Sharon needs another 7 at minimum to form a government.
The problem is that it will be almost impossible to run a government with both Shinui and Shas in it, for obvious reasons. Should they annoy each other too greatly, one will pull out and the government will fall. The other religious parties pose a similar coalition problem.
Thus, Sharon’s ambitions are leading him to court not the rejectionist Right, but the dovish Left. He is doing everything he can to compel the Labor party, which is a shell of its former self at a mere 19 seats, to join with him again in a unity government. Most of the leaders of Labor don’t want to join his government. Their hatred of Sharon borders on the pathological–perhaps because they understand that he may be on the verge of usurping their signature issue and entering the history books as the Israeli prime minister who brought about the creation of a Palestinian state.
Israel is still a nation at war, and may soon face its greatest threat in decades. War in Iraq could embolden Yasser Arafat and others to unleash a terror barrage on Israel (not to mention Saddam and his Scuds). The danger will create emergency conditions under which all major parties will be invited to join the government as a display of unity. No matter their feelings about Sharon, they will have to accept.
Sharon will then have cause to sing about how happy and pleasant it is for brethren to join in unity. Nobody else will be singing “Hinei Ma Tov” along with him, but that’s Israel for you.
John Podhoretz is a columnist for the New York Post and a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard.
