Elections have grown increasingly contentious in countries across the globe. This makes sense; governments have become immensely powerful in the face of growing challenges, governments control a much greater share of the economy, and the benefits of dispensing government largesse are increasing exponentially. More recently, thanks to the “innovations” of James Carville and his ilk, campaigns have become ever more bitter and negative. Instead of debating serious issues, campaigns are now filled with ad hominem attacks and mudslinging.
Nowhere is this more true than in Israel. Israel, after all, faces existential threats that no other nation faces, real threats to its very legitimacy and existence. Government decisions can determine matters of life and death. People are therefore passionately concerned about politics — it literally affects their survival.
Moreover, as a result of more than fifty years of purist socialist ideology, which caused Israeli politics to totally dominate the economy, a very destructive nexus was created between politicians and the tycoons who own all of the large price gouging monopolies, along with most of the media. Lack of competition and efficiency resulted in low salaries and high prices. As a result, most Israelis live barely above the poverty line, and hundreds of thousands of families cannot make ends meet without government assistance. Nearly a million Israelis have emigrated in the last three decades because of the lack of economic opportunity.
All of which is to say, it’s natural that when so much is at stake in the elections, anxieties and passions flourish and become fertile ground for negative campaigning.
Enter Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu, Israel’s famous — or infamous — prime minister. Because he is the only serious threat to the corrupt system that was fashioned by politicians and tycoons, and supported by a partisan media, which impoverishes Israel and threatens its viability, Netanyahu has become the lightening rod of the elections. Like other strong, smart, articulate leaders, Bibi, who straddles the deep chasm in Israel in matters of security and economics, has become the object of a very nasty negative campaign by the Left, which is managed by some of the experts who ran President Obama’s campaigns. The anti-Bibi forces are financed with tens of millions of dollars from mysterious American donors and, according to just released reports, even by the U.S. State Department. Netanyahu is accused by his detractors of sabotaging the putative peace process, and threatening Israel’s survival.
The Left in Israel consists of only 17% of the electorate, to the Right’s 32%. But since Israel’s socialist days, when its elites gained power, the Left has dominated public and economic life in Israel. Most of the members of the left leaning university-educated political, military, business, media, PR, academic, and cultural elites are avid supporters of a statist system. Together, they operate the highly centralized, utterly inefficient, and horrifically corrupt economic system that threatens Israel’s survival. They also greatly benefit from it, creating the highest wage gap in the Western world.
Though they fear Netanyahu because of the threat he poses to their system, they also hate him because they are ideologically convinced that he has ruined the chance for peace and thereby threatens Israel’s survival. Of course, they fail to explain how peace can come by upgrading the dysfunctional and criminal Palestinian Authority to the status of a state, or how supporting the establishment of another criminal state that routinely oppresses its citizens and deprives them of their most basic rights can bring about any good or result in peace. They exploit the high anxieties over security in Israel as a battering ram to advance their sectarian interests.
Netanyahu, an outsider, is a politician that they can’t stand because he is not one of the boys. He was the first politician to take on the elites. He instituted several key economic reforms that curbed -– at least in part — their cartelistic powers. He now threatens to further erode their control of the economy.
The Israeli Left is committed to only expanding the welfare state that has deepened poverty in Israel and arrested economic growth since its establishment. With its exceptional human capital and the $300 billion invested from abroad, Israel should by now have become one of the wealthiest countries in the world. Massive government interference in the economy, strangling bureaucracies and the domination of labor markets by the corrupt monopolistic Labor Federation has cut the productivity of Israeli workers to about two thirds that of Americans. Labor control of the economy will reverse Israel economic growth with dire social and political results.
The results of the elections may also have grave international consequences. Should the left wing camp that seeks “peace in our time” win, it will eagerly cooperate with President Obama’s obsessive desire to build a Palestinian state – which would be taken over by Hamas within weeks. Hamas could launch a missile assault against Israel, as it did from Gaza, except that this time it will be against Israel’s center, where most of its population and strategic assets are located. There could be thousand of casualties and great ruin. Even a peace-seeking leftist government would have to conquer the West Bank. Battles in densely populated areas could result in tens of thousand of casualties, including both Jews and Arabs. The Arab population of the West Bank would flee to Jordan, topple the king, and extend the Hamas state to the east Jordan under Iranian sponsorship, as in Gaza. The conflagration could likely spread beyond the West Bank. Needless to say, this would be a catastrophic outcome.
In past elections, the Left managed to topple Netanyahu and replace him with Ehud Barak via dirty campaigns involving illegal means. They hope to do it again with even worse practices. In 1997, the respected left wing pundit Ari Shavit wrote in Ha’aretz, no friend of Netanyahu (it’s the Israeli equivalent of the New York Times) about the media’s campaign against Netanyahu: “What is happening to us, what is this lynch atmosphere? Why do our editorial writers behave like judges in a kangaroo court whose verdict is predictable. Why is the campaign against Netanyahu so lawless, so acerbic so blood thirsty, and good people become hate mongerers.”
Netanyahu, who has to face the heaviest workload of any national leader, having to deal daily with Iran, Obama, the Palestinians, Middle East “unrest,” and his complicated coalition politics, poses nevertheless a great danger to the dysfunctional Israeli system. Those who belong to it have been fighting him for their survival, in a dirty brutal campaign.
Whoever wins the Israeli elections, Israeli democracy has already lost. Badly.
