Ready For Tuesday's Israeli Election? No One Else Is

If you watched the clip above, you already know that most popular American support for Israel is based on neither government strategic considerations nor on Jewish loyalty but on sad, untreated evangelical mental illness based on Bronze age myths. Didn't watch it yet? Please do... because it will help you understand why Jared Kushner can't solve the Middle East problem, why Trump still has a third of Americans willing to support him regardless of anything and everything that makes him anathema to normal people, and why Israel is more of a mess than it's ever been since it was born in 1948.

On Saturday, spooked by Friday polls showing him losing the election Tuesday, Netanyahu, appealed to the most right-wing Israelis by vowing to annex the West Bank if he's reelected, something not even Jared Kushner backs. I guess that's the end of the official U.S. policy of supporting a two-state solution-- at least until Trump is expelled from the White House. Netanyahu told Channel 12 News yesterday that "A Palestinian state will endanger our existence and I withstood huge pressure over the past eight years, no prime minister has withstood such pressure. We must control our destiny." And under Trump-- who Netanyahu sounds more like every single day, that would pretty much mean our destiny as well.

Always look very closely at where Jared is collecting money from

On Friday, the L.A. Times reported that Benjamin Netanyahu's world may be crumbling. Even if his party wins the Israeli Knesset elections on Tuesday, his legal peril isn't going away. "The smooth-talking, American-educated prime minister," wrote Noga Tarnopolsky and Laura King, "faces a vote that is widely seen as a referendum on him. If the election keeps him in power, Netanyahu, 69, will hit a political milestone later this year, becoming Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, a distinction held until now by founding father David Ben Gurion. But with a criminal indictment on corruption charges hanging over his head, that historic marker might carry a very large asterisk."

He has long been willing to form alliances across the political spectrum to maintain power. That fluidity-- considered raw opportunism by some-- is once again at play in Tuesday’s elections, analysts say.

...Although Netanyahu’s rightist Likud party has long been the country’s dominant political force, its main rival-- the new centrist Blue and White party, spearheaded by former military chief Benny Gantz-- has also been polling strongly throughout the campaign.

The final preelection polls, released Friday, showed Blue and White with a slight lead over Likud, but also suggested that a bloc of right-wing parties would be better positioned than the centrists to form Israel’s next government.

Experts urged caution. “The polls are simply not right,” said Hebrew University’s Hazan. “The only thing we know is that in every Israeli election, we get a surprise.”

Camil Fuchs, the veteran pollster for the Haaretz newspaper, said this was the most difficult election to predict since 1996, when Netanyahu first came to power.

He served for three years, then returned to office in the spring of 2009 and has held the job ever since, surviving four elections.

Israeli politics are rarely a pretty sight, but this campaign has been distinctive for its divisive tone. In the final days before the vote, a Likud video highlighted a shaky interview performance by Gantz, sarcastically captioning wild-eyed shots of him as “completely stable.” That was reminiscent of an election-day video in 2015, when Netanyahu warned of Israeli Arab voters turning out “in droves” to support his rivals.

Gantz, in turn, has hammered Netanyahu as fatally tainted by the graft scandals for which he faces imminent indictment. The whiff of scandal has for years been a constant in Netanyahu’s public life, but only now is he facing what appears to be genuine legal peril.

...Israeli analysts believe that if granted a winning hand at the polls, Netanyahu will attempt to establish a new coalition with politically weak extremist parties who will help pass a law granting him immunity from prosecution as long as he remains prime minister.

In February, Netanyahu brokered a deal between three extreme right-wing parties that include candidates advocating Jewish supremacy. But if he tries to bring them into any new government, he could face a rebellion in the Likud ranks.

“I am afraid we’ll awaken Wednesday morning with Bibi in place, with a very, very, very, very right-wing government,” said Christoph Schmidt, a philosophy professor at Hebrew University.

Here's one; meet the Ron Paul of Israel:



Yesterday, writing for New York, Abraham Riesman, asked a question that is client for anyone growing up with Israel. I, for example, was born 71 years ago, just like Israel, when it was both socialist and idealistic. Whatever Happened To The Israel Left? "On April 9... Israeli citizens will swarm the polls for a pivotal national election that will determine the makeup of their Parliament and, as a result, who will be their prime minister. Meanwhile, 5 million–odd Palestinians who are directly or indirectly governed by Israeli military law will get no opportunity to select the people who make the ultimate decisions about their lives, deaths, status, and future. More than 5 million Jews dwell between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, forming a majority alongside a Palestinian minority within Israel’s U.N.-recognized borders-- but who are now also forming a growing and politically ascendant minority in the Palestinian-dense West Bank, which Israel occupies and allows (in some cases encourages) Jewish settling of, in defiance of international law. Jewish settlers of the West Bank can vote in Israeli elections, but Palestinians there cannot, nor can those of the blockaded Gaza Strip, another Palestinian territory Israel first captured during a 1967 war. The roughly 1.6 million Palestinians in the territory of Israel proper can vote, but live with well-documented legal inequality. In American politics, this state of affairs is inevitably discussed when the country comes up. As the recent fracas over Congresswoman Ilhan Omar’s criticisms of pro-Israel lobbying demonstrated, the policy agenda of the Israeli government is a specter that howls ever louder while it haunts the Jewish state’s superpower patron."

And yet, surreally enough, the Palestinian Question has been all but unuttured in the tiny nation’s election season. The race has been brutal, dirty, and largely focused on voters’ personal feelings about the Likud Party’s Benjamin Netanyahu, the allegedly corrupt prime minister who has been in power for the last decade. But neither he nor the political novice leading the charge against him, retired general Benny Gantz, is willing to even entertain following through on Israel’s occasional promise to permit the West Bank and Gaza to form an independent Palestinian state. Gantz is characterizing himself and his cobbled-together party, Blue and White, as ideologically centrist and thus slightly to the left of the hard-right Netanyahu coalition, which has increasingly pushed for West Bank settlements, ethnic division, and religious orthodoxy.

The two men are a nanometer away from one another in the polls, and while Netanyahu runs ads suggesting a Gantz victory would end Netanyahu’s ten-odd years of forcefully repressing Palestinian violence, Gantz boasts of how he bombed sections of Gaza “back to the Stone Age.” Leading Netanyahu allies openly speak of formally annexing parts of the West Bank, a proposal that once was beyond the pale in mainstream discourse. A viciously racist political party whose leaders have called for the expulsion of Palestinian citizens of Israel deemed disloyal has been offered provisional membership in a Netanyahu coalition. Meanwhile, “leftist” has become a potent slur applied even to centrists like Gantz and his party mate Yair Lapid, and the failures of past stabs at peace have led progressive candidates to shove their anti-occupation messages to the side.

...Today’s Israel is one that has largely embraced Donald Trump, a man whom American Jewry voted against at a rate of roughly 80 percent and who many of them believe is himself an anti-Semite. Horror about recent state violence against Gazans has spurred the growth in stature of stridently anti-occupation Jewish groups like IfNotNow, Jewish Voice for Peace, and the Jewish Solidarity Caucus. American universities-- which Jews are disproportionately likely to attend-- are hotbeds of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement that seeks to ensure Palestinian rights through international ostracization of Israel and its inhabitants. As this younger generation enters the spotlight, we stand at the verge of one of the greatest schisms in the millennia-long history of the Jewish people.

...What I found in the Israeli left was not a unified movement. Rather, it was a collection of individuals who are motivated less by optimism that things can change than by what you might call inertia or you might call moral compulsion. I was particularly fascinated by the Zionists among them, who see the way the global left is turning on them and bristle at being held responsible for the failings of the people in power against whom they rail. Above all else, those liberal Zionists are people who, however calm they may appear on the exterior, are panicked about what might happen were they to give up their progressivism or their patriotism. You can argue that they’re complicit, that Zionism is bankrupt, that they had their chance and blew it. But it’s hard to fight the feeling that far worse things lie ahead should they lose even one inch to their opponents on Israel’s reactionary right.

...“The Israeli left is nonexistent,” West Bank Palestinian author and activist Tareq Baconi tells me in a café during a torrential Ramallah downpour. “I cannot see what kind of reality could change that, or what kind of event would change that reality. There could be something that I don’t foresee, but unless something major happens, I don’t see how the Israeli political Establishment in the system can viably produce a Palestinian state or has any interest in producing a Palestinian state. What I think will happen is that we will have differences of how the occupation is managed.”

“I think the real game-changer is what happens abroad,” says Amjad Iraqi, a writer, activist, and Palestinian citizen of Israel, over cups of water on a hot day in the coastal, ethnically mixed Israeli city of Haifa. “At the moment, the only real resistance is coming from outside, the only resistance that the Israeli political leadership is really taking into account.”

To be sure, BDS promoters have seized the attention of the Israeli political Establishment and its backers in America. Indeed, the movement is perhaps their primary bête noire these days. Members of pro-BDS organizations have been barred from entering the Jewish state. The speeches at last month’s annual American Israel Public Affairs Committee conference were littered with BDS denunciations. Israel advocates regularly raise money in the name of combating BDS. An entire new wing of the Israeli government, the Ministry of Strategic Affairs, has devoted itself to attacking BDS efforts around the world. Even left-wing Israeli politicians decry BDS on the grounds that it delegitimizes Israel and undermines the belief that the country has a right to exist as Jewish state. But no matter: Most of the Palestinians I spoke to didn’t much care what Israeli progressives had to say, anyway.

...This is the basis of the increasingly repeated argument in American leftist discourse that Israeli progressives are too comfortable with the oppression of Palestinians and that, even worse, their progressivism is making that oppression palatable-- that Israeli lefties’ talk and small victories on matters of human rights allow the international community to sleep soundly without demanding the outright demolition of unjust sociopolitical structures. However, there is already a hard core of domestic Israeli radicals who don’t need reminding about the injustice and actually support making their home country a pariah. For them, they live in a nation gone wrong.

“Jewish supremacy is the only organizer or unifier of the Jewish society in Israel today,” says Orly Noy, an Iranian-Jewish writer, translator, and politician from the ostracized pro-Palestinian party Balad, over cigarettes outside a Jerusalem café. “That is the only thing. Nothing else. We are divided in every single parameter that you can think of except for this. I mean, 99.9 percent of the Jews in Israel deeply believe in the concept of Jewish supremacy. They won’t always define it in such a term. You believe inherently, without questioning it, that we should have extra national rights in this land. Of course, it is our”-- that is, she and her small cadre of allies-- “political obligation to continue speaking with the Jewish society in Israel. That’s the political and the moral thing to do. But I don’t have any hope that the change will come through the Jewish society itself.”

Noy balks on the question of whether or not she’d like to see a “two-state solution” (the creation of a separate Palestinian state in some combination of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem) or a “one-state solution” (a single, Palestinian-majority state comprised of all the territories that Israel now exists in or controls). However, she emphasizes that Israeli Jews are already a minority in the lands of their extended sovereignty and sees catastrophe on the horizon if that is not reckoned with. “I do want to see a Jewish national existence here that will be sustainable,” she tells me. “And we are so blinded by the power now that Jews don’t even … It’s such a hypothetical question that it doesn’t even exist. But it will be very relevant pretty soon. We need to start thinking about these questions.”

[The] bifurcated-- some might say oxymoronic-- desire to both defend Israel and instill it with progressive values alienates detractors on the left and the right. Liberal Zionism’s champions are people who, for the most part, are fully aware of how desperately hard it is to move the Israeli agenda in a leftward direction right now, especially on the Palestinian Question. “Occupation, for Israel, is …” begins Ran Cohen, founder of an activist collective called the Democratic Bloc, speaking in a sparse conference room in Tel Aviv. “For most Israelis, it’s boring. It’s boring! It’s old news. They’re not aware of what’s going on. They are tired of hearing about settlements. The attempt to connect the occupation with poverty, or with issues of economical issues and so on, succeeded in a very minor way, as I see it. We need to reinvent ourselves and the discourse.” Nevertheless, Cohen still dreams of a future where Jewishness and democracy go hand in hand: “The Jewish nation is not afraid of a long wait,” he says with a smile. “I don’t want to give up.”

Of course, the leftist counterargument here is that Cohen’s ability to wait is a luxury while, say, the nearly 2 million blockaded Gazans just a few miles south seethe in an open-air prison that is predicted to become unlivable by the end of next year. The nonstop moral crises mean gradualism loses a significant amount of its appeal in discussions of the region. Plus, there’s the question of what, exactly, liberal Zionism’s beloved two-state solution could even look like.

It would be tremendously difficult and politically costly to order a mass evacuation of any parts of the West Bank. What’s more, Israeli Jews understandably lose sleep over the idea of a Palestinian state that could arm itself against Israel. They see how Israel pulled its troops and settlements out of the interior of Gaza in 2005 and was eventually faced with a government there controlled by the militant Islamist party Hamas (though that story is much more complicated than it may seem), which has repeatedly fired rockets into Israel. They think such things could happen in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, too. Historically, even when Israeli governments have made overtures about allowing the creation of a Palestinian state, they usually come with enormous caveats like full demilitarization of that new state, territorial carve-ups that allow Jewish settlements to remain in seas of Palestinian territory, and a permanent Israeli military presence on the theoretical country’s border with Jordan. And yet, even that sort of “state-minus,” as Netanyahu has memorably called it, is too much for many of today’s Israeli voters to feel safe with.

On top of all that, there’s the fact that the Palestinians are divided between Hamas in Gaza and the late Arafat’s Fatah movement in the West Bank, meaning there’s no credibly unified Palestinian entity to do business with. With the expansion of the Israeli settlement project, we’ve entered a de facto and wholly unequal one-state reality for the time being. The status quo has made it increasingly standard among international lefties to declare the two-state solution dead. They are joined in this by right-wing expansionists. The debate among those two extremes is simply about whether the single state should be democratic or definitionally Jewish-- i.e. whether Palestinians there should be granted the vote and other political rights. A plurality of Israeli citizens still want a two-state solution, but polls show a majority of them grimly conceding that such a deal isn’t viable right now.

It is against this backdrop that we must ask: What on earth can Israel’s Zionist lefties accomplish? I posed this question to every one of them that I met and was struck by a subtle philosophical bifurcation that has bedeviled Zionism since at least the establishment of Israel: the difference between individual rights and national rights. The former are things like free movement, legal redress, and freedom from physical abuse; the latter include self-determination for identity populations and peace between said populations. Most of the left-leaning Zionist activists I spoke to were excited to talk about the ways they are pushing for individual rights, be they for people of Israel or those of the West Bank and Gaza. I spoke to human-rights lawyers and NGO workers who tout their accomplishments in saving and changing the lives of individuals and families. They think they can keep that up in the future.

Trouble is, you can make the argument that the pursuit of individual rights is merely a way to make the deprivation of national rights for Palestinians in the occupied territories tolerable enough that it can persist. This is where those accusations of making the system palatable come in. Even when the Zionist lefties I spoke to were polite, it was clear that they truly hate being lectured by outsiders about whether their work perpetuates occupation and repression. I sit in the Tel Aviv offices of the U.S.-based “pro-Israel, pro-peace” organization J Street and watch as a gathering of Israeli lefties from various allied organizations grows increasingly incensed over the stigma attached to their work by international leftists.

The last poll before voting begins

April 9 will not be a good day for the Jews and Palestinians between the river and the sea who want to see human rights flourish in the land they both call home. Perhaps Netanyahu will be unseated, perhaps not. Perhaps his unseating would be a good thing for the cause, perhaps not. I keep coming back to the words of a man hardly associated with the Middle East. As I wandered the streets of Tel Aviv on my final day there, I was surprised to find myself ruminating on Langston Hughes’s 1935 poem about the compromised society to which I’d be flying in a few hours, Let America Be America Again. Rolling Zionism around in my mind, I thought of Hughes’s lines about how America’s hypocritical slogans of liberty had been used in the service of destruction and oppression. And yet, he believed that those dreams, if reclaimed and actually lived up to, could still be put into the service of liberation:

O, let America be America again--
The land that never has been yet--
And yet must be-- the land where every man is free.

And:

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath--
America will be!

So, too, is it with liberal Zionism in the Holy Land. For many people, Israel never was Israel. The dream has, in so many ways, been a nightmare. But as a Jew, I believe I am obligated to yearn for the messianic age, when all the world will be redeemed. That will mean the creation of a Land of Israel that uplifts rather than burdens. I look at liberal Zionism and am inspired by the rhetoric of balancing Jewish self-protection with human rights and democratic liberties. At the very least, I see how hard they are pushing to be the last line of defense against greater bigotry and deprivation of rights. I can only hope that Israel’s liberal Zionism will somehow be repurposed, reimagined in a way that recognizes its predecessor’s audacious achievements while abandoning its deficiencies. That true solidarity with Palestinian liberation can be found among Israeli patriots. That thesis and antithesis will, in defiance of doubt, become synthesis. That the Zion that never has been yet is the Zion that will be.