Thank you for the many letters of congratulations. They are so welcome! Below is my take on what happened. Sorry if I burden you with what my daughter calls ‘too much information’. Maybe it was just my need to share the good – and the bad – news.
First, The Rejoicing:
Netanyahu has been soundly trounced, losing 56% to 44% to Ehud Barak. Even more than savoring victory, we feel enormous relief that this corrupt, deceitful and hate-mongering politician is no longer prime minister of Israel. To quote Ya’akov, the baker near me, ‘I woke up this morning feeling that I had just been released from prison.’ That’s how many people felt.
Netanyahu had worked hard to win the hatred of so many in this country and even his own former allies, many of whom had deserted him for ‘centrist’ parties. He incited Moroccan Jews against European Jews, he whispered in the ear of a senior rabbinical leader that ‘the seculars [nonreligious Jews] aren’t really Jewish’, he told the market vendors that ‘the elites hate you’, he arranged the printing and distribution of a deliberate mistranslation of Barak’s autobiography, and he did everything in his power not to keep the peace agreements that he himself had signed, blaming others for it. On Election Day itself, Netanyahu defied Israeli law that prohibits electioneering on that day by granting live radio interviews…after being reprimanded by election officials and apologizing to them, he promptly did it again.
Hearing the results of the victory produced euphoria; the feeling of release spread like wildfire. In a spontaneous outburst that began late at night when the polling booths closed and the exit polls shows a landslide victory, tens of thousands of Tel-Aviv residents gathered at the plaza where Yitzhak Rabin had been assassinated over 2 years ago and sang, danced, kissed, wept with joy. ‘Peace, peace, peace!’ they chanted to every peace song they had ever come to believe in. It was not surprising that amid the sea of Israeli flags, the rainbow flags of the gay movement waved prominently, symbolizing hopes for an end to despised religious coercion in every area of life in Israel. It did not just feel like a victory of one politician over another. It felt as if the liberal, democratic, and peace-oriented citizens of Israel were extricating their country from three years of darkness and despair.
That was the best part of the elections.
And More Sobering Aspects
This election had three main axes, I would say:
1. A vote against the character of Netanyahu, discussed above.
2. A vote against the oppressive religious coercion in which the ultra-Orthodox parties have engaged with the collusion of all previous governments of Israel, not just Netanyahu. This theme was successfully played by the Meretz Party (just left of Labor) and the brand new Shinui party, which brought religious-legislation bashing to high art. But these efforts were more than offset, I’m sorry to say, by the third axis:
3. The growth of the ultra-Orthodox parties, particularly Shas, which increased its power by 70% in the Knesset and became the third largest party (17 seats), just a whisker behind Likud, which dropped 13 seats (and now stands at 19).
Clearly the biggest story of the elections was the transformation of the fundamentalist Shas party into a major political player. This party, supported primarily by lower income Moroccan Jews, was swept in on a tide of fury over the conviction of party leader Aryeh Deri on fraud and bribe taking at the height of the election campaign. ‘He’s innocent,’ declared the Shas campaign slogan, both vindicating their hero and casting aspersions on the court system. But voting for Shas was more than protest over an allegedly unjust conviction; it expressed rejection of the hegemony of Ashkenazi (European-Jewish) culture in Israel with its concomitant discrimination against and disdain for Mizrahi culture – that brought by Jews from Muslim countries.
Now add to Shas the other parties in support of religious legislation (United Torah Judaism and the National Religious Party), and you have a pro-theocracy bloc that has grown 17% (from 23 to 27 seats).
Speaking of blocs, the extreme right wing – those who refuse territorial compromise with Arabs – has maintained its power if you consider that the openly right wing parties (National Religious Party and United Nationalist Party) will be buttressed by the Russian-immigrant party led by fascist Avigdor Lieberman. And that’s not even counting members of the Likud and Shas who can be counted on to vote against compromise peace agreements.
In the center, we saw an overall shrinking of the major parties: Barak’s ‘One Israel’ party (Labor plus satellites) lost 7 seats, while Netanyahu’s Likud party lost 13. The newly invented Centrist Party picked up only 6 of those losses, the rest going to Shas and anti-Shas (Shinui).
Finally, the left: little change. Meretz held its own and Hadash lost a seat. But the message of these two parties about peace has hopefully permeated much of the new One Israel movement.
The stark question now remains: With whom will Barak form a coalition? He has already announced his desire for a ‘broad’ one. He does not want to repeat the Red-Green format of Germany. Barak is himself a ‘centrist’ and he wants as large an alliance as possible; for this he is clearly willing to sacrifice the purity of those on his left. He will surely bring in Sharansky’s immigrant party, which held its own, and the Centrists, led by Yitzhak Mordechai, whose leaving of the Likud turned a leak into a hemorrhage. Neither of these parties represents a yearning for a just peace with the Palestinians, just a desire to rid ourselves of the problem. Barak will also want to bring in either the Shas or Likud party, both of which have been less than peace-oriented. And we hope that Meretz will also be included, although they are jockeying to prevent a Shas presence, and they may be exclusive alternatives.
The upshot, in my opinion: We will see a ‘centrist’ government committed to as cheap a peace as it can get away with – with Palestine, Syria and Lebanon. We may see improvement on social issues, which everybody has been promising. And religious legislation will be a threat that continues to hover. Barak has already been reaching into the Bible for enriching his acceptance speeches. Let’s hope the Bible remains an inspiration and does not become a platform of action.
Everybody Did It
Finally, before allowing ourselves to sink into the minutiae of political bickering that clearly awaits us, let us take a moment to rejoice. Toppling Netanyahu has really been a release from prison. It was more than the result of partisan efforts. It was also the result of a widespread grassroots mobilization – from the ‘Women Vote Peace’ campaign of Bat Shalom to the thousands of volunteers who staffed polling booths, preventing the widespread fraud that had taken place last election day, to the thousands of Israelis who returned home to vote. Everyone played a crucial role.
There’s no one to thank. We were all doing it to save ourselves.