Don’t believe the hype! Unlike the Right, liberals and the establishment Left in Israel have always worn a mask that cleverly and deceptively cloaked their true political objectives, and, sadly, many believed them.
The current struggle for Israel’s opposition, led by the Labour Party is focused on maintaining a degree of relevance in a political atmosphere that has decisively shifted to the Right. This struggle has particularly accentuated since the March 2015 elections, when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud and its allies triumphed, and firmly so, against the Zionist Union Centre-Left bloc. Since then, Israel’s opposition has been undergoing a serious soul-searching to stave off further decline.
Thus when Isaac Herzog, leader of the Zionist Union, began making statements, starting last January, that Israel must divest from bilateral talks, shelf the two-state solution and adopt a strategy of unilateral action, he was not necessarily declaring an end of an era. He was simply trying to realign his party’s politics to accommodate the changing political mood in his country.
“There’s too much hatred and incitement,” for a two-state solution to work, Herzog told a conference organised by Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv. “I want to yearn for it, I want to move towards it and I am obligated to it, but I don’t see the possibility of doing it right now.”
Herzog’s supporters agreed, and in earlier in February Labour Party members voted to 'disengage from negotiations’, veering instead towards a new strategy predicated entirely on unilateral action, and motivated almost solely by ‘security’ interests. The change was explained by some as a reflection of the mood in Israel, where a Palestinian uprising has been gaining momentum since October 2015.
However, there is more to the change in the Labour Party attitude than that, as the Labour decision is, in fact, a reflection of their own political bankruptcy after their election defeat last year. Then, the Centre-Left had in fact merely adopted a spiritless version of the same neoliberal, pro-military occupation and settlement expansion policies, as did the Right.
Of course, as demonstrated by a scary coalition of right-wing nationalists, ultranationalists and religious zealots, the current Right in Israel deserves all the bad press it has garnered since its formation last May. But none of this should come as a shock, as the Right in Israel has never been anything but a coalition of demagogues that catered to the lowest common denominator in society. As unlikable as Netanyahu is, he is, in fact, a fair representation of the worst that Israel has to offer, which, over the years, has metamorphosed into a representation of mainstream thinking.
But Israel has not always been ruled by the right-wingers and the likes of current Justice Minister, Ayelet Shaked, for example, who has made a habit of calls for extermination and genocide of Palestinians, and who is a relative newcomer to Israel’s political tussle.
For decades, Israel was dominated by a single camp, a concoction of Labour and Left that has ruled Israel since it illegally and forcefully established itself on the ruins of Palestinian cities. It was not until the late 1970s that a manifestation of the Right began moving closer towards winning elections, and eventually dominating Israeli politics.
Before that, the Labour reigned supreme, and their legacy was nothing but a devastating expression of bloodletting, ethnic cleansing, military occupation and other heinous crimes.
Take any aspect of Israeli history that many, even in the Western hemisphere, now see as immoral and inhumane — for example, the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, the massacres of 1947-48, the racism against Palestinians who remain in today’s Israel after the Nakba, the illegal occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, the illegal annexation of East Jerusalem, the construction of the illegal colonies and the building of the Apartheid Wall. Much of these atrocities have the fingerprints of Labour and their allies.
It was the Mapai Party, which was later joined by other supposedly ‘progressive’ forces to form the Labour Party in the 1960s, that has been responsible for most of the bloodletting, ethnic cleansing and illegal practices that have pushed Palestinian retaliation to this degree of desperation.
For many years, much of the Western world’s understanding of Israel has been based on a cluster of myths, from the early fables of the Zionists making the desert bloom, to Palestine supposedly being a land without people for a people without land. This intricately constructed and propagated mythology evolved over time, as Israeli hasbara laboured to provide a perception of reality that was required to justify its wars, its military occupation, its constant violations of human rights and its many war crimes.
One aspect of the Western perception of Israel is that the ‘Jewish-state’, which is also argued as being a ‘democracy’, has been experiencing a long, drawn-out battle between right-wing ideologues, and liberal forces that have laboured to preserve Israel’s ‘democratic ideals’. Nothing could be further from the truth.
The Zionist Union was formed after the merger of two parties, the Labour and Hatnuah, which was established by Tzipi Livni — the main champion of the so-called Cast Lead war on Gaza in 2008-09. That union of December, 2014, still failed to deny Netanyahu his victory. The irony is that while Labour had then branded its message as that of social justice and economic equality, according to Haaretz, it had won the support of 28 of the country’s 33 wealthiest communities. The poor largely voted for the Right.
The Zionist Union offered little to differentiate itself from the Likud or the Right in general, aside from slogans, of course. They too wanted to keep the illegal colonies, and only advocated the removal of small colonies that could not be easily defended. However, Labour had then insisted on the bilateral approach to conflict resolution. That reference seemed to target Western countries, the United States in particular, which was keen on propagating the two-state illusion and peace process charade.
Thus, when Herzog decided to drop the only remaining leaf that distinguished his party from the Likud, he simply revealed the true face of Labour. Indeed, Labour governments in Israel, whether those that existed in the late 1940s and 50s, or those that ruled under the leaderships of Isaac Rabin, Shimon Peres and Ehud Barak, never truly showed any genuine and sincere sign that respecting international law, ending the Occupation and granting Palestinians a form of real sovereignty was ever on their agendas.
It would be interesting to dissect the actual reasons as to why Herzog has decided to drop that strategy from his party’s agenda — perhaps he knew that it is a lost cause anyway. Perhaps he knew that he could never expand his party’s appeal by rallying voters around an unworkable idea. Perhaps further, he believed that the tilt to the Right in his country is too overwhelming to fight back with strategies that were largely aimed at winning favour with the US.
Whatever it is, the Labour decision should not be seen as an end of an era, for neither the Labour Party, nor its leaders, or even past and present coalitions were ever truly interested in a two-state solution to begin with; after all, it was Labour that masterminded the military occupation of Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, and which were the first to encourage illegal colonies there. It was these belligerent actions, which are also championed by the Right, that have destroyed the chances of co-existence and a lasting peace.
