Israel's likely move to the right

The last opinion polls in Israel published on Friday indicate that Benjamin Netanyahu, the leader of the right-wing party Likud and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, the leader of the centrist party Kadima, are in a very tight race.

But regardless of who wins in today's election, one thing is clear - the Right bloc is leading the Left bloc by a strong margin of 65 to 55 seats.

Netanyahu said that he would form a coalition without Kadima. But he wants to include Labour, the rising Lieberman's right-wing party Yisrael Beiteinu and the Sephardic religious party Shas, which endorsed Netanyahu.

The growing popularity of the Right-wing bloc with Israeli voters may turn out to be at the expense of Labour.

Many Israeli voters feel that the Labour party, which dominated Israeli politics for the first 30 years or so since the establishment of Israel, has had its chance but managed to achieve neither peace nor security. The brief surge in Labour leader Ehud Barak's popularity as Defence Minister during the assault on Gaza disappeared when Israeli voters realised that the Gaza war did not eliminate Hamas nor silenced its rocket launching.

The ability of Hamas to resist the massive Israeli assault and the strong opposition of the Arab Israeli parties to the war, were used by demagogues on the right to argue that both the Palestinians and the Israeli Arabs could only be silenced with tougher measures.

None is more strident in his anti-Palestinian and anti-Arab attack than Avigdor Leiberman, the leader of the extreme right wing party Yisrael Beiteinu whose popular support has been growing.

When in 2006 he was appointed minister of strategic threats, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, in its October 25, 2006 issue, editorialised: "The choice of the most unrestrained and irresponsible man around for this job constitutes a strategic threat in its own right."

He supports the establishment of a Palestinian state not because he supports Palestinian rights to independence but because he wants a pure Jewish state by getting rid of Arab-Israeli inhabited areas of Israel in exchange for Palestinian territories colonised by Israelis.

Lieberman even called for the disqualification of two Arab Israeli parties from standing in the election, accused them of disloyalty to Israel, and threatened their representatives in the Knesset in the following terms. "We'll deal with you like we dealt with Hamas."

It would be superfluous to say that the election of Netanyahu would be a serious blow to the peace process because the peace process never really took off the ground since its beginning in 1993 with the Oslo agreement. Since the Oslo Accords, Palestinians have lost more of their land to Israeli colonies, are more impoverished, continue to be occupied, and see the prospect of independence gradually slipping away.

Netanyahu, who was prime minister of Israel from 1996 to 1999, played a crucial role in sabotaging Oslo and obstructing an agreement with the Palestinians.

Netanyahu's platform this time is as dogmatic and aggressive as ever. He is against the establishment of a Palestinian state and he is prepared only to offer the Palestinians economic peace but keep them otherwise subjugated. He is committed to continuing the confiscation of Palestinian land for the so-called natural growth of Israeli colonies. He promised regime change in Gaza by toppling Hamas, and vowed not to return the Golan Heights to Syria.

The popularity of the right and extreme right and their belligerent talk led Kadima's Livni and Labour's Barak to try to outdo Netanyahu in tough talk and in hostile actions. Thus, Livni, after a meeting with her party's security forum, said the forum had set the overthrowing of Hamas "as a central goal for the long term."

One week before the election, Barak approved the establishment of a new colony in the West Bank - a decision which led the Israeli paper Haaretz, in its February 4 issue, to point out that the "establishment of the new community violates the conditions of the road map, as well as Ariel Sharon's commitments to president George W Bush in 2003."

A Livni-led coalition government will have to include Lieberman, and other right-wing parties since the Arab-Israeli parties are not likely to join a coalition with Lieberman in it. Moreover Lieberman has not said which party he would support, and Netanyahu is ready to offer Lieberman more than whatever Livni offers him.

Ultimately, the key to a settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, resides in Washington. And there are already signs that the Obama administration intends to chart a more independent course than the Israeli-inspired policies of the Bush administration (Israeli Prime Minister Olmert recently bragged about how he told Bush how to vote at the UN).

Theses signs include Obama's statement that he intended to pursue a settlement of the conflict "actively and aggressively" - a dramatic departure from the approach adopted by Bush who waited until the last year of his presidency to call the Annapolis conference. And even then, he proceeded to support the Israeli side.

Then there is Obama's choice of Middle East envoy, George Mitchell, who headed an international fact-finding committee that looked into the causes of the second intifada. The 2001 Mitchell Report established a clear link between colonies and acts of Palestinian violence. Mitchell rejected both and called for a total freeze on colonist activities and the lifting of Israeli siege of the Palestinian people.

Finally the tone of the new administration was also set by a recent statement made by the new US ambassador to the UN Suzan Rice. In a close session of the UN Security Council she spoke of "the tragic suffering of Palestinian civilians" - a language of compassion that was conspicuously absent from the Bush approach to the Palestine conflict.

Adel Safty's new book, Might Over Right: How the Zionists Took Over Palestine , is endorsed by Noam Chomsky, and published by Garnet, England, 2009.