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Israeli politics is always complex and a bit baroque, hard to follow for outsiders, often involving personalities and issues beyond those familiar to Western Middle East watchers, and with its own rather esoteric rules. But rarely has Israeli politics been more dramatic, chaotic, and perhaps in the fullest sense of the word, historic, than in the past month. Certainly not since the Likud Party displaced Labor for the first time, ending the 30-year dominance of the Labor Party in 1977, has such an earthquake shaken Israeli politics.
Ariel Sharon, a sitting Prime Minister, has quit the Likud Party he helped to co-found. Sitting Prime Ministers do not quit their own party. David Ben-Gurion would petulantly quit Labor after he had been Prime Minister, but not while in the job. Shimon Peres, Ben Gurion’s protégé and at 83 the grand old man of the Labor Party, a man who served as Prime Minister several times but never led the party to an electoral victory while at the helm, has been displaced by the head of the Histadrut Labor Federation, and soon after that announced his support for Sharon for Prime Minister and the end of his party “activity,” in effect quitting Labor. And, as noted, the new head of Labor is — a Labor activist. Labor may be in the process of actually becoming a labor party again.
Most of the Western attention has been paid to the well-known dramatis personae of Sharon and Peres, but Amir Peretz, the new head of Labor, is a new element in the mix. Moroccan-born, he is the second Mizrahi or Oriental Jew to head Labor (the short-tenured, Iraqi-born Binayamin Ben-Eliezer in 2000-01 was the first); should he ever become Prime Minister, he would be the first Mizrahi in that post. Peretz is profiled on Page Nine.
The rump of the Likud Party is up for grabs. Former Prime Minister Binyamin (Bibi) Netanyahu is probably the front-runner for the Likud leadership, but he has plenty of challengers within the party, and Likud is running fourth in one recent poll.
Into the midst of this changing landscape is Sharon’s new party, Kadima. For decades, the idea of a “centrist” party has been a common chimaera in Israeli politics: a party to the right of Labor but to the left of Likud, especially on peace issues, has been the dream of more than one generation of Israeli politicians. The late Yigal Yadin tried to create such a centrist party with his Democratic Movement for Change in the late 1970s, but it was a short-lived phenomenon (though one of its elements, Shinui, is once again a major player in Israeli Party politics, though some of its stalwarts are now defecting to Kadima); the “Center” Party that emerged in the late 1990s turned out to be a party that was “all chiefs and no Indians” and went nowhere due to the rivalries among its founding personalities. Now Sharon’s Kadima steps up as the new entry in the Center-party dream alignment. It has Sharon, perhaps the one man on the Israeli right who has the reputation and authority to make territorial compromise (“Only de Gaulle can give up Algeria; only Nixon can go to China”); it has several ex-Likud personalities, including Ehud Olmert; it has some prominent Laborites (notably Haim Ramon, and the verbal support, at least, of Shimon Peres himself); many Shinui figures are shifting to it as well.
Like many such new factions in Israeli history, however, Kadima has at the same time what is its current strength and perhaps its long-term weakness: it is Sharon’s Party. And most people expect this will be Sharon’s last campaign. If current polls hold up through March and he wins a new term, he will try to forge a peace in that time, before age and changing politics overtake him for good. It is hard to be confident that Kadima will survive Sharon. But for the elections now scheduled at the end of March, it will be the cneterpiece, though new leadership in Labor (and to come in Likud) will also play a role in making this a landmark Israeli election. This Dossier and this issue’s Profiles seek to sort out the players after the dust clears from the earthquake of the past month.
After several suggested names were bruited about, the new party came to be called “Kadima,” or “forward,” in the military sense of an advance, perhaps an appropriate name for a party led by one of Israel’s best-known, if most controversial, generals. Ariel Sharon is one of the most dominant figures in Israeli history. In the early decades he was a swashbuckling young officer, escaping wounded from Latrun in the 1948 war, fighting bravely in 1956, 1967 and 1973 (decisively in the latter), but remembered as well for controversial acts such as the reprisal raid against the West Bank town of Qibya in the early 1950s and for his support of the settler movement in his political incarnation from the 1970s on, as well as his controversial role in the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, when he was Defense Minister. Long seen as the hardest of hard-liners, the man who insisted for years that Palestine lies east of the Jordan, the bête noire of Arabs, he is a curious figure to be repositioning himself as the peace candidate.
Sharon as de Gaulle?
Curious, perhaps, but not necessarily out of character. No one has ever accused Sharon of a lack of self-esteem, or a lack of confidence in his own position. And for some time now there has been a school of thought in Israel and among some Israel-watchers (a school to which Shimon Peres seems to have converted in his declining years) which has seen Sharon as a de Gaulle figure. Charles de Gaulle, of course, was brought back to power in 1958 in the quasi-coup which created the Fifth French Republic, largely in order to save Algeria for France. He went to Algeria and told the pieds noirs, “Je vous ai compris,” “I have understood you.” Understand them he did, but not in the way they thought, and four years later, Algeria was an independent Arab country, an end resisted by attempted coups and assassination attempts, but one which de Gaulle, utterly secure in his own infalibility, steered to its conclusion.
Many Israelis, including many on the left, have felt that Israel needs a de Gaulle: only a man of the right, a man of unquestioned patriotism and military heroism, can make the hard decisions to give up territory for peace. Is Sharon going to prove to be that man? Some Israelis increasingly seem to think so, and the fact that the Likud Party, so identified with Sharon until recently, is now running a poor third in the polls, suggests that at least some of those may be from the right. And Shimon Peres, in what is almost certainly his curtain call in Israeli politics, has now in effect agreed.
But it is not so easy. De Gaulle had the advantage of dictating the constitution of the centralized Fifth Republic before he moved on Algeria. Sharon has a fractious political system that is more fragemented than usual, and in a sense his current move is a result of a petulant refusal to compromise with his own base. Sharon is a septuagenarian plagued by family financial scandal and political controversy. By contrast, de Gaulle had been the one man to resist Vichy, to renounce defeat in 1940, to come back as the self-imagined, but also to some extent the real, liberator of France. Sharon has been a key player on the Israeli scene for decades, but he has always been controversial, sometimes seen as an off-the-reservation maverick, sometimes as a man on a white horse, but never quite in the same league as de Gaulle had been in France at the end of World War II. (And, of course, the fact that de Gaulle quit politics in 1946 and waited for France to call on him again added to the sense that he was no man on a white horse, no dictator. Sharon’s enemies — once on the left, now in his old Likud — still harbor suspicions about his style. One of his former Likud colleagues recently compared him to Mussolini.)
The comparison has probably been stretched to the breaking point. Israel is not France (France is bigger, Israel has more political parties) and Sharon is not de Gaulle. But Sharon has been going through a very interesting evolution. He has just taken a gamble few sitting Prime Ministers in any country would dare to take, quitting his own party while in office. Yet the polls suggest he may win his gamble.
If de Gaulle is not the best analogy, Sharon has at any rate always been a maverick. Long considered probably the IDF’s most brilliant tactical operator, he was never that popular with his superiors, because he had a tendency to be insubordinate or downright unmanageable. Both characteristics are visible today: he is utterly convinced of the rightness of his current tactics, including the Gaza disengagement; he is therefore unwilling to take direction from his old Likud Party colleagues. If the party disagrees with its leader, he will take his voters somewhere else. And, unlike many of his erstwhile allies, Sharon is not and has never been either a religious or a romantic nationalist: his commitment to retaining the occupied territories was always based on his strategic views, and his commitment as a secular Zionist, not on some intangible and non-negotiable religious belief. He was determined to keep the territories in order to ensure the security of Israel; he will give them up if the strategic environment has changed to make that the more secure tactic.
Ironically, the two aging figures who have been moving together in the Israeli political spectrum in recent years and particularly in recent weeks have many characteristics in common. Shimon Peres, though about a decade older than Sharon, also is veteran of the whole of Israel’s independent history, and has been a major player throughout. Though Peres never actually served in the IDF, it was because he was the civilian architect of the Israeli defense establishment, the man who created, in the 1950s, the entire Israeli defense industrial establishment almost single-handed, forged the defense relationship with France (de Gaulle enters the story again), and, for all his dovish positions in recent decades, created Israel’s nuclear deterrent.
Neither Peres nor Sharon were great vote-getters for their parties. Peres was Prime Minister twice but each time he tried to win the post in his own right he led his party to defeat. Sharon’s elevation to Prime Minister had to wait until he was approaching his 70s. Both men have as many enemies as admirers, often within their own parties.
But appreciating the role Sharon is playing is only part of understanding the curious transformations currently going on in Israeli politics.
Labor Returns to its Roots
Peres’ defeat in Labor’s primaries surprised some (apparently including Peres), but may not be all that surprising: he has never led the party to victory, he is in his 80s, and the party has been adrift. Since the departure of Ehud Barak after the collapse of the second Camp David talks and Barak’s electoral defeat, the party has sought to find new leadership without much success. Neither Binyamin Ben-Eliezer nor Amram Mizna won much popular support, and ultimately to avoid electoral squabbles the party let its grand old man, Peres, head it again. But Labor needs a younger face for the next elections, and it was increasingly clear that those elections would likely be early. (Now we know they will be March 28.)
Amir Peretz (the reader must beware confusing Peretz with Peres) is in some ways something rather new for Labor: a Moroccan and a Mizrahi Jew, he appeals to Israel’s growing Mizrahi/Sephardic majority, which has been a source of Likud voters. Ben-Eliezer, an Iraqi, was also Mizrahi, but his closeness to Sharon hurt him with many in the party. Peretz comes, instead, from the party’s left: a dove on peace issues, but most of all a labor organizer, the head of the Histadrut Labor Federation. With Peretz, the Labor Party returns in a sense to its origins as a labor party.
His Moroccan origins and his union background will probably help Peretz with several constiutencies, but it will also lay him open to charges (sure to be brought by Sharon) that he would pursue pro-union policies which would break the budget and bankrupt the country. The country’s old socialist identity was gradually displaced after the rampant inflation of the 1980s, and while there are still many active kibbutzim in Israel, to many modern Israelis the country’s socialist origins are now a quaint artifact rather than a national identity.
The Future of Likud
Still, the polls at the moment make it look as if Peretz and Labor will run second to Kadima, Sharon’s new party, and well ahead of Likud. at presstime, a Haaretz-Dialog showed the Kadima Party of Sharon winning 37 seats (out of a total of 120), Labor winning 26, the religious party Shas winning 10, and Likud winning only 9, tying the National Religious Party for fourth place.
That would mean that Sharon would in effect have taken most of the Likud voters with him. But one should be cautious about placing too much confidence in such an early poll: not only are Sharon and Kadima the big story of the moment, but Likud has yet to choose its new leader now that its leader has bolted the party.
Binyamin Netanyahu is of course the best-known of the challengers, but he is far from the only one. Already announced are another Likud “rebel” leader against Sharon, Uzi Landau; outgoing Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz; outgoing Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom; and hardliners Moshe Feiglin and Yisrael Katz. Netanyahu probably has the strongest position: Shalom is trying to portray himself as a moderate centrist, but the moderate centrists in the party seem to be flocking behind Sharon. Feiglin and Katz are probably to be considered marginal candidates. Landau has a party base; Mofaz is well-known but untested in the political arena.
The early polls may, of course, be misleading. Israeli politics is rife with instances where a confident government has called new elections only to see itself defeated when the polls arrive. Sharon and Kadima have the novelty of newness and of Sharon’s rather daring defiance of his own party apparatus; they also have the momentum produced by various Likud, Labor, Shinui and other political figures flocking to their banner at the moment.
But Likud still has to choose a leader, and Labor’s Peretz could prove more polarizing within his own party than is immediately apparent.
Perhaps most importantly, Kadima does not eexactly have a clear-cut program at this point. Sharon says he is committed to resuming the peace process, but what does that mean? He withdrew unilaterally from Gaza and built the separation wall because he felt the Palestinian Authority did not provide a negotiating partner; he was seeking to define Israel’s borders unilaterally. It seems unlikely that that is what Shimon Peres means when he says he supports Sharon as the best way to achieve peace. Sharon, and Kadima, will presumably have to produce some sort of platform for peace, including a clear statement of his intentions toward the West Bank settlements (though the settlers are unlikely to vote for him, after the Gaza withdrawal). Will Sharon carry the de Gaulle analogy further and actually break with his own past on the West Bank settlements, as he did on Gaza? Or will he pursue what some have called “Gaza first and Gaza last” and say that Israel has given up enough?
Quite frankly, at this stage, the answers are not clear from the public record, and it is far from certain that they are even clear to Sharon himself.
Sharon and, particularly, his son Omri, a close political advisor, have been tarred with corruption charges which, while they have not yet been made to stick decisively, continue to haunt his political reputation. New revelations there could affect his electoral chance. So could the question of who will lead Likud. Will it be the polarizing Netanyahu? And, much as one would prefer not to mention it, the recent observance of the tenth anniversary of Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination is a reminder that, when feelings are running as high in some quarter sof Israeli society as they are at the moment among many settlers, unpredictable political violence is not completely unthinkable. Much can happen between here and March 28.
Also, though the split in Likud is profound and the shift of Labor back to a labor union-oriented base is also important, it is not certain these changes are permanent. This year could be, as 1977 was when Likud first won an election, a true watershed in Israel’s political history. But it could also be one of those moments when the long-predicted centrist party seems to be emerging and then vanishes, as happened in the 1970s and again a few years ago.
That raises another question. Israeli political history is littered with one-man parties, or larger parties which reflected the vision of one man. In fact, the new head of Labor, Amir Peretz, was until recently the head of his own small party, called Am Ahad. Ben-Gurion famously split with Labor to form Rafi (with Shimon Peres among others), but was ready to return to Labor when it was ready to return to him. Sharon is probably going to have, at most, one more term as Prime Minister before age overtakes him. Is Kadima going to be a real fixture in Israeli political life, or simply “the Sharon party” until he decides to step down, after which the political kaleidoscope will turn again and create new patterns?
Israelis sometimes joke that if there are two Israelis, there will be three Israeli political parties. While that is a slight exaggeration, the country’s party history is one of factions dividing and recombining, of political figures defecting across factions, creating small new offshoots, and quarreling constantly among themselves. The two big political alignments, Labor and Likud, have long been more umbrella groupings of smaller factions than real political parties like the small, single-interest ones. Usually in the past, political figures split with their party when they were passed over for the leadership or overruled on a policy issue: this is the first time a sitting Prime Minister has quit his own party. But some would argue that Sharon is not leaving Likud so much as Likud has left Sharon; that since he could not carry the party leadership with him, he will now seek to carry its voters with him instead.
Simply because of the stakes, this will be an important election for Israel. It will also be important for the futures of Likud and Labor. But one should not overlook the fact that the earthquake shaking Israeli politics has its strangeness (Sharon as a dove?) and that, as always, Israeli voters are unpredictable, especially more than 90 days out from the vote.
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