Recent events
have caused Israeli politics to enter a period of disequilibrium unseen in
recent history. The election of Amir Peretz as head of the Labour Party on
November 10 shocked the entire Israeli political establishment.Peretz, head of Israel’s
national trade union organization, is the first Jew of Arab origin (he is
Moroccan) to lead the Labour Party since the creation
of Israel
in 1948.He is a traditional social
democrat who favours state investment in education, housing, welfare and other
social programs and argues that the money spent on implementing the occupation
of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza
Strip has robbed the state of its ability to provide services to Israelis.He has also repeatedly said that Israel must
withdraw to its 1967 borders so the Palestinians can establish a viable state. Those
in the Israeli peace camp have greeted his election with surprised joy.
Shortly after
the election of Paretz, Labour
withdrew from the coalition with Likud that has allowed Prime Minister Ariel
Sharon to govern for the past three years.Sharon
then dissolved the Knesset and quit the Likud party, a party which he helped
found, to form a new party, Kadima (Hebrew for
‘Forward’).He has recruited several of
his former cabinet ministers from both Likud and Labour to run as candidates
for this new party, including Shimon Peres, the Labour leader whom Peretz
unseated.
Sharon’s
campaign slogan is “A strong leader for peace” and he has said that Kadima will
continue with the plan he embarked upon with his unilateral disengagement from
the Gaza Strip – solidifying Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, finishing construction of the separation
wall and at a later date, unilaterally declaring the boundaries of a
Palestinian state.Israeli political
commentators have characterized this as a “centrist” approach.
Who will replace
Sharon as
leader of the Likud party is still uncertain,
although the battle is between a number of far-right
candidates, including former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.All of the candidates vying for the Likud
leadership opposed the withdrawal from Gaza
and have strong ties to the Israeli settler movement.Netanyahu also has close ties to the American
evangelical Christian political movement which is closely aligned with George
Bush’s administration.
Sharon’s Likud
government was able to cobble togather a coalition
with Labour to govern only with the support of the Bush administration.The withdrawal from the Gaza Strip along with
plans to entrench the occupation in the West Bank and East Jerusalem came only
after the Americans signed off on the plan, with some commentators speculating that
the Gaza withdrawal was meant to be followed by
a partial U.S. withdrawal
from Iraq.However, the Americans’ inability to either
crush the Iraqi insurgency or withdraw on their own terms was making Sharon increasingly
vulnerable to pressure from within Likud itself and from the Israeli left.The left of the Labour Party,
virtually wiped out after the failure of the Oslo Accords, was reinvigorated by
the fact that every prediction it made about Iraq
turned out to be true, while every prediction Sharon
made, including providing the Americans with Israeli intelligence on Iraq’s weapons
of mass destruction program, turned out to be false.
Sharon’s new party is widely expected to win
the most seats in the March 2006 elections, but it is not clear with whom he will
be able to form a coalition that would enable him to govern.Similarly, if the Labour Party under Peretz
wins the most seats, there are very few options for forming a coalition
government, although a Labour victory will be seen as a rebuke of Sharon and the Bush
administration’s unilateral approach to the Palestinians.In either event, the March 2006 elections
will only deepen the political crisis in Israel.