Israel’s last pre-election poll shows that Isaac Herzog, the head of the Zionist Union—a center-left coalition of the Labor Party and former Minister of Justice Tzipi Livni’s Hatnuah—is likely to win twenty-four seats or more, opening a four seat lead over Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party. Neither is remotely close to winning the sixty-one seats needed to form a government after Tuesday’s election—leading parties build coalitions with smaller parties—but the Zionist Union's surge has inspired excitement among liberals that is harder than usual to restrain. Although about ten per cent of voters are still undecided, Herzog seems to be trending up, with Netanyahu trending down. President Reuven Rivlin is required by law to award the mandate—the right to attempt to cobble together a government—to the leader who is most likely to succeed. Unless the ten or more parties that are expected to win seats declare a preference for Prime Minister in advance, and Netanyahu emerges as most likely to make a majority, Herzog’s projected plurality should be enough to compel Rivlin to award the mandate to him.
Netanyahu could still emerge triumphant; Israeli polling is not as reliable as one might hope. Even if the polls are accurate, Herzog will need support from some uncertain sources—most importantly, from Moshe Kahlon, the leader of the Kulanu party, who came from Likud. Yet Herzog’s likely strong showing, and the new coalition he represents, portends some long-term shifts in the political map. Netanyahu has polarized the country, much as the former Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir did in the early nineteen-nineties. Netanyahu has declared Likud the anchor of the Israeli right, repudiated the feasibility of a two-state solution, brazenly defied the White House (Likud robocalls refer to “Hussein Obama”), and rallied mainstream conservative voters to identify with ultra-nationalist settlers and ultra-Orthodox communities. Netanyahu assumed, when he called for this early election, back in December, that, like Shamir, he could rely on Likud’s traditional base. Manifestly, he cannot. Instead, Netanyahu and Herzog are enacting an enormously significant battle between two political camps: the parties of Greater Israel and the parties of Global Israel—and the latter has the social momentum. Even if this election does not produce an immediate change at the top, it will almost certainly be pivotal.
Since 1977, when Menachem Begin’s Likud first won power from the Labor Zionist parties that founded the state, Israel has had twelve national elections. Likud has won eight times, and Labor just twice. In 1984, even after former Prime Minister Begin’s failed war with Lebanon and Defense Minister Ariel Sharon's forced resignation, and with inflation at four hundred per cent, Likud still pulled out a tie. In all, Labor leaders have commanded Knesset majorities for just about six years out of thirty-eight. Meanwhile, Likud seemed to have assembled a near-permanent conservative majority. After Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination by a far-right law student, in 1995, liberals felt that they were witnessing an unfolding tragedy, in which time and rage were working against them. They struggled to compete with Likud’s self-reinforcing ideology: occupation produced violence, and violence strengthened Jewish xenophobia, which resonated with Likud’s hawkish rhetoric. Likud’s neo-Zionist orthodoxies gave rise to a rapidly expanding West Bank settler population, whose towns many began taking for granted. Likud also benefitted from inescapable identity politics, which ran in families, and largely reflected resentments against the once dominant Labor Zionist parties for the centralized way that they ran the state in the fifties and sixties. If (as I’ve written elsewhere) Israel were to be divided into five roughly equal demographic voting groups—pioneering Zionists from Europe, Arabs who became Israeli citizens, Jewish refugees from Muslim countries, national-Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox theocrats, and immigrants from the former Soviet Union—Likud has appeared to have a lock on the last three.
This election suggests that globalist liberals are now at least in contention. One important change has been the full emergence of the Israeli political center, once considered a passing political force, but now clearly the product of younger, more cosmopolitan voters who have come into their own—connecting with peers abroad through entrepreneurial ventures, cultural and scientific networks, and travel—and who have not remained altogether loyal to the party identities of their parents. These centrists tend to consider themselves socially progressive: distancing themselves from settlers and theocrats. They are economically liberal: positive about global markets but wary of both capitalist oligarchs and socialist tinkering. And they are diplomatically skeptical: open to the peace process, but indignant about terrorism and the criticism of the Israel Defense Forces by the world press. Yair Lapid, the former minister of finance, leads Yesh Atid, the first centrist party to draw large numbers of young voters; he will almost certainly support Herzog over Netanyahu. Moshe Kahlon, the former minister of communications under Netanyahu, who is largely credited with opening the cell-phone market to new competitors, reportedly resents Netanyahu for reneging on a pledge to make him the head of the Israel Land Authority, and he refuses to rule out joining Herzog. Together, Lapid and Kahlon are likely to win at least twenty seats, nearly as many as the two major parties. They are drawing votes especially from young people in Russian and Mizrahi families—votes the Likud was counting on.
The most striking proof of the rise of the center, however, is Labor’s efforts to transform itself into a centrist party. Herzog electrified the campaign by making common cause with Livni; he has promised to hand over the Prime Minister position to her two years into his term.* Herzog and Livni both have backgrounds in military intelligence, but are not decorated warriors like Rabin or other past Labor leaders. They boast instead about their teamwork—about coöperation that has larger implications for politics and diplomacy—and the gender equality among their Knesset candidates. Together they have focussed on Israel's economic inequality and have presented a plan to mitigate the crushing cost of housing for young couples. Neither has suggested negotiating a two-state solution without the support of the U.S., Europe, and some members of the Arab League. Nor have they talked about taking on Hamas, Iran, and Hezbollah alone. They speak of rebuilding Gaza, not just deterring rocket fire. They raise the prospect of a regional alliance with the Palestinian Authority, Jordan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, based on the Arab Peace Initiative of 2002, which they are counting on the Obama Administration to consolidate. Herzog and Livni have solicited former intelligence and military figures to warn of the dangers of alienating American Democrats and the European Union. They are trying to bring off in Labor something like what President Bill Clinton and the Democratic Leadership Council achieved in the United States in the nineties: transforming the party from welfare advocacy and anti-war activism to private entrepreneurship and foreign-policy realism.
Signalling another change in the electoral map, the Arab parties have strengthened Herzog’s position. They’ve combined into the blandly named Joint List, led by Ayman Odeh, a forty-year-old lawyer who seems comfortable identifying himself as an Israeli and is less involved in Palestine Liberation Organization diplomacy than his predecessors. Odeh’s coalition includes former communists, Islamists, and bi-nationalists, but it has converged on a single democratic platform and includes Jews on its roster, including the former Knesset speaker and Labor party leader Avraham Burg. I spoke with the Joint List chairman, Jamal Zahalka, a week ago. He told me that, in early February, a senior member of his list had reached out to Meretz, a party to the left of Labor, to try to arrange a vote-sharing agreement. At the time, Meretz refused. Later, when Meretz, prodded by Herzog, tried to revive the deal in early March, Zahalka refused, causing many observers to conclude that the Joint List was continuing a policy of non-coöperation with parties that have their roots in historic Zionism. Zahalka adamantly denied this when we spoke. “Meretz supported the Gaza bombing during the first week,” he said, referring to last summer’s confrontation between Israel and Hamas. “So I concluded—and I had to decide quickly—that we’d lose thousands of votes.” Still, he anticipates coöperating with Herzog, Livni, and Meretz on the fight for civil equality. Would he agree in the coming years to merging with existing parties? “If we could agree on a political platform, I would also support a joint list with Meretz,” he said.
The growing influence of the Joint List is encouraging in the long term, but it will not make it easier for Kahlon, a former Likud member from a Mizrahi family, to join with Herzog in the days ahead. Kahlon would be choosing a coalition that rests on the support of Arab members over settlers and the Orthodox. He would be choosing, in effect, an Israel that is a Hebrew-speaking state of all its citizens, rather than the Jewish state that Likud has stridently proposed with its Jewish Nation law. Netanyahu knows this, and speaking on the radio on Sunday morning, he taunted the center parties for entertaining a government with “the Arabs,” sounding more like George Wallace than Winston Churchill. This past Sunday, he publicly offered Kahlon the position of finance minister should he lead the next government. Herzog is counting on Kahlon to overcome these threats and seductions. Talk around the candidate suggests that he might. The veteran journalist Raviv Drucker told me that, behind closed doors, Kahlon is making it clear that his preference is for Herzog. Former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told me that Kahlon wants to see Netanyahu out of office, which Kahlon’s close advisor, former Israel Defense Forces general Yoav Galant, has all but admitted publicly. Kahlon has also recruited Michael Oren, the former Israeli Ambassador to the United States, who rebuked Netanyahu for his speech to Congress two weeks before the election. Oren implied in a recent meeting that he believes the settlement project to be a disaster and would like to see it ended; he fears for Israel’s relations with the U.S. and Europe.
Still, there is no way around this: if Kahlon chooses Herzog, supported by the Joint list, over Netanyahu, his decision will be as historic for the country—and personally difficult—as Rabin’s recognition of the Palestine Liberation Organization, in 1993. Again: Kahlon, of all people, would be signalling that, under the new government, the Arab minority should be considered integral to Israeli democratic governance, and that Arabs—twenty per cent of the Israeli population—should accept their Israeli identity in return. Kahlon would much rather avoid this. He’d prefer a national-unity government, made up of both Labor and Likud, with his party in the middle. But this seems unlikely given the acrimony between the Labor and Likud. Kahlon would also settle for the ultra-Orthodox parties abandoning Likud, and winning enough votes from it, making Herzog and Livni’s reliance on “the Arabs” unnecessary. Current polls, however, suggest that this is unlikely.
Nothing illustrates Kahlon’s choice as starkly as the personalities of Naftali Bennett, the head of the Jewish Home Party, and Erel Margalit, one of the economic leaders of Herzog’s Labor Party. Bennett is running a campaign bordering on fascist incitement: he says that the whole of the country's land belongs to the Jews and mocks liberals for supposedly apologizing to the Western world. If the world wants to isolate Israel, he argues, let them do without Israeli inventions like drip irrigation and flash memory. For Margalit, who earned a doctoral degree in philosophy at Columbia and founded the highly successful venture-capital firm Jerusalem Venture Partners, Bennett is a dangerous simplifier. “He thinks we should be a fort, but Israel must be a hub,” Margalit told me. “Water, bandwidth, trade, agriculture trade, tourism, technology—people don’t really care where the borders are. There’s a whole region incubating a new middle class. Could Israelis and Palestinians be a part of this? Yes! The Oslo model has caused democratic forces in Israel to play defense. We need to play offense, offer a new language—which is regional coöperation.”
Whoever puts together the governing coalition, Herzog or Netanyahu, will not have an easy time of it. Netanyahu, should he try holding to the status quo, will not be able to ignore the growing reproach of the Obama Administration and international community, or the shunning of Israel by European universities and companies. Herzog, should he advance the peace process, will have to contend with the streets of Jerusalem—its fanatic Orthodox extremists, infuriated Arab residents, and the roads radiating out to expanding West Bank settlements. Still, much is at stake tomorrow. Mohammad Mustafa, the vice-premier of the Palestinian Authority, told me last month that the gross domestic product per capita in the Palestinian territories was a third greater than Egypt’s in 2006; now it is a third less. Teachers and police officers are being paid partial salaries. Others in Ramallah fear that coöperation with Israel may lead to an explosion against Palestinian security forces. Jordan’s King Abdullah insists that no regional coalition with Israel is conceivable without a solution to the Palestine question. Under Netanyahu, the settlements, and the sentiments behind them, get more time.
Yet, the settlers are no longer the only ones who benefit from time, and who create facts. A new generation of moderates—building business and technology centers—is rising alongside them. For two generations, since 1967, Israelis with ordinary democratic impulses thought that their task was to restore a lost, more beautiful little Israel, separate from their Arab neighbors. Now they are claiming a more global, more integrated future—one that the Zionist pioneers could never have envisioned. Liberals fought election after election, saw how they were outnumbered, and, like Sisyphus, went back down to the rock, resigned to pushing as an end in itself—“the price paid for the passions of this earth,” as Camus wrote. But the terrain has changed, and Herzog and his hopeful supporters want to believe that the push might be different this time. This year, Kahlon must decide.
*Update: On Monday, Livni announced that she would not rotate as Prime Minister with Herzog if the Zionist Union wins.
