The Militarists and Haters Win in Israeli Elections

Winners: Netanyahu, AIPAC, U.S. Republican Party, Sheldon Adelson (American Jewish billionaire funder of the right), Hamas, Islamic State, the right-wing Mullahs in Iran.
Losers: Israeli, World Jewry, the Palestinian people, the forces for peace and non-violence everywhere, the Palestinian Authority, the people of Iran, the people of the U.S.
According to Israeli newspapers reporting on the outcome of the Israeli election on Tuesday, Likud increased its lead in the next Knesset of 120 members. It will now hold 30 Knesset seats, compared to the Zionist Union (former Labor Party) with 24 seats. As the front runner, Netanyahu will be asked to create the government coalition.
The Joint List of Palestinian Israelis, the third-largest party, gets fourteen seats, followed by Yesh Atid with eleven, Kulanu with ten, Habayit Hayehudi (ultra right) with eight, Shas with seven, United Torah Judaism with six, Yisrael Beiteinu (fascist right) with six, and Meretz (once the peace party) with four.
Though the Israeli president has said he will ask for a government of national unity, it will be unity around the policies which Netanyahu put out clearly in the last days of the election: No Palestinian state, no deal that would allow Iran to develop nuclear energy, no willingness to count Arab Israelis as “real Israelis” (Netanyahu went so far as to warn the Israeli public that they were in danger because Arab Israelis had formed a Joint List and might become a real force in the Knesset unless the Jewish Israelis rallied around Netanyahu’s Likud party).
How can the right wing grow to so much power in an Israel filled with mostly decent human beings, some of whom have even been influenced by Judaism’s teachings of love for neighbor and love for “the other,” though of course most Israelis are secular?
The first culprit here is Hamas. Hamas’ decision to bomb Israeli cities last summer was not only an ethically hateful violation of human rights, targeting Israeli civilians, pushing millions to run into air raid shelters day after day for much of the summer, but it was also a massive victory for right-wingers in Israel who were thereby able to justify Israel’s massive assault on Gaza but also to recredit in the minds of many Israelis the most fearful vision of Jews being in danger of annihilation even though Israel is by far the strongest military force in the Middle East and the only one with massive nuclear weapons. Hamas is playing a dirty game here, believing that Israel’s extremists will ultimately cause Israel to lose the support of most of the countries of the world, and weaken Israel in the long run. Moreover, Netanyahu’s explicit rejection of a Palestinian state gives Hamas the upper hand in its political battle with the Palestinian Authority which had agreed to the Obama/Kerry strategy of negotiations with Israel to create a Palestinian state. With that no longer an option, Hamas’ commitment to replace Israel with a “one state solution” will seem the only remaining option to many Palestinians and hence increase Hamas’ political power in any future Palestinian election.
For the same reason, most of the Islamic fundamentalist violent extremists will be rejoicing over the Israeli vote. It is in their interests to portray Israel as an evil state, and the racism and militarism that just got a new lease on life in Israel will help them make their case.
Republicans will have their stature elevated, having given Netanyahu a platform on which he could communicate the image of being “tough” and at the same time loved by the U.S. Congress. Doing so almost certainly helped his status with a section of Israeli voters who two weeks before were not so sure about Netanyahu and who continue to deny to pollsters, but not to each other, that they were swayed by the Congress’ support of Likud — it’s beneath their Zionist dignity to allow non-Jews to impact their voting, but they did.
Conversely, being a militarist and racist state will not help win Israel any friends around the world, and in the not-t00-long-run it will weaken Israel’s support in the U.S. both among Americans in general and in particular among young Jews. So count the real anti-Semites who want to see Israel undermined as a way of getting at all Jews as having been among the beneficiaries of the Netanyahu victory.
The biggest losers will be all those on the planet who yearn for a world based on social and economic justice, environmental sanity, peace and non-violence, and genuine caring for the peoples of the world. Those of us who talk about building a world based on love and caring will face the next five years with an Israel that scoffs at those ideas and spreads its cynicism to the rest of the world. Instead, Israel will be spouting a message of fear and championing the “Right Hand of God,” i.e. the notion that force and violence are the only way to achieve safety and security. And while few Israelis want to be involved in another war, many want to get the U.S. to do a proxy war on Iran for Israel, and that will be bad not only for the people of the Middle East but also for the many Americans who will lose their lives in such a war.
But why did the progressive peace voice have so little impact in Israel? The answer to this is startling: it didn’t have much electoral impact because it was almost totally absent from the discourse of the supposedly left former Labor Party which now calls itself “The Zionist Union.”
That party spent much of its time focused on matters of economic inequality, while simultaneously trying to prove itself equally militant with Netanyahu both in regard to Palestinians and in regard to Iran. They thus followed the same bankrupt path that Democrats have followed in the U.S., failing to articulate a different worldview from the militarists, instead trying to insist that they would be just as militant and just as determined to wipe out “the enemy” (whoever that is perceived to be).
It’s an old secret of politics that when people want a warlike government or a racist government, they vote for right wingers. It’s a useless strategy for Labor in Israel or for the right wing of the Democratic Party to present itself as the “better militarists,” because people who want that will end up voting for the Right anyway. Obama should have learned that when, instead of ending the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, as he had led his followers to believe he would do, he instead escalated those wars with “surges,” the result was not a victory for the Dems in 2010 and ever since, but rather a growing militarism in the U.S. and a consequent capture of Congress by the Right.
If you listened to the television ads in Israel about the elections, one barely heard a peep, suggesting that the real issue in the elections was peace with Palestine, peace with Iran, or an end to Israel treating the U.S. President as though they owned him. The parties did their best to stay away from the reality that a vote for Likud would de facto mean more wars and violence for the citizens of Israel.
Yet the left in Israel, like the left in the U.S., has little understanding of the need for a whole new worldview to be popularized as the central task of liberal and progressive Israelis or Americans. That worldview must challenge the great fears that Israelis have about their own annihilation, help Israelis recover from their post-traumatic stress disorder that keeps many from being able to think rationally about their own (or the Jewish people of the world’s) self-interest, and instead keeps them focused on the Holocaust and why they think it could happen again. But if so, it will happen not despite what Jews do with their power, but precisely because of what Jews are not doing today to build a world of peace and generosity, love, kindness and radical amazement at the grandeur and mystery of all being!
This is why Jews and friends of the Jewish people must join together to champion the Strategy of Generosity as a replacement for the Strategy of Domination which emanates from the PTSD of the Jewish people. I’ve developed these themes further in my book Embracing Israel/Palestine which you can order for Kindle on Amazon.com or by reading it in print by ordering it at www.tikkun.org/eip. And this is one of the reasons why I’ve joined with people of all faiths and secular humanists and fundamentalist atheists to build a Network of Spiritual Progressives (NSP) that can articulate the world we really want, rather than remaining stuck in a politics that is so worried about being “realistic” that it only reinforces the very worldviews that lead to wars and racism of every sort. Please join me in that by becoming a member of the NSP atwww.spiritualprogressives.org.
Originally posted on The World Post on Huffington Post.
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