Astounding Facts Most People Don’t Know About Israel 9
Israel has moved steadily leftwards politically over time
Want to enliven a dreary dinner party conversation? Recite this sentence to the assembled company: Israel has moved steadily leftwards politically over time. (You might want to stir things further and throw in the exhortation that all true progressives should support Israel – a sentiment that permeates all my blogs and one that I plan to address specifically in the future). Then sit back and watch. Reactions will range from stunned silence to guffaws of ironic laughter. It’s unlikely that anyone will agree with you. Don’t be deterred. The truth is often counterintuitive and sometimes frankly unbelievable.
If you’re old enough, you’ll remember how Israel’s victory in the 1967 Six Day War began a process whereby her image morphed from that of a plucky little David to an overbearing and bullying Goliath while the Arabs (especially the Palestinian ones) moved in the opposite direction. The rot spread further, according to the progressive narrative, as the country became an entrenched occupier and settler of Arab land. You may also recall the panic-stricken editorials in the western media that greeted the election of the allegedly “far right” Menachem Begin as Israeli prime minister in 1977. We were regaled with apocalyptic predictions of war about to engulf the region following the Likud victory over a Labour Party (rebranded Alignment) that had held power for nearly 30 years.
The prophets of doom were wrong. Ostensibly hawkish on foreign policy, Begin soon displayed ultra-dovish tendencies. When Sadat opted to be the first Arab leader to make peace, Israel withdrew from every last inch of the Sinai desert and uprooted thousands of settlers, taking a huge security risk in the process.
Socio-economically too, the Likud was far from a traditional right-wing party that would shore up privilege and roll back the state: on the contrary, it drew its strongest support from the poorer (largely Sephardi/Mizrachi) urban working classes who had felt abandoned by (largely Ashkenazi) Labour politicians whom they regarded as elitist and intent on preserving their wealth and power across key sectors of society, notably within the Histadrut (trade union federation) and the kibbutzim. One of Begin’s first moves was to bring the third largest party, Dash (Democratic Movement for Change), a liberal offshoot of Labour, into his government.
Since that revolutionary year of 1977, general elections have tended to send roughly equal numbers of representatives from the right and left to the Knesset. (In September 2019, the left bloc won 57 seats while the right won 55). Nevertheless, the gradual leftward policy drift within both mainstream parties continued. It did briefly stall a couple of times in the 1980s after the treaty with Egypt produced a disappointingly “cold peace,” and a series of major crises (the divisive first Lebanon War, a wildly overheated economy, the First Intifada) shook Israeli society to the core. But the public soon grew weary of the nationalist rhetoric of Begin and Shamir – although they had both demonstrated a willingness to compromise on their most cherished principles in pursuit of peace – and returned to power the old left in the personages of Rabin, Peres and Barak. Even the shock of Arafat’s bloody post-Oslo terrorist campaign, the Second Intifada, failed to dampen Israelis’ willingness to take risks for peace as the “right wing” Sharon and Olmert adopted startlingly conciliatory policies in their attempts to end the conflict.
Just before Israeli general election in 2013, Jonathan Freedland of The Guardian, in one of his frequent spasms of liberal angst about Israel, predicted (wrongly) that Israeli voters were about to elect an intransigent, hard-right government. He argued (as did many others) that this was the near-inevitable outcome of the Israeli electorate’s propensity to move steadily rightwards over the years and that the process was accelerating, making the continuation of any vestiges of a peace process impossible. If Freedland had been writing around 1985 he might have had a point. Three decades on, he didn’t.
The charge of a rightward drift most often focuses on the twin issues of land and settlements. Foreigners regularly urge Israel to pursue territorial compromise as if this was a novel idea. If they’d been paying attention they might have noticed that Israelis have been doing just that since the early 1980s – relinquishing the whole of Sinai to Egypt, dismantling dozens of settlements and military bases in Sinai and Gaza, totally withdrawing the IDF from Lebanon, Gaza and large tracts of the West Bank, and forcibly uprooting of militant settlers from dozens of West Bank outposts. Throughout this period, the expansionist Greater Israel movement virtually collapsed despite the bitter disappointments of the land-for-peace Oslo Accords of 1993-95. The last five prime ministers have all expressed support for the establishment of a Palestinian state, with appropriate safeguards.
The charge of a rightward drift most often focuses on the twin issues of land and settlements. Foreigners regularly urge Israel to pursue territorial compromise as if this was a novel idea. If they’d been paying attention they might have noticed that Israelis have been doing just that since the early 1980s – relinquishing the whole of Sinai to Egypt, dismantling dozens of settlements and military bases in Sinai and Gaza, totally withdrawing the IDF from Lebanon, Gaza and large tracts of the West Bank, and forcibly uprooting of militant settlers from dozens of West Bank outposts. Throughout this period, the expansionist Greater Israel movement virtually collapsed despite the bitter disappointments of the land-for-peace Oslo Accords of 1993-95. The last five prime ministers have all expressed support for the establishment of a Palestinian state, with appropriate safeguards.
Domestically, all the key political trends have also long faced leftwards: the consensus on drafting Charedim into the army, the provision of universal health care, the passage of progressive human rights legislation, the official recognition of non-Orthodox Jewish religious streams, the banning of far right political parties such as Kach, and the recent upsurge of centrist political parties at the expense of the hard right and religious ones. These developments would have been inconceivable in the early years of the state.
Wait, I hear my wokest reader protest, what about that perennial bogeyman of the left, Binyamin Netanyahu? Isn’t he an unreconstructed reactionary that has pulled Israel sharply rightwards since gaining power? On the contrary, his dovish policies (as opposed to his rhetoric) would have warmed the heart of Abba Eban. In foreign policy, his three key acts were his signing of the Oslo-related Hebron Agreement (1997) and Wye River Memorandum (1998), his public recognition of the right of the Palestinians to achieve sovereignty, peacefully, alongside Israel, and his freezing of settlement activity for 10 months in 2009 to try to kickstart negotiations with the Palestinians. Domestically, he committed successive administrations to reducing social inequalities by a variety of means, notably via Resolution 922 that involved an unprecedented investment in the Arab sector that (according to initial evaluations) has already yielded significant social, economic and educational benefits [1].
What is even more remarkable about this seismic shifting of the Israeli political landscape is that it has occurred against a background of perpetual warfare, terrorism, demonisation, delegitimisation, and the rise to power of an EU-subsidised authoritarian, revanchist kleptocracy in the West Bank along with Islamo-fascist, genocidal regimes in Iran and Gaza – all aimed at destroying the world’s only Jewish state.
Yet we are told that it is Israelis – not Palestinians, other Arabs or Iranians – who are jeopardising peace by drifting inexorably rightwards. It wasn’t true in the past and it’s not true today.
Israel is not a socialist paradise nor is it free of anti-liberal elements. But the overall direction of travel is clear. Liam Hoare [2] succinctly summarised the phenomenon: While the left did indeed lose the electoral struggle after the turbulent 1990s and bloody Second Intifada, it won the war of ideas... the right and centre having appropriated part of its raison d’être.
Israel is not a socialist paradise nor is it free of anti-liberal elements. But the overall direction of travel is clear. Liam Hoare [2] succinctly summarised the phenomenon: While the left did indeed lose the electoral struggle after the turbulent 1990s and bloody Second Intifada, it won the war of ideas... the right and centre having appropriated part of its raison d’être.
Here’s a challenge: name another country that, in such unpropitious circumstances, has moved so unambiguously leftwards over such a prolonged period. If you can, I’ll buy you a falafel in pitta – with all the trimmings – from the most woke kiosk you can find in Tel Aviv.
