Israel's tough choices

Editorial

The frequency of Israeli elections – and the comparatively speedy turnover of leaders – is a sign of that country's somewhat flailing effort to find permanent peace and stability. Over the past three decades, voters have tried hawks and doves, Laborites and Likudniks, then Kadima, sometimes permutations of coalitions and alliances that seemed destined to failure.

All of this has been because the country has tried an open hand with its neighbors and been rebuffed, so turned to a closed fist and been rebuffed, returned to the open hand, closed fist and again and again. This says less about Israel, of course, than it does about its potential partners for peace. That Israel cannot make peace whether led by doves or hawks, whether it expands settlements or disengages, whether it offers all or nothing, is an indication of the intransigence of the Palestinian leadership. Israel's leadership, a reflection of its population, is flexible, open to fresh approaches and ready to try just about anything.

Following the wars of 2006 and 2008-09, we came to this week's election.

Israelis are feeling understandably baffled and unhopeful about how to proceed. The winter war has not halted the attacks of rockets from Gaza. Hamas is even claiming victory – the numbers of dead, so triumphantly and cynically exploited for PR gain, are counted as points, as if more means victory.

But, in a way, Hamas did win. As long as it survives and continues to make life miserable for Israelis, it wins. Dead Palestinians are no shame for Hamas; just a "cost-free" part of war and a public relations jackpot. Every dead Israeli is a national tragedy grievously mourned, and so, again, Hamas wins. Dead Israelis: win for Hamas. Dead Palestinians: win for Hamas. No wonder Hamas leaders can call what happened a victory. On an amoral playing field, defeat always awaits the moral.

The Israeli people were in the mood for hawks again this week. Ehud Barak, the defence minister who led what looked like a successful war last month, is relegated to fourth place. Likud's candidate, former prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu, and Kadima's candidate, prime minister-in-waiting Tzipi Livni, clamored for first place. Shooting up the middle, well, the far right, was Israel Beiteinu's Avigdor Lieberman, who proposes loyalty oaths for citizenship and swapping Israeli Arab villages for Jewish settlements in the West Bank.

Lieberman's surge must be some sort of petulant act of bad faith in retaliation for the bad faith of the Palestinian leadership. Or it is a last, desperate grab for anything that hasn't been tried before, Labor, Likud and Kadima having all had their kick at the can. Or it may be that the Lieberman phenomenon speaks to something deeper.

Remember that, although the election seems to have indicated a swing to the right, the definition of "right" has changed starkly. Twenty years ago, a "two-state solution" was still an off-centre idea. After 1993, it became almost universal orthodoxy. Israel's mainstream accepted, either ideologically or practically, that a Palestinian state was the only thing that would end the conflict. The 2005 disengagement and the succeeding creation of a terrorist dystopia in Gaza have made this assumption highly questionable. While there are those among the Palestinians who evidently support coexistence – Fatah, allegedly, is the carrier of this torch, even though, in 2000, it was Fatah that used this torch to kindle this intifada – there are clearly those who continue to seek the destruction of Jewish self-determination, if not peoplehood.

As the Israeli body politic has moved en masse toward the two-state concept and peace has still been elusive, voters can be forgiven for seeing in Lieberman's hybrid two-state population-trading concept an alternative worth considering. Nothing else has worked.

So what will all of this mean for we who toil in the trenches of Zionist activism here in the Diaspora? A perceived shift to the right in Israel will certainly entrench the animosity from the North American and European left. But, given that these people brand the most dovish Israeli leaders "war criminals," this is a notoriously hard-to-please constituency.

The question of what the election outcome will mean to Diaspora Zionists is somewhat misplaced. We cannot second-guess Israeli voters – of course, we can and we do, but we should not apply our advocacy objectives on the security needs of Israel. If Israelis feel the need to harden their security responses, that could make advocacy work here more difficult. But Israel must do what Israel needs to do. Diaspora Jews, who have and will certainly again feel the backlash from Israel's actions, cannot demand that Israel behave more dovishly just because it makes our job of defending its policies easier.

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