Six months have passed since the last elections in Israel. It is high time to draw up a first provisional assessment of the victory which, after fifteen years in the wilderness, has at last allowed the Labor Party to win a relative majority and Yitzhak Rabin to form a government.
In the aftermath of these elections, the French press and certain Israeli analysts spoke of a veritable parliamentary upheaval, one that had eliminated the right from the Israeli political landscape.
In fact, this is not the case. At most one could speak of a slight shift of the electorate toward the social-democratic left, as a more thorough analysis of the distribution of seats within the new Knesset shows.
This illusion was produced in particular by changes in the parties’ names and/or by their splitting or merging into new formations.
Nevertheless, the Labor victory was the symbol of a new climate in Israeli politics — younger, fresher, more open, and more likeable — even though the average age of the voters who cast their ballots for Mr. Rabin and his allied parties is higher than that of the Likud voters.
Nor should we forget that part of the new votes which secured this relative majority for him came from the immigrants from the USSR. Their arrival symbolizes a slight change in the climate of stagnation that Israeli politics had known over the past twelve years, but it manifested itself above all in a strengthening of the votes in favor of the non-religious parties.
This climate of freshness and optimism is quite evident to visitors who have traveled to Israel recently, despite unemployment and the difficult economic situation… Let us recall the figures (the seats in the previous Knesset are in parentheses). The Israeli parliament is made up of 120 members.
LEFT AND CENTER-LEFT
The Labor Party won 44 seats (38) and their allies of the Meretz party — center-left — (12).
But this party is made up of an alliance between the Civil Rights Movement (5), Mapam (3), and Shinui (2). And it is a fair bet that those who voted four years ago for the New Liberal Party (3) — former Progressives — which is no longer represented in the Israeli parliament, also transferred their votes to Meretz. These four formations represented, on their own, 13 seats. Yet Meretz holds only 12.
Let us also note that Meretz is not a left-wing formation in the sense in which that term is understood in Western countries.
The parties that compose it have in common only their struggle for a separation of synagogue and state and a settlement with the Palestinians, based on a partial withdrawal from the disputed territories (but excluding an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank).
The gains of these two formations, Labor and Meretz, came to a total of 56 seats instead of 45, but they were not enough to form an absolute majority of 61 seats. Like all the Israeli prime ministers before him, Mr. Rabin therefore had to resign himself to calling on at least one of the religious parties, Shas (7 seats, 2 more than in the previous parliament). He also enjoys the tacit support of the Arab Democratic Party (two seats), representing the Israeli Arabs.
The nationalist right, for its part, won 43 seats — 42 seats in the previous parliament — 32 for the Likud (37), 8 for the Tzomet party (2), and 3 for the Moledet party (3).
The analysis of these figures makes it possible to see that the voters who had voted Likud in the past merely transferred their votes to Tzomet. By contrast, there was no change in the opinions of that portion of Israelis who hold that the West Bank must either remain under Israeli control or be annexed.
The phenomenon is due to two factors: on the one hand, Tzomet represents the secular Israeli right, whose claims over the West Bank are based solely on questions of security, with no reference to historical rights going back to biblical times; and on the other hand, the irritation of the right-wing electorate against the Likud, whose internal dissensions and partial, distrustful attitude toward Mr. David Levy had exasperated a good number of its former supporters. A certain number of them transferred their votes to Shas (an extremist Sephardic Orthodox party) and the others to Tzomet.
As for the religious parties proper, they won, all tendencies combined, 16 seats instead of 18 in the previous parliament. The cause of this relative weakening is the fact that it now takes 44,000 votes to elect a member, and that the religious parties were fragmented in the previous Knesset into 6 formations, two of which were eliminated for having failed to obtain the 1.5% of the total vote required for the allocation of a seat.
Nevertheless, the weakening of the religious parties has not for all that diminished the key role they have played since the creation of Israel in the formation of governing coalitions.
These facts demonstrate that for more than four decades, the Israeli political balance has not appreciably changed. Israeli social democracy has always won between 35% and 40% of the vote, the conservative and nationalist right roughly an equal percentage, the religious parties around 15%, the Communist Party (whose voters are essentially Arab) and the parties representing Israeli Arab citizens a little under 4%, and the remainder has gone to small marginal formations.
The consequences of this state of affairs were not long in coming.
Irritated by the anti-religious positions taken by the Meretz leader, Shulamit Aloni, who obtained the education portfolio (a religious stronghold for more than 15 years), the Shas party keeps up the constant threat of withdrawing from the coalition, which would shake Mr. Rabin’s current majority, a majority also threatened by Meretz’s growing impatience in the face of religious blackmail.
At the same time as Mr. Rabin attends, then, to the two great files of Israeli politics — the recovery of the economy and the settlement of the Palestinian question — he must also reckon with the squabbles among his partners.
In fact, only the fear that Mr. Rabin might be forced to reshape his coalition by calling on other religious parties, currently in the opposition, keeps Meretz from leaving the government.
The alternative would be either a new government of national unity, or a coalition with the secular right, excluding the religious parties from power entirely. But that would also mean an exclusion of the Sephardim, of whom Shas is unfortunately the only political spokesman.
THE PEACE FILE
It is already known that, compared with the policy of the previous government, Mr. Rabin has gone fairly far in the concessions granted to the Palestinians. But despite the dialogue that has been ongoing for more than a year with the Palestinian negotiators — whether during the official negotiations in Washington or during the discreet talks that Israeli politicians maintain with them outside the framework of the bilateral meetings — these negotiations have not advanced an inch.
At the same time, under the impetus of various Palestinian “rejectionist” organizations, as well as of the PLO, which is keen to keep the initiative, the intifada has taken on another, far more dangerous aspect. It is certainly no longer the mass protest movement we had known — strikes and the war of stones — but, by contrast, the use of firearms and explosives is multiplying, just as the clashes provoked by Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, under Syrian impetus, have multiplied. All of this sustains a climate of insecurity and growing irritation within Israeli opinion, reinforces the intransigence of the right, and can only, sooner or later, provoke a hardening of the Israeli position.
Quite apart from the refusal of any agreement with the Israelis displayed by the extremist and fundamentalist Palestinians, Palestinian policy is also caught in the trap of the memory of the nationalist guerrilla struggles — those of the Algerian FLN and of the Vietcong, directly inspired by the Maoist strategy of redoubling the violence of the confrontations even as the negotiations continue, with the aim of wearing down public opinion on the adversary’s side.
But thirty years have passed in the meantime and, in any case, the Israeli forces are not thousands of kilometers from their bases, as was the case for the French contingent in Algeria or the U.S. expeditionary corps in Vietnam. The Palestinian intifada therefore has, as its only effect, the strengthening of Israeli fears about the danger that a settlement might pose to the country’s security.
Faced with the threat of a Palestinian terrorism that would continue even in the event of a settlement, it is not impossible that Mr. Yitzhak Rabin — who is not exactly a dove — might reach the conclusion that the current status quo is preferable to the uncertainties of a possible agreement that part of the Palestinian organizations would reject in any case by resorting to a terrorism that would this time unfold inside the former armistice lines of before June 1967.
Nor should one forget the ancestral laws of oriental bargaining, in which Israelis and Arabs are past masters, and which hold true whether it is a matter of trade or of politics.
For the moment, the Palestinians’ refusal to respond to the Israeli concessions with equal concessions does not endanger the continuation of the negotiations. But in an interview granted to Le Monde [21 October 1992], Mr. Yitzhak Rabin stressed that these must proceed “step by step,” whereas the “Palestinians demand everything, all at once,” and he laid the responsibility on their “leadership, which has always been wrong and which is incapable of taking a decision.”
The recent multinational talks in Paris — where the Arab countries (with the exception of Syria and Lebanon) met the Israeli delegation alongside several other countries interested in the regional development of the Middle East — likewise demonstrated the divergences between the points of view. The idea of this multinational negotiation, which dates back several years, comes from Mr. Shimon Peres, who had drawn his inspiration from the agreement of the “Coal and Steel” Community, the first stage of the EEC. Mr. Peres had asserted at the time that economic projects carried out jointly could do more to advance peace than treaties in due and proper form, just as the Franco-German agreements in the aftermath of the Second World War had created a new atmosphere between the FRG and France. The Arab countries, however, including Egypt, hold that no multilateral cooperation with Israel is possible before a total peace — meaning, in particular, the evacuation of all the territories and a settlement of the Palestinian question. For the moment, then, these “multilateral” negotiations are no more than meetings of an unreal character, with no tangible result.
One must not, therefore, let oneself be taken in by the optimism that characterizes the declarations of the Israeli government. In fact, we are just as far from an agreement with the Palestinians as in the days of Mr. Shamir. The only difference between the start of the negotiations in Madrid in October 1991 and the current situation is that the Rabin government enjoys a far more favorable image than that of Mr. Shamir. This might perhaps persuade the most moderate Palestinians not to set the United States and the governments of the West against them, all the more so since international opinion is now growing increasingly indifferent to this conflict…
Such is the essential asset that gives hope that the negotiations might eventually succeed.
But one thing is certain: in everything that concerns Israeli security and Jerusalem, Rabin’s non possumus will be as firm as that of the previous right-wing government, and for as long as the Palestinian leadership continues to insist on obtaining satisfaction on files where these imperatives are at stake, nothing concrete will be achieved.
THE ECONOMIC SITUATION
And yet one must not deceive oneself. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict in particular, and the Israeli-Arab conflict in general, have played only a relatively marginal role in the choices of the Israeli electorate.
Just as this conflict has played no role in the cultural, economic, and social process in which the Israeli nation is forged, it has only very slightly inflected the votes of the electors.
It is considerations of an internal order that have weighed on the choice of the Israeli electorate (as in all the other Israeli elections of these past forty years). It is the exasperation of the voters in the face of the Likud’s incompetence, indeed its indifference, in managing the economic problems that determined its defeat, and it is on the success or failure of the way in which he resolves the problems of unemployment, of the integration of the new immigrants, and of the recovery of the Israeli economy that Mr. Rabin is staking his future.
To be sure, he has promised to “change the national priorities” — that is, to devote fewer funds to the settlements in favor of the creation of new sources of employment in the field of infrastructure. Moreover, he now enjoys the credit of the 10 billion dollars granted by the United States for the integration of the new immigrants, and lastly the support of the Histadrut, which, though considerably weakened, is a paramount factor in any effort of this kind.
In this domain, the active fight against unemployment becomes the first of Mr. Rabin’s priorities, but it can only be resolved through the launching of large-scale public works, and that entails the danger of an extremely threatening inflationary process in an economy as fragile as Israel’s.
All the more so since the budget — of which nearly 60% of revenues are earmarked for national defense and the servicing of the national debt — has only a reduced margin for maneuver: less than 45 billion French francs available out of a total of 120 billion.
The fact remains that, despite the opinion of his finance minister, Mr. Rabin will have to resort to a neo-Keynesian economic policy, perhaps taking up on his own account the famous phrase of the late finance minister Pinhas Sapir (Labor): “The generations to come will have to pay for the debts contracted… after all, we are working for their future”…
October – November 1992