Al-Ahram Weekly   Al-Ahram Weekly
13 - 19 May 1999
Issue No. 429
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 Index of issues This week's issue
 
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Divided as tribes, united in "peace"

By Graham Usher

Barak and Sharansky
Netanyahu Check and mate: The candidates in Israel's prime ministerial elections seized photo ops galore as they squared off for competitions of a more sophisticated sort. Labour Party leader Ehud Barak, who was about 12 per cent ahead of Netanyahu in recent polls, lost to Trade Minister Natan Sharansky, head of the Russian immigrant party, in a rapid seven-draw game, before ceding his place to Netanyahu. Sharansky's Yisrael Baaliya could secure most of the Russian vote, which candidates are wooing assiduously. On Israel's structurally polarised political scene, the Russian vote could determine the outcome of the elections. The Arabs, however, may well be the losers in this particular round, and a bitter sense of disappointment prevails even before Monday's vote

photos: AP&AFP

Less than a week before the first round of Israel's 15th Knesset elections, most observers are confronted with a paradox. For the Palestinians, and a large swathe of the Arab world, the primary focus is on the poll for prime minister on 17 May and, should none of the five present contenders achieve a 50 per cent majority of votes, on 1 June. This emphasis on who leads Israel into the next millennium is based on the assumption that neither the Oslo "peace process" in the Occupied Territories nor the controlled instability that currently passes for regional "peace" elsewhere can endure another term of an Israel led by Binyamin Netanyahu. (It is a view strengthened by Netanyahu's recent pyromania over Orient House where, in order to revive his flagging electoral fortunes, he again seemed prepared to burn down Jerusalem.)

Yet for an increasing number of Israel's 4.2 million strong electorate -- and the record 32 political parties fighting to represent them -- the main focus is less on who will lead Israel after 1 June than on whether he will serve their diverse sectoral, sectarian or ethnic interests. This explains why the issue that has dominated the campaign so far has not been Likud or the Labour Party's conflicting visions of Oslo, but whether Netanyahu or "One Israel's" Ehud Barak can woo the vote of the million or so Russian immigrants in Israel. It was "the Russians" that brought Yitzhak Rabin's Labour coalition to power in 1992 and kept Netanyahu's Likud-led coalition intact after the 1996 elections. Current polls show the Russian immigrants again swinging away from Likud. Yet this shift has less to do with Netanyahu's policies on Jerusalem or settlements than with the fact that it is Barak (and not Netanyahu) who has promised Nathan Sharansky's Russian Yisrael Baaliya Party the post of Interior Ministry and, with it, the power to define who is and who is not a Jew. Netanyahu cannot do this for fear of alienating the other main "tribe" of Israel -- the Sephardic Jews of mainly Arab descent represented by the orthodox Shas movement.

If "peace" or "Oslo" has not been an issue in these elections, it is because most Israeli Jews believe that their historic conflict with the Arabs over the land of Palestine is either solved or on the way to being solved. It is a political consensus that enjoys the support of about 70 per cent of the Israeli public and has been quietly endorsed by most of Israel's parties in the present campaign. And if those parties are starting to line up behind Barak -- which current opinion polls suggest that they are -- it is because they believe that he, rather than Netanyahu, now best represents that consensus.

The consensus boils down to a renewal of negotiations with Syria to enable Israel's full withdrawal from south Lebanon and a partial withdrawal "on but not from" the Golan Heights. As for the Occupied Territories, it accepts (whether reluctantly, as on the right, or enthusiastically, as on the left) that there will be a truncated, "de-militarised" Palestinian state in most of Gaza and parts of the West Bank, but with "red lines" most clearly spelled out by Barak in numerous platform speeches and media interviews: that "Jerusalem will be united and under our [Israel's] rule forever"; that there will be "no return to the 1967 borders"; that "there will be no foreign army [sic] west of the Jordan River"; and that "most of the settlers" in the Occupied Territories "will remain in settlement groups under our sovereignty".

Aside from the messianic settler movements and Israel's Arab parties, such a "permanent settlement" would be endorsed by every politician in Israel, from the "leftist" Meretz bloc to the pragmatic wing of the "rightist" Likud. Nor is it clear that Netanyahu is against such a settlement, though he advocates "enlarged Palestinian autonomy" in the West Bank and Gaza rather than a "state", and may quietly prefer no deal with Syria rather than any form of withdrawal on the Golan Heights. His problem -- and the reason he is trailing in the polls -- is that fewer and fewer Israelis believe he can implement such a deal given his electoral dependency on and lingering ideological affinity with those Israelis -- such as national/religious settler movements -- who are outside the political consensus.

If the current polls are accurate, the next Israeli Knesset will have a "centre-left" majority, be divided on sectarian and ethnic issues but united on the "peace process". It will also be welcomed by the US, the European Union and many Arab leaders (including Yasser Arafat), since it is likely to implement the Wye Memorandum, set an end-date for Oslo's final status negotiations and revive the Syrian and Lebanese "tracks" of the peace process. Most of all, it will provide a period of calm after the real and potential storms of the last three years.

But it will not challenge the Israeli consensus on "peace", or the regional balance of military and territorial power on which it is based. Nor will it grant the Palestinians even the most minimal of their national aspirations. The only real imponderable is whether the Israelis will elect a prime minister who (unlike the present incumbent) can implement the consensus as well as subscribe to it.

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