Israel's Leadership Vacuum

Veteran Israeli political reporter Ben Caspit, who has co-authored biographies of both the recently deceased Ariel Sharon and Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu, had this interesting column for the Israel Pulse of the Al Monitor of the  Christian Science Monitor. I agree with it in general with one major disagreement: Caspit groups both Ariel Sharon and Yitzhak Shamir together with the Likud princes. The Likud princes were the children of prominent Revisionist Zionist and Herut figures and include figures like Netanyahu, Benny Begin, Ron Milo, Ehud Olmert, and Tzipi Livni. Shamir and Sharon were from a different generation--that of the princes' parents who served in the underground and founded Israel. Shamir was a contemporary and colleague of Benny Begin's father, Prime Minister Menahem Begin, and arrived in mandatory Palestine several years before Begin did. Shamir became of the trio leading the Lehi underground from 1943 to 1948 when Begin was leader of the Etzel (Irgun) underground. Shamir did, however, head the faction within the Likud that the princes belonged to. Sharon was in opposition to that faction as the head of his own faction within the Likud after 1983. 

Caspit's thesis is that the demise of the generation of Israel's founding fathers (and mothers in the case of Golda Meir and some other women) due to mortality has left Israel with a leadership gap. Actually the founders consisted of three separate generations: that of David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister from 1948-53 and 1956-63, who arrived in Palestine during the Second Aliya or wave of immigration following the abortive Russian revolution of 1904-05; the generation of Moshe Sharett, Pinhas Sapir, and Golda Meir, who arrived in Israel in the 1920s; and finally the 1948 generation that fought Israel's War of Independence and were born in Israel from 1915 to 1930 or who arrived in Palestine as children during the 1930s in the case of Shimon Peres. The first two generations ruled Israel and the Zionist Yishuv from 1935 to 1974. The third generation took over in 1974 when Yitzhak Rabin was elected leader of the Labor Party and prime minister to replace Meir. Sharon and Peres are the last members of that generation. Sharon left office due to his stroke in March 2006 and Peres was elected president by the Knesset in July 2007 and is set to leave office later this year at age 90.

The Israeli Election: A Preview

Israel goes to the polls on January 22. Everyone has already conceded that Prime Minister Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu will be heading the next government. His Likud Beitenu (Union: Our Home) party is forecast to receive between 34 and 38 seats out of 120 in the Knesset. Next largest will be the centrist Labor Party with 16 to 18 seats--up from 13 in 2009. Third will be the Jewish Home (haBeit haYehudi) party with 13-14 seats- (Hebrew link) --this will be a record for the old National Religious Party, which normally received anywhere from four to ten seats in each election since the 1950s. For another forecast in English see here. The Kadima party, founded by Ariel Sharon as a splinted from the Likud in November 2005, is likely to only receive two seats despite being the largest party after the 2009 election with 28 seats. Most of its voters are said to be either returning to the Likud after seven years, returning to Labor after three years, or going to former Kadima leader Tzipi Livni's haTnua (the Movement) party that is projected to receive seven seats. Overall the Right is projected to receive about 53 seats and the Center-Left about ten seats less than that. Daniel Levy, an analyst affiliated with a number of European and American think tanks as their resident Israel expert, has a very good article organized around the concept of Israel's "four tribes" or electoral blocs.

There are many explanations for this move to the right.  But the important thing is the effect that it will have on the policy of the Israeli government. Netanyahu is likely to form another rightist coalition with one of the Center parties in the coalition, such as Yesh Atid (There is a Future), as a legitimizing party in the small role that Labor has periodically filled (after 2001, after 2009 etc.) An attempt to form a Center bloc with Yesh Atid, Labor, and haTnua blew up last week when Tzipi Livni issued a statement about a meeting that the three party leaders held and then the other two contradicted her.  This will make it easy for Netanyahu to play the three parties off against one another after the election. The most interesting figure in this election cycle has been Naftali Bennett, leader of the Jewish Home party, portrayed in this New Yorker article by David Remnick.  Here is an article that ran on Sunday January 20--two days before the election--in The Times of Israel on the Likud's post-election coalition options.

Tzipi Livni: The Latest Great Western Hope

Tzipi Livni was best friends forever with Secretary of State Condi Rice during the second Bush term and appeared on many lists of influential women. Tzipi Livni, the former leader of Kadima, was the latest but not the last of a string of Great Western Hopes in Israel who are more loved in America and Europe than in their own country. They are polyglot and erudite men and woman known for their reasonableness and learning. They explain Israel to the world and attempt to explain the world to Israel. All have been foreign ministers at one time or another and two have been prime ministers and a third--Livni--nearly became prime minister.

Ranking Israel's Prime Ministers

As an American centrist who in Israel would be considered a leftist (which shows how far to the Right Israel's democracy is), I will now rank Israel's prime ministers. I rank them primarily on their contributions to Israeli security and to peace with Israel's neighbors, but also on their contributions to Israeli democracy. I will not rank those prime ministers whose term in office was less than two years, as less than half a term is too little to fairly judge a prime minister by.

First, David Ben-Gurion (1948-1954, 1955-63)  Ben-Gurion had the historic understanding of his environment, of what history demanded and of timing to build the framework for a state during the 1930s and 1940s as head of the Jewish Agency. He then managed to divorce the Jewish Yishuv from Britain in 1945, without provoking a fatal reaction. He conducted a victorious war strategy in 1948-49 after having wisely accepted the UN partition plan. Later he built an alliance with France to replace the British connection. I could write a column about all of his faults, but in the largest matters he was correct.

Is Sharon (Politically) Dead?

On February 26, 2012 Ariel "Arik" Sharon will be 84, although it is very unlikely that he will celebrate his birthday. This is because he has been in a coma, probably brain dead as well, since January 6, 2006. He will probably die without ever having regained consciousness.

But imagine, for argument's sake, that tomorrow he were successfully revived and like many elderly people who suffer strokes he would be able to recover cognitive function eventually. This would at minimum probably take a year before he could speak without slurring his words and think and function at a high level. And it might be possible--even likely--that while in a coma he had developed some sort of dementia. It is doubtful that voters or party functionaries would trust someone of that age with the premiership. When Sharon suffered his stroke and was subsequently permanently relieved of the premiership he was 77-78, older than any previous occupier of his office. Previously the oldest premier at retirement had been David Ben-Gurion, the first and third prime minister who retired in June 1963 at age 76.5. So no Israeli prime minister has crossed the 80-year-old barrier and none is likely to ever do so--particularly someone who has suffered a severe stroke.  Between Ben-Gurion and Sharon Golda Meir had retired at age 76 in 1974 and Shimon Peres at age 73 in 1996.

South Africa and Israel: What is the Lag Time?

I recently had the experience of reading an authorized biography of Pik Botha, the long-serving South African foreign minister during the 1970s and 1980s who was also a leading leadership contender in the National Party because of his combination of liberalism (or what passed for it among most whites) and defiance of the West and the world. As I read his chapters on the dark days of apartheid in the mid-1980s I was struck by the parallels with Israel today. Botha fulfilled the same role in National Party governments as Shimon Peres and Ehud Barak have filled in Likud coalitions since 2001--the respectable face of the government that deals with the West.

So I started to think, what is the lag time between developments in South Africa and their equivalents in Israel? South Africa was initially ruled by the centrist Afrikaner South Africa Party (SAP). The National Party split from the SAP in 1913 and came to power for the first time in 1924. It then alternated with the SAP's successor, the United Party, until 1948 when it began an uninterrupted period of 46 years in power. The Likud first came to power  forming a coaliton in 1977, some 53 years after the National Party came to power. Twenty four years later--the same period as in South Africa--it began a period of uninterrupted rule of the Right, first the Likud under Sharon then the splinter Kadima under Sharon's successor Ehud Olmert, and finally the Likud again under Netanyahu.

Motives are much less important than actions

Those who are liberals, particularly those from the religious Left or from the "chattering classes" (as Margaret Thatcher used to refer to them) worry much about pure hearts in politicians.  Real politicians, however, worry much more about the ability to deliver.  Historians of American abolitionists from the 1960s to the present have sung the praises of William Lloyd Garrison and his followers because their political sentiments are politically correct today. But that meant that because of the very great changes in racial attitudes between their time and ours, their sentiments were very politically incorrect then. Garrison and his brand of abolitionists remained unpopular until the start of the Civil War.  Their rivals, the Liberty men of the tiny abolitionist Liberty Party were equally as unpopular and only averaged about two percent of the vote during the eight-year lifetime of the party. But the Liberty men at least had the correct impulse to use the ballot box in their cause. The more pragmatic among them, namely Salmon P. Chase, engineered a merger between the Liberty men and splinter groups from the two main parties, the Whigs and the Democrats. Then the professional politicians took over. The moralists within the Liberty Party revived that party rather than merger with the sinners and accomplish something. They were left on the ash heap of history.

In the Middle East the liberals have often felt disappointed by the politicians they have had to rely upon in the peace process. Although most belonged to Ratz or Mapam in the 1970s and 1980s and Meretz in the 1990s, they had to rely on the Labor Party to work as their vehicle. During the 1980s they had to rely upon Shimon Peres, a former hawk and very ambitious and weak politician, and Yitzhak Rabin, a pragmatic hawk until he died. In 1978 Menahem Begin, then prime minister suggested in the Knesset that Peres had become a dove because Rabin was blocking his way to the party leadership and he needed the doves to get around Rabin. President Mitterand of France started his political career on the Right in the Fourth Republic where he became one of the most talented politicians. In the Fifth Republic he suddenly moved to the Left and joined the Socialists. What happened--was it a miraculous conversion? No, he simply decided that he could not compete with Charles de Gaulle for the presidency from the Right. In 1981 he was elected the third president of the Fifth Republic and served for two full terms. Peres was never quite as lucky.

Peres and Rabin competed for twenty years during a period in which the Likud became and stayed the dominant party. Peres had to settle for the lesser prizes of senior ministries: defense minister (1974-77), foreign minister (1986-88) and finance minister (1988-90). Only from mid-1984 until October 1986 was he prime minister in a rotation scheme in a national unity government. He again served as prime minister in 1995-96 for six months following Rabin's murder.

It wasn't until 1993 that Labor could be persuaded to accept the PLO as their negotiating partner for peace rather than Jordan. This was despite Jordan having renounced its roled in 1988. Then in the 1990s liberal doves had to settle for a peace process between Rabin on the Israeli side and Arafat on the Palestinian side. The man who had as defense minister given the order to break the bones of Palestinian rioters in 1988 and the arch-terrorist responsible for the Munich massacre and other atrocities. It was not until January 2005 that the Palestinians chose a leader that most Israelis could stomach, if not exactly admire. And they had to settle for Arik Sharon, the butcher of Beirut, carrying out the withdrawal from Gaza later that year.

No wonder that many liberals were willing to give the benefit of the doubt to Bibi Netanyahu and hope that he had reformed since his first premiership in the late 1990s. In American history anti-slavery liberals faced a similar dilemma. Stephen A. Douglas in December 1857 had split the Democrats by opposing President James Buchanan in calling for new elections in Kansas before statehood was granted. Douglas was the champion of the 1850s version of pro-choice--he believed that local whites should determine whether or not a territory should be free or slave. Anti-slavery Republicans on the East Coast wanted  to give Douglas  a free shot at reelecction because of the trouble he could cause among the Democrats. The leader of their party in Illinois, Abraham Lincoln, wanted to run a vigorous campaign for the state legislature and be elected by that body as the U.S. senator from Illinois. Lincoln gave his famous "house divided" speech and argued that a live dog was better than a dead lion. Douglas was the dead lion because any feeling for the slave as a human being was dead in his heart. Lincoln modestly placed himself in the role of the live dog.

David Remnick of the New Yorker magazine has argued that Netanyahu is the equivalent of the dead lion, without actually using that metaphor. Today for liberals in Israel the equivalent of William Seward in the 1850s and Lincoln in the 1860s is Tzipi Livni of Kadima. She may be flawed but she is the best that they are going to get for some time. Now she just has to convince Israelis to trust her and to trust the leadership of the Palestinian Authority.