Elitist, splintered, myopic and Eurocentric – small wonder the centre-left has contributed to the rise of the Israeli right
Israelis have rarely seemed so despondent. During a recent trip ahead of the impending elections, the popular sentiment I kept hearing was of Israel as a country that screws its citizens. There's a paucity of hope, a frustrated paralysis over corruption, cronyism and ego-driven politics. Nobody believes voting will change anything. Sadly, some Israelis told me their best case scenario was that their children emigrate.
Israel is expected to elect the most rightwing government in its history on Tuesday – a coalition that will make the current prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, look like a man of peace.
His Likud party is running ever more extreme candidates and is outflanked to the right by Jewish Home, a rapidly rising, Palestine-denying, new settlers' party that is predicted to play a key role in coalition. But alongside the headlines heralding a rightward lurch, voter turnout is expected to plunge. That has prompted ubiquitous, state-sponsored commercials with the tagline: "Vote now; moan later."
Low motivation is highest among centre-left voters. Endemic levels of misery and apathy are tied to a popular conviction that Israeli politicians of all stripes will continue to serve an elite while ignoring everybody else, except to expose the wider population to constant fear and endless war.
The increasingly splintered centre and left parties are predicted to win up to 57 out of 120 Knesset seats. That sounds good, but no one party will have significant clout on its own, and they don't seem able to agree enough to form a strong, combined force (some of these left and centre parties might even join Bibi's coalition).
As the nation's mood seems to slide ever rightwards, polls still show majority support for the creation of a sovereign Palestinian state. And the mass social movement of 2011, a united cry against the nation's crippling neoliberal economics, brought 500,000 of the nation's 8 million on to the streets – the largest protests in Israel's history. How is it possible, in this context, for the left to be so powerless in politics?
The straight answer is that the Israeli left has never really been leftwing. Labour has long been the elite, establishment party, dominated by Jews of European origin who monopolised power and discriminated against Jewish communities from Muslim and Arab countries (labelled "Mizrahi" or "Eastern"). Such discrimination – the lopsided allocation of resources, such as land or education; the cultural negation – was so bad that ethnicity is now too often synonymous with class.
In the late 1970s, the rightwing Likud exploited this to win a landslide victory. Its leader at the time, Menachem Begin, toured city slums and peripheral towns proclaiming his party would never dishonour or deprive the majority Mizrahi population like Labour did. The wealth gap widened under Likud's naked capitalism, but mistrust of a condescending, Eurocentric left wing still holds sway – especially as ethnic discrimination remains an unacknowledged divide.
In a new documentary about the left, which recently aired on Israeli TV, the Iraqi-born Israeli author Sami Michael explains this crucial, myopic contradiction within the pro-peace left: "They see [Mizrahis] as a danger, because we bring Arab culture, enemy culture which the Israeli left hates," he says. "It's nice for them to be photographed with Arabs, to say that they have Arab friends, that they want peace. But peace with whom? First of all make peace with your own people!"
But the Israeli left can't make peace with the Palestinians, either – not even with the Palestinians who make up 20% of Israel's population, but are second-class citizens because of systemic discrimination. No Israeli government has included Arab political parties. Even in 1999, after gaining 94% of the Palestinian vote in Israel, Labour snubbed this sector and built a coalition without even a token Arab party. When peace talks with Palestinians at Camp David failed, the then Labour prime minister, Ehud Barak, proclaimed that Israel had "no partner for peace" – a cowardly own goal that kicked away a political foundation-stone.
"This is what made the right wing stronger," says Asma Aghbaria-Zahalka, leader of Daam, the Jewish-Arab workers' party. Although unlikely to gain a Knesset seat, she has gained many column inches for her fresh, charismatic socialism. "The Israeli left has no future without the Arabs, and the right will stay in power for ever," she says.
Therein lies another problem with the Israeli left: it doesn't really do equality. As Sami Michael (who is also president of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel) points out in the TV documentary, this should be the starting point of any leftwing party. While the right dominates identity politics with its ultra-patriotic Jewish nationalism, the supposed left can't provide a more inclusive, democratic alternative.
As Anat Saragusti, director of the social change communications centre Agenda explains: "My Israeli nationality is much larger and broader than my Jewish nationality. I have more in common with Arab citizens of Israel than with Jews in Guatemala or New York." A truly leftwing party would rise above the choking patriotism test of Jewish ethnocentrism and find a better alternative.
This failure to support an inclusive Israeli identity in part explains the factionalism that typifies Israeli left politics – without binding progressive ideals, every party has its pet issues to peddle. Ahead of this election, the Israeli centre-left sub-split into a baffling number of atomised parties – now including Labour, Kadima, Hatnuah, Meretz, Yesh Atid – which then polluted media coverage with childish squabbles about who wants to join whose gang. Small wonder that centre-left Israelis can't be bothered to vote.
However abhorrent, the far-right of "greater Israel", ultra-nationalism, no Palestine and pure neoliberalism is, at least, ideologically true to itself – which brings continuity and political traction. As long as the scattered Israeli left can't be properly leftwing, its hard to see the point of it – much less it having any meaningful success at the polls.
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