Andrew or Lyndon? Israel Post-Sharon
They are already talking about Ariel Sharon in the past tense. Whether the Israeli Prime Minister survives or not, it is becoming clear that his career in the political arena is over.
To understand fully Sharon's transformation and, indeed, greatness as a leader, one just has to listen to the worried words of Israelis and those that care about the Jewish State. From my limited -- although somewhat diverse sample of both -- what's surprising is that 10, five, and even two years ago, these people would not have shed a tear for Ariel Sharon. Yet, as Robert Satloff ably explains over at TNR, Sharon up-ended Israeli military policy, defense strategy, and party politics. He rejected the extremes of the right and left -- and like a colossus bridged the broad Israeli center.
Indeed, Sharon captured the thinking of "Middle Israel" and promised to restore the pre-1967 national consensus by rejecting both the Greater Israel theories of the expansionist right and the Land-for-Peace dreams of the dovish left. Right now, the question is whether the party he created to accomplish this - Kadima -- can move forward without him?
I know little about Ehud Olmert -- the presumptive head of Kadima post-Sharon -- and this new party is still gelling. A friend of mine from Jerusalem sent me an e-mail last night reassuring his friends here that "Kadima will survive, even if diminished, as it does represent a genuine, large centrist grouping within the body politic," and reminding us that Sharon was able to bring together an impressive group of leaders into Kadima.
Now, we have to see if Olmert will become an Andrew Johnson or Lyndon Johnson figure. If Olmert ends up emulating the man who stepped into Lincoln's shoes -- a hapless leader unable to bring the country together or bend policymaking to his agenda -- then Israel, the region, and US interests there are in trouble. However, if Olmert ends up as an LBJ, he will use the Sharon legacy as an effective political tool to bring the country together, break political logjams, and undertake policy advances that seemed unlikely or impossible just months before.
Of course, no one wants Olmert to become the LBJ who refused to reverse course in Vietnam, but if it's between the path of Andrew or the path of Lyndon, we all should hope that Olmert is an LBJ man.
Meanwhile, back in the States (and in the West overall), we need a genuine peace and human rights movement to advance such perspectives among the interested third parties in the international diplomatic sphere. Unfortunately, what we have now instead is a movement that maintains the ortodoxy of the UN's 2001 Durban conference, whereby Jewish and Arab national rights in the former British Mandatory Palestine are mutually exclusive, and a rigid prejudice insisting upon an exclusively religious component of Jewish identity that disqualifies the Jewish people from equal national rights among the family of nations.
January 5, 2006 7:42 AM | Reply | Permalink
Indeed, Sharon captured the thinking of "Middle Israel" and promised to restore the pre-1967 national consensus by rejecting both the Greater Israel theories of the expansionist right and the Land-for-Peace dreams of the dovish left.
This is an empty paragraph. You've said what he rejected, now what did he embrace? Or is "greatness" achieved by the mere act of rejection?
January 5, 2006 7:44 AM | Reply | Permalink
It seems to me that rather than rejecting both, he embraced both, just at different times during his career. Early on, he was among the leaders of the settler movement. Recently, he withdrew from Gaza. The end result will be that he maintained the stalemate.
January 5, 2006 8:06 AM | Reply | Permalink
The best option for Kadima would be to turn to another Sharon protege, Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz - former Chief-of-Staff and an Iranian Jew. Olmert could remain the parties point main on the domestic issues he knows best, while Mofaz and Shimon Peres could work to craft a continuation of unilateral separation policy that would be faithful to the legacy the Sharon has created in the past five years.
January 5, 2006 8:16 AM | Reply | Permalink
As for Sharon, he adopted the unilateral withdrawal policy only reluctantly, and after having explicitly run against it less than a year before he announced his support for it. Not exactly the most forward-thinking leader in the country's history. Still, he did have the credibility with the electorate to get rid of at least some of the settlements, and he overcame severe political challenges within his own party to get it done, which definitely counts for something.
January 5, 2006 8:21 AM | Reply | Permalink
I find myself rather astonished to read tributes to Sharon as if he was about to do something important and revolutionary in Israel.
As best I can make out, he did one thing concrete and substantive that might be considered a positive. He withdrew from Gaza.
Now a cynic might say that he was simply listening to those even on the right who thought they had better do that, for a less than noble reason. Namely, there were so many Palestinians in Gaza that, together with the Palestinians and other non-Jews in Israel and the occupied territories, they were approaching a majority in the combined region. This would make a call of "one person one vote" in that region impossible to respond to, making Israel look like an Apartheid.
In other words, his only true, "positive" step toward peace can be understood simply as a device to stave off imminent national disgrace. Given that Gaza was and is so undesirable to Jews in any case, and having little historical significance to either side, and containing only a handful of settlers, the withdrawal required only the most relatively trivial amount of confrontation. Who would imagine that the same would be true if there was a perceived need to withdraw from the more attractive portions of the occupied territories?
What I suspect will happen is that a cult of personality will develop around the whole issue of peace, with a great pretense that if only Sharon had survived, peace might have come. In fact, the true obstacle to peace is now, and always will be, the inherent politics of the the Israelis themselves, and of the Palestinians themselves. The Israelis will NEVER be able to give up enough of the occupied territories to bring about peace, just as, on the opposite side, the Palestinians will NEVER be able to cede enough of the occupied territories to bring about peace. Nothing Sharon has done, or could ever do, will break that stalemate.
What does that mean? Simply that things will continue as they have, pretty much ad infinitum. But the fly in the ointment for Israel's supporters is the underlying demographic trends, which predict that within a decde or two, the number of non-Jews in the occupied territories and Israel, even excluding Gaza, will constitute a majority, and within a few decades, that that will be so even within Israel proper.
That, finally, will be the day of reckoning for Israel and its supporters. They will have to stop talking about the "Jewish Democracy", because it will no longer exist, and indisputable Apartheid will supplant it. Will Israel's band of supporters reject this new state? My prediction: not on your life. They will simply scale up their rationalizations, as they have done in every instance in the past. Unhappily for them, the potency of the Holocaust will have greatly diminished as a pretext for Israel, and the accusation of anti-Semitism will have lost most of its punch.
You'd think that the more thoughtful supporters of Israel would be contemplating with real horror this certain fate for their beloved country. But if so, I have seen virtually no evidence of it.
January 5, 2006 9:25 AM | Reply | Permalink
Just to follow up my post, what strikes me is that so many of Israel's supporters, who see in Israel the fruition of a desire the Jewish people have held for thousands of years, can't bring themselves to contemplate even a few decades down the line, when Israel becomes an Apartheid.
What is the glory or point of creating such a country, which can survive for only about 100 years from its inception before becoming a disgrace?
January 5, 2006 9:42 AM | Reply | Permalink
frankly0, any and all Israel supporters who have ever identified with the left/left-of-center side of the Israeli political spectrum have spent the last several decades warning about the exact demographic realities you mention, vis-a-vis the occupied territories (although the demographic future of pre '67 Israel is far less obvious than you make it out to be). Just to name one example, while he isn't exactly my favorite columnist these days, Tom Friedman has written literally dozens of columns about the exact subject of the demographic reality of Israel and the territories as a whole. But it must feel nice to be on that high-horse, safely removed from any and all "more thoughtful supporters of Israel."
January 5, 2006 9:42 AM | Reply | Permalink
The end result will be that he maintained the stalemate.
In fact, he achieved precisely the opposite, although it depends on which stalemate you're talking about. Israel through most of the last 20 years or so was stuck between those on the left who chased the chimerical land-for-peace idea and those on the right who insisted that Israel had to hold on to all the land for both ideological/religious and security reasons (the reasoning shifts depending on who you talk to). After the experience of dealing with the Palestinians and Arafat through the 90's, it became clear that land-for-peace was impossible as long as the Palestinian Authority doesn't have control over its territory.
Meanwhile, on the right, the proportion of the people who believed that holding on to the occupied territories is a net gain for Israel dropped significantly. Many on the right began to realize that the cost of holding on to the land was too high and that what was needed was a separation of the populations. The problem there is the existence of settlements in the West Bank that house hundreds of thousands of people.
Sharon chose the obvious path: forget about the Palestinians as negotiating partners and impose a unilateral solution that recognizes the realities on the ground. Those are that Israel cannot maintain the occupation of Palestinians indefinitely and that uprooting Jewish settlers from the main West Bank towns is not going to happen. As a result, he was on a path to creating real, secure borders for Israel and letting the Palestinians stew in their own areas. It's the only realistic option Israel has given the chaos and radicalization among the Palestinians. It is also where the majority of Israelis are in their thinking. I would expect that, contrary to what some have written about Israel reverting back to the political stalemate of before, the new centrist consensus in Israel will indeed outlive Sharon and will prevail politically.
January 5, 2006 9:48 AM | Reply | Permalink
Haggai,
I'm certainly aware that any number of people have pointed out these demographic trends.
What I'm saying is that I have seen NOTHING of substance from the supporters of Israel in how to respond to them.
What is the answer supporters of Israel have to this impending moral catastrophe for their country? What will they say in defense of an Israel that must shut down true democracy in order to remain in Jewish control?
All I've heard is evasion.
Maybe you could find a way to answer the question without evasion?
January 5, 2006 9:51 AM | Reply | Permalink
There would certainly be no defense at all for retaining the West Bank into perpetuity. Who among the "more thoughtful supporters of Israel" says otherwise?
As for pre-'67 Israel, if peace came with the Palestinians and the demographic balance still tipped against the Jewish population in a few decades time (and again, it's far from obvious that this will even come close to happening), there would need to be some re-calibrating of the national institutions in some pretty important senses. What it would be not be is apartheid, or the end of democracy; Israeli Arab citizens do still face discrimination in a lot of ways, but it's not apartheid.
January 5, 2006 9:57 AM | Reply | Permalink
Haggai,
Really, this is a nonresponsive response -- just another evasion.
Look, the problem with democracy is that numbers count, by definition, and they mean something -- look at the US as a too poignant example, in which minor differences in numbers have forced a very unwholesome agenda on the minority point of view.
You talk about how Israeli Arabs aren't discriminated against. This is utterly irrelevant. The problem is, how is Israel going to maintain any kind of basic identity as a Jewish state in a democracy in which they are a minority? This is no "recalibration" -- this goes to the very heart of what Israel conceives itself to be, and is conceived to be by its supporters. My prediction is that, between staying clearly in Jewish control, and embracing a real democracy, it's going to be the first that will win out, and Israel will become an Apartheid.
Really, it's pretty obvious that you yourself are one of those supporters of Israel who just can't come to terms with the impending moral doom for Israel. You seem to be the very type of supporter of whom I spoke.
January 5, 2006 10:10 AM | Reply | Permalink
Exactly how is the desire not to descend into apartheid an ignoble motivation for statecraft? This notion that Jewish interests and Israeli policies are nefarious by nature would seem medieval if it weren't so increasingly popular.
January 5, 2006 10:19 AM | Reply | Permalink
"My prediction is that, between staying clearly in Jewish control, and embracing a real democracy, it's going to be the first that will win out, and Israel will become an Apartheid."
I do not think that Jews will become a minority within pre '67 Israel, and even if they are, I do not think they will choose to ditch 100 years of democracy (at least within their own borders) in favor of apartheid. There simply isn't anything more for me to debate you about.
January 5, 2006 10:34 AM | Reply | Permalink
Haggai,
Apparently, your problem is that you are "evading" frankly0's predictions and certainties.
January 5, 2006 10:44 AM | Reply | Permalink
I confess I don't have the pulse on who the Israeli electorate trusts to succeed Sharon, but there is a clear consensus for the the path of unilateral separation laid out by Sharon - untangle the populations to the best extent possible and draw the most defensible border that leaves the smallest number of Palestinians under occupation.
January 5, 2006 12:05 PM | Reply | Permalink
Agreed on all counts, mhpine. The fact is that nobody in particular is trusted yet by the electorate, as almost all of the potential contenders are considered to be largely untested. But that path you mention is definitely the one that most voters want to continue on.
January 5, 2006 12:13 PM | Reply | Permalink
This seems to me like a pretty clear expression of the view that (1) Israeli democracy is valuable and (2) in order to preserve Israel's democracy and identity as a Jewish state Israel should withdraw from the West Bank.
There is a clearly defined problem and a clearly proposed solution that does not evade the real problem posed by demographics.
January 5, 2006 12:19 PM | Reply | Permalink
Maybe you're right Brad that given time Sharon's initiative would (and maybe still will) produce results. But until I see an actual solution implemented successfully, I think the only conclusion I can draw is that the reality of stalemate continues.
January 5, 2006 2:48 PM | Reply | Permalink
Give me a break.
January 5, 2006 5:59 PM | Reply | Permalink