Emanuele Ottolenghi has written a really superb analysis of the Israeli election. Rightly lamenting the fact that voter apathy/disaffection failed to give Israel the strong government that it so desperately needs, he observes:

The real losers are the Israelis and judging by their apathy, they probably deserve it: By not voting, they brought it upon themselves. Like their fallen hero, Ariel Sharon, who is in a deep coma in a hospital, they sleepwalked through an election where they had a chance to shape their destiny but instead gave their new and untested leaders an inconclusive verdict.

Still, a clear message emerged from this vote. Israelis are ready to partition the land, though they cannot trust the Palestinian give-and-take. History offers its ironies, and it is remarkable that on the day Israelis voted to seal their willingness to endorse the partition of the land, a Hamas government won an easy majority in the Palestinian parliament and renewed its militant vision. While Israelis are prepared to endorse a two-state solution, Palestinians, through their Hamas-led Palestinian entity, are ready for a final solution only...

Olmert wants to redraw Israel's boundaries today. He will have to avoid the nightmarish scenario of a civil war that a narrow center-left coalition would no doubt usher in and will have to negotiate the consensus with the right. That, even in ideal conditions, would take longer than the time it took Rabin's far more stable coalition to sign Oslo and it would cost infinitely more than the Disengagement did: this time, it would evict tens of thousands of settlers from their homes, and it is the heartland of Biblical Israel that they would be asked to abandon for an uncertain future.

But conditions are not ideal. While Israelis were busy voting (or not voting), a Katyusha rocket landed in southern Israel, killing two Beduin shepherds. No doubt, now commentators will bend over backward to say that it was not Hamas, but some "militant" group that "rejects" the "peace process." Whoever pulled the trigger, Gaza today is closer to Tel Aviv than ever before. And the presence of much more efficient, elusive, and sophisticated weaponry in Gaza seven months only after the disengagement shows how frail and fragile the Kadima vision was, how unreliable the international community who should be monitoring the borders is, and how ineffectual (not to say worse) are the Egyptians in Sinai when it comes to weapons' smuggling into Gaza. And that withdrawal does not a peace make.

With Israel now encircled by Iran's proxies and Islamist fanatics, the last thing the country needed was an inconclusive result. It got just that. It will reap the whirlwinds of its apathy.

It cannot be said too often that Israel’s agony is that it is damned if it does and damned if it does not; at terrible risk if it disengages from the territories and at (in my view) even greater -- because more fundamentally existential -- risk if it does not. Should it talk to Hamas? Of course not. Does it have any choice but to deal with Hamas? Of course not. All Israel’s choices are always terrible ones; all entail a fearful penalty that it is forced to pay. The only question is, as it always has been, which is the least worst of these terrible alternatives.

Is this not also why the Israeli voters are ‘apathetic’? A less politically apathetic people cannot be imagined: fixated upon every political development, glued to the news bulletins every hour, because for them politics is literally the difference between life and death. A more insanely optimistic people cannot also be imagined: seizing upon every hope of peace, every scrap of evidence, however slender, that the Arabs may not really want to kill them or destroy the Jewish state. But it is in fact the optimism born of the deepest possible despair, clutching at any straw in order not to face the possibility that is simply too terrible to be even contemplated -- that there really is no end to this Arab hatred, and that there is no end to the state of siege that Israel has been forced to endure since its inception.

It has defended itself through wars. It has defended itself through negotiating for peace. It has defended itself by dialogue through discreet back-channels with reformist Palestinian Arabs. It has defended itself by the targeted killing of genocidal Palestinian Arabs. It has defended itself by electing warlike expansionist right-wingers. It has defended itself by electing peace-at-any-price left-wingers. Yet whatever it does, nothing brings an end to the agony. Instead, to its bewilderment and incomprehension, much of the free world has decided that it must be treated as a global pariah because it has dared to attempt to defend itself at all.

Now, as it reels punch-drunk round the geopolitical ring, fate has dealt it another cruel twist. No sooner was it presented with another possible escape from the trap – to call the Arab bluff, impose upon the Palestinians the state that is the pretended cause of the conflict and then turn its back upon them until they come to agree that life is preferable to death and economic prosperity preferable to mass murder – than the architect of this vision was felled and the country left leaderless.

Shell-shocked, traumatised and dysfunctional after decades of unremitting abuse for the crime of daring to exist at all; with rockets being fired daily from Hamastan and genocide being invoked from Iran; with people screaming that the government is paving the way to national extinction by coming out of the territories; with people screaming that the government is paving the way to national extinction by not coming out of enough of the territories fast enough; with the ‘greater Israel’ movement having been destroyed by Sharon; with the ‘peace’-camp having been destroyed by Arafat, Hamas and Islamic Jihad; with elderly Israelis scrabbling in refuse heaps for food (!); with a political class that makes Little Piddling borough council look like world statesmen and an electoral system that is a blueprint for permanent national paralysis – is it any wonder that, abruptly finding themselves to be political orphans with the passing of their warrior father, the Israelis lost their confidence in yet another leap into the menacing dark and voted for the Pensioners’ Party instead?

People ask: will the election result make peace more or less likely? Wrong question. The election result is irrelevant to the issue of peace in the Middle East. That is because what the Israelis do cannot affect whether peace comes to the Middle East, because what the Israelis do is not the cause of war in the Middle East. The cause of that war is the fact that Israel exists at all and the drive by the Arab world to eradicate it– and the fact that the free world has refused to acknowledge that simple fact for the past half century is the most important reason why this murderous impasse still continues. Paying lip-service to its ‘right to exist’ – an avowal which calls that right into question merely by articulating it – the so-called civilised west has nevertheless been content to let Israel swing in the wind while its attackers are fawned over, traded with, built up, endorsed, promoted, excused, justified and indulged.

What will make peace more likely? If – and only if -- the free world repairs its busted moral compass and starts treating mass murderers as pariahs and defending their victims, rather than the other way round. The chances of that happening, it has to be said, are remote. As a result, the only question arising from Israel’s election result is whether it will make it easier or harder for Israel to defend itself against the unremitting war waged against it; and to that question, the answer will become clear soon enough.

Posted by melanie at March 30, 2006