Israelis went to the polls this week with the hope of resolving the Israeli-Palestinianconflict once and for all. The new political party Kadima, which means 'forward'in Hebrew, promised as much and therefore won the day, while the country'slong-established ruling parties, Labor and Likud, lost their traditional placeat the helm.
Although the refreshing social justice discourse introduced by Labor's newleader, the Moroccan born union advocate Amir Peretz, did inject energy into theshattered party, he failed to reap the support many had hoped for. His positionregarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been rightly criticized asincoherent, and it also appears that many of Labor's longtime Ashkenazi votershave deserted the party ranks because they are unwilling to be led by a MizrahiJew.
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Likud's situation is much worse. Following the creation of Kadima it lostalmost 75 percent of its cohorts not least because it has been increasinglycharacterized as an extremist party that represents the settler's uncompromisingideology. Perhaps more importantly, during his tenure as Minister of Finance,Binyamin Netanyahu introduced unpopular Thatcherite policies that pushedhundreds of thousands of Israelis under the poverty line. After the election'shumiliating results -- in which Likud won less than 10% of the Knesset seats andhas been relegated to the fifth largest party -- many believe that Netanyahushould resign.
Even though the extreme right lost many seats, Avigdor Liberman's party IsraelBeiteinu (Israel is our Home), garnered 12 seats, four times more than it won inthe previous elections. This is a worrisome development since Liberman isIsrael's version of France's Jean Marie Le Pen, a shrewd politician whocaptivates right wing voters by appealing to atavistic sentiments of Jewishblood and soil.
Whereas Liberman may have been the election's surprise, Kadima was its victor,gaining 28 seats. Kadima's meteoric ascent in the polls is due, in part, to apervasive yearning for a centrist party that will solve the Israeli-Palestinianconflict. While the party has very little to say about the country's othersocial ills, Ehud Olmert's bold declaration that Kadima will unilaterallydetermine Israel's international borders is one of the secrets behind itsnoteworthy achievement.
It was actually the party's founder, a man who is currently lying in a coma, whomanaged to persuade the public that he will make the Palestinian problemdisappear. In the weeks leading up to the elections Kadima simply exploitedAriel Sharon's promise, and much of the support the party enjoys reflects theenormous respect many Israelis developed for the former prime minister.
Kadima had a straightforward message and the Israeli public bought it. Thethrust of its claim is that there is a contradiction between Israel's geographicand demographic aspirations: as the settlement project deepened its hold on theOccupied Territories, the very idea of Israel as a Jewish state, where Jews arethe majority, has been undermined. In other words, the fact that the majority ofpeople living between the Jordan Valley and the Mediterranean Sea are not Jewishunderscores the impossibility of achieving the vision of a greater Israel whilemaintaining a Jewish state.
The party's idea is to unilaterally redraw the borders between Israel and thePalestinian territories, and thus to radically alter the region's demographicand geographic reality. Last summer's Gaza pull-out constituted the plan's firststage. This move was regarded both in Israel and among the internationalcommunity as a positive step towards solving the conflict. Few seemed to carethat it was carried out unilaterally and that the new reality limited Gazanseven further in terms of resources, mobility and decision-making.
In a recent interview for Ha'aretz, Olmert outlined the plan's nextstage, explaining that Sharon's so-called security barrier will become Israel'spolitical border. But he failed to explain what exactly will the conversion ofthe security barrier into a political border entail.
Demographically, the barrier will surround 48 Jewish settlements from the east,so that 171,000 of the West Bank's settlers will be incorporated into Israel'snew borders. The wall being built in East Jerusalem is meant to reinforce the1967 annexation of this part of the city, and to further consolidate the 183,800settlers living there. In this way the government will not have to evacuate 87percent of the settlers now living in the West Bank, and Jews will have a clearmajority within Israel's unilaterally determined borders. The price Israel willhave to pay for such a solution is the evacuation of 52,000 settlers.
Geographically, however, the barrier qua political border (including Israel'splan to maintain control of the Jordan valley) does not resemble either one ofthe two traditional visions for peace: the two-state solution or the bi-nationalpolity.
An examination of the barrier's route reveals that the future Palestinian ìstateîwill be divided into three if not five areas (including Gaza). Each area will beclosed off almost entirely from the others, while Israel effectively continuesto control all of the borders so as to enforce a hermetic closure whenever itwishes. What is new about Kadima's vision is not the attempt to create isolatedenclaves in the Occupied Territories, but rather the effort to transform theseinto quasi-independent entities that will ostensibly constitute a Palestinianstate.
Examining the make up of the new Knesset, it appears that anywhere between 65and 85 members out of 120 will support Olmert's proposal. The brilliancy ofKadima's political plan is that it solves Israel's demographic problem andpresents its solution as the two-state option, regardless of the fact that thiswill be the first time in history that a so-called 'independent state' will nothave power over any of its borders. Indeed, Kadima's plan elides the fact thatIsrael will continue to control the Palestinians, whose living conditions willbe even further limited. The methods of control, though, will have to be moreremote and technologically sophisticated, using biometrics, video cameras,robots and surveillance aircraft.
The Palestinians, in turn, will no doubt employ all means at their disposal toresist Israel's attempt to transform the West Bank and Gaza into remotelycontrolled Bantustans. Consequently, one should not be surprised if Olmert'splan were to be met by Qasam missiles being launched from the West Bank towardsJerusalem and Tel-Aviv.
The ultimate irony is that Kadima's political vision actually puts the peaceprocess into reverse. On the one hand, it is trying to persuade the public thatit can make the Palestinian problem disappear by reintroducing the age-oldZionist trope of an iron wall. On the other hand, it has abandoned all forms ofdialogue and negotiation, which Israeli leaders since the early 1990s understoodto be the only way to reach a solution with the Palestinians. Kadima isaccordingly an oxymoron. While the party's name means forward its politicalprogram will effectively take Israelis several steps backwards.
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Neve Gordon teaches humanrights at Ben-Gurion University in Israel and is the editor of Fromthe Margins of Globalization: Critical Perspectives on Human Rights.
