Elections: Israel needs a strong Left to safe it from itself - opinion
While there are popular opposition leaders today, such as centrist Yair Lapid, he isn’t the savior who will enable the Israeli Left to seriously challenge the Right’s entrenched beliefs.
By JOSH FELDMANLABOR PARTY leader Merav Michaeli (center) attends a first meeting of the party with its newly-elected members, in Tel Aviv on Tuesday.(photo credit: AVSHALOM SASSONI/FLASH90)
We are living in polarizing times. We are living in times in which people are clinging onto beliefs despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, and despite the increasing absurdity of their claims. We are living in times of incitement, intolerance and grave misunderstanding of the “other.”It is in this very climate, then, that exposure to the other – those on the opposing side of the ideological aisle – is so vital to society. It is also why Israel is in desperate need of a strong left-wing political party.On March 23, Israelis will vote, with recent polling predicting that of the four parties to win the most seats, three of them are right wing, namely: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud (29), Gideon Sa’ar’s New Hope (15), and Naftali Bennett’s Yamina (14). In total, right-wing parties are predicted to take approximately two-thirds of the Knesset’s 120 seats.That Israel’s political Right carries great clout is of no concern. What is extremely distressing, however, is the abyss that Israel’s left-wing parties have fallen into. Ruling Israel for the first 29 years after its founding, the political Left has now become utterly irrelevant, with polls handing left-wing Meretz a mere five seats. Labor, Israel’s once all-powerful ruling party, is barely expected to pass the minimum 3.25% threshold to enter parliament.Israel will be headed down a dangerous path if March’s elections hand the political Right another four years of power, albeit this time total.For decades, Israel has been home to a boisterous opposition. These were not simply parties excluded from ruling coalitions, but rather parties with vastly different worldviews to those in power. As in any democracy, this is vital to ensuring a nation continuously questions its convictions, and does not stifle itself and its creativity through ideological homogeneity. With the disappearance of strong left-wing political parties, however, Israel’s political arena – already largely dominated by the right – is at risk of exactly that.According to a January poll, more than half of Jewish-Israeli voters identify as right wing, while a mere 16% to 18% identify with the Left. In such an atmosphere, one can all but guarantee that there will be no unified voice to confront the Right when it inevitably errs. We all recognize the difficulty in admitting our own mistakes, so do we genuinely believe a political movement with no true ideological opposition will engage in any serious introspection?ISRAEL’S SHORT history already contains similar warnings. Following 25 years of uninterrupted rule, the smugness pervading Israel’s left-wing elite saw it caught utterly unprepared by a surprise Arab attack in 1973, with near catastrophic results. The situation was so dire, that Moshe Dayan, Israel’s defense minister, proposed using nuclear weapons. Israeli society today would do well to heed the warning of 1973.While there are popular opposition leaders today, such as centrist Yair Lapid, he isn’t the savior who will enable the Israeli Left to seriously challenge the Right’s entrenched beliefs.This is all the more relevant given the terrifying levels of hyper-polarization and incitement permeating Israeli society. According to an October poll from the Israel Democracy Institute, 71% of Israelis believe “incitement is widespread”, while 86% of left-wingers “view themselves as targets for incitement.” The same sentiments are held by 81% of haredim (ultra-Orthodox), 70% of Arabs and 67% of right-wingers.Perhaps the survey’s most telling result, however, is the recipient of “blame for the incitement.” While “political leadership on the Right” is blamed by 74% of the Left and 44% of centrists, only 10% on the Right agree. It should cause great concern (yet perhaps come as little surprise) that those who are gaining increasingly uncontested control of Israel’s political front are simultaneously unable to question their role in the spreading of a social virus throughout Israel.In 1944, American judge and judicial philosopher Learned Hand described “the spirit of liberty” as “the spirit which is not too sure that it is right.” It is this very spirit of actively questioning one’s own beliefs and actions that has guided Jewish thought for millennia, and it is the same spirit that safeguards democracy, preventing polarization of the kind that we are witnessing today on a global scale. It is this spirit, too, that encourages compromise, and enables coalitions such as the 1984 national unity government between Yitzhak Shamir’s Likud and Shimon Peres’s Alignment. I doubt whether a coalition between such fierce ideological opponents would be possible today.Should the Left disappear for good, Israel will not only be faced with a right-wing movement competing against itself, but a political movement whose assumptions will remain unchallenged and whose iconoclasts will be silenced. That can never bode well for democracy.The author is an Australian writer and activist for Jewish and Israeli issues. The views expressed in this article are his, and do not reflect those of any organization of which he is a part.
