Fear as Gold
The Currency of Israel’s Elections
By Binoy Kampmark
Elections can be shots in the
barrel of darkness. Polls can prove the
poorest of measures, masking expediency,
calculation and, in the end, sheer
desperation. The voter finds form just
before casting the ballot. The mind can take
leave of its senses. The psychology of
vulnerability can prevail.
The Israeli
elections of 2015 will be a textbook example
of fear fastened to a mast of glaring
despair. If ever politics could be dismissed
as the practice of dismissal and loathing,
this election must be it. Benjamin
Netanyahu’s contemporary practitioners of
those dark arts – Canada’s Stephen Harper,
Australia’s Tony Abbott, and Britain’s David
Cameron, were made to look amateurish, mere
adolescents in their uses of narratives of
doom.
Not since the
days of the carnival-like Bush
administration, when fear had the currency
of gold, did we see anything like this in
the context of a nominally democratic
society. “Every so often,” as the late Robin
Williams reminded us of the former US
Secretary of Defense, “Rumsfeld comes out
and goes ‘I don’t where, and I don’t know
when, but something awful’s going to happen.
That’s all for today. No further questions.”
[1] That is the language of Homeland
Security, Stasiland and police paternalism.
It is the lingo of the wall and the garrison
state.
Not that the
Likud campaign did not try to sugar the
effort with a touch of celluloid miracle.
One tries to do one’s best to protect
paradise. Foreign supporters of Netanyahu
were rolled out in what counted as comic
detritus. “I watched Prime Minister
Netanyahu’s speech before Congress,” claimed
a vapid Chuck Norris on a YouTube video,
“and I saw a man who loves his country with
all his heart and soul. I also saw a strong
leader that is absolutely crucial for the
safety of the Israeli people.” [2]
It came down
to the last, tight days. The polls were
always going to be hard to read – a recent
Israeli law prevented pollsters from earning
their keep from Thursday on. This laid the
ground for the speculative and daring,
though Netanyahu’s opponents were taking
stock about readings that showed up to 60
percent of Israelis did not want him to
continue in office. [3] Last Friday, it
seemed that Yitzhak Herzog’s Zionist
grouping would lead by four seats.
Yesh Atid
party leader Yair Lapid provided the fiery
summation prior to the polls. Netanyahu had
acted in merciless self-interest, calling
“unnecessary” early elections to spite the
constituency. “Why? Because you are
disconnected. You have no idea what it does
to the citizens of Israel because you live
in your aquarium and for a long time you
don’t know who the people are and what
really troubles them” (Jerusalem Post,
Mar 12).
In an effort
to push voters back into the Likud fold,
Netanyahu of the aquarium employed rhetoric
that was heated, spiced, and flamed. “It
was,” observed Gaid Wolfsfeld of the
Interdisciplinary Centre in Herzliya, “a
scorched earth policy to stay in power” (New
York Times, Mar 17). It’s singeing
character involved an assortment of
nightmarish scenarios about race – what will
those Arab Israelis do to the voting
numbers? The main party representing
Israeli-Arabs, United List, was condemned as
an extremist outfit. Herzog’s grouping were
excoriated as effete, cuddling up to
sinister foreign forces.
Then came
that most Machiavellian of plays – the issue
of recognising a Palestinian state. For
Netanyahu, pitching in those last desperate
hours against the very idea was the gamble
of gambles, suggesting that the peace
process was not only a shambles, but a dead
shambles. The strongman was refusing to
yield to any prospects that might let
insecurity via Israel’s vulnerable backdoor
– Palestinians could not be trusted with
either sovereignty or security.
Having
attained electoral victory, Netanyahu has
demonstrated how the reptile in politics can
go far, one whose embrace of an economic
version of reality can profit. As Gigi
Grinstein, founder of the Israeli strategy
group the Reut Institute suggested,
Netanyahu might well go “back to the
two-state solution.” [4]
On Thursday,
he did the rounds on American television
claiming that the Monday rubbishing of a
Palestinian state was not intended as a
repudiation of his 2009 stance taken at Bar
Illan University. “I want a sustainable,
peaceful, two-state solution,” proposed
Netanyahu in an MSNBC interview. “But for
that, circumstances have to change.”
Before Fox
News, the new Netanyahu showed very much
what the old Netanyahu thought. “I said we
have to change the terms. Because right now,
we have to get the Palestinians to go back
to the negotiating table, break their pact
with Hamas, and accept the idea of a Jewish
state.” In an atmosphere of duplicity and
pervasive double-think, a Likud
deputy-foreign minister such as Tzachi
Hanegbi can make a statement that Israel
“would be very delighted to renew
negotiations” with the Palestinians.
Naturally, blame them for intransigence –
they merely have nothing to negotiate with.
Even US State
Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki would say
in a somewhat undiplomatic tone that the
Israeli Prime Minister had chosen to remain
vague and inconsistent on the issue. “If he
had consistently stated that he remained in
favour of a two-state solution, we’d be
having a different conversation.” [5] The
Obama administration has promised a
strategic “rethink” regarding the two-state
solution stance, but is hardly going to move
beyond the state of current stagnation.
Israel can’t be the ritual absentee in this
matter.
The
connoisseur of hopelessness won, but the
costs of that victory will be telling. The
insistence by Netanyahu to place Israel in a
parallel stream of political consciousness,
a garrisoned world ironically ghettoised and
repellent of international convention and
diplomacy, is finite in its realisation. It
could also prove fatal.
Dr. Binoy
Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at
Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at
RMIT University, Melbourne. Email:
bkampmark@gmail.com
Notes
1.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LaJDOD5cJI
2.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2998938/A-campaign-muscle-Chuck-Norris-endorses-Benjamin-Netanyahu-s-election-cult-action-hero-says-crucial-safety-Israel.html
3.
http://www.jpost.com/Israel-Elections/Post-poll-60-percent-of-Israelis-dont-want-Netanyahu-anymore-383724
4.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/18/world/middleeast/netanyahu-israel-elections-arabs.html?_r=0
5.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/abbas-two-state-solution-no-longer-possible-1426776658