Reviewed by: E. L. Abramowitz
Most “experts” on Israeli affairs will tell you that the results of the two recent Knesset elections prove that Israel is a deeply divided country. What they really prove, however, is that the vast majority of Israelis are united around right-of-center principles, and the Israeli Left has completely collapsed—exactly as Prof. Mordecai Nisan predicted in his new book, The Crack-Up of the Israeli Left.
More than 90% of Israeli Jews voted for parties with right-of-center platforms. Blue-White may have run as the anti-Netanyahu party, but its positions were clearly to the right: hit the Gaza terrorists harder, keep large parts of Judea-Samaria as part of Israel, and rejection of a Palestinian state.
The only Jewish political parties that campaigned in favor of a Palestinian state, the Democratic Union (formerly Meretz) and the Labor Party, won a combined total of just eleven seats—less than 10% of the Knesset.
This is an astounding change from previous decades. For the first twenty-nine years of Israel’s history, Labor ruled Israel and was by far the largest political party. As recently as 1992, Labor and Meretz were able to put together a governing coalition. Today, they are a pale shadow of their former selves. What happened?
The core reason that the Israeli left has cracked up is the failure of the Oslo accords, according to Prof. Nisan, who taught Middle East studies at Hebrew University for many years. “The nationalist camp remained committed to Zionism and its central pillar of Jewish settlement in the Land of Israel, specifically Judea and Samaria,” while the Left “lost the moral high ground, babbling about the Oslo peace process with the Palestinians which turned into a bloodbath of terrorism against the Jews.”
The Israeli Left was good at slogans. “Land for peace” is the best known. The Hebrew-language bumper sticker which translated as “Peace is Better than a Greater Israel” had a certain attraction in the 1980s. Simplistic, catchy, a quick fix to a seemingly insoluble problem. The public allowed itself to be dragged into the Oslo agreement, an experiment that failed—miserably. Catchy slogans lost their appeal in the smoke and flames of Palestinian suicide bombers.
That left the Likud to clean up the post-Oslo mess. Beginning in 1996, “the Likud Party, particularly under the leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu, successfully dominated the political arena in elections and coalition governments, directing the country to impressive successes in the economic domain, foreign policy, and promoting more balance in the media and culture to give voice to rightist, nationalist, patriotic themes,” Nisan writes.
The Left did not give up easily. True believers never do. And as much as
They mock Jewish religious believers, diehard leftists were true believers, secular messianists, always convinced that giving up one more piece of land, tearing down one more Jewish community, making one more concession, would bring Israel to the verge of a messianic era of peace and tranquility.
As their electoral share steadily diminished, the Israeli left desperately sought other avenues of influence, Nisan reports: “The Leftist forces continued to predominant in academia, the courts, and in various cultural domains where they adopted the Palestinian position against Israel’s rights and interests.”
Israeli leftists increasingly sought common cause with forces that were cold or even hostile to the Jewish State: radical Israeli Arabs, anti-Israel European NGOs, American Jewish far-left activists, and even the Palestinian Authority.
This activity gained the Israeli left lots of media coverage and speaking invitations to United Nations forums, but in the end cost it dearly among Israelis voters, Nisan points out. Not just Israeli right-wingers, but also the center and even the moderate left recoil at the idea of collaborating with hostile forces. Every pilgrimage by Meretz leaders to Ramallah drove away moderate-left Israelis who had previously voted for the party.
“Maligning courageous Israeli soldiers, portraying Israel as a racist state, clinging to a vacuous peace over Zionist idealism—this kind of extremism has further contributed to the crack-up of the Israeli left,” according to Prof. Nisan.
Perhaps the final straw that sealed the left’s awful performance in the last elections was its extreme hostility to Jewish tradition. Nisan points out that while Orthodox Jews may be a minority of the Israeli population, there is a significant portion of the non-observant population who still light Shabbat candles, fast on Yom Kippur, hold a Peach seder, and genuinely revere Jewish tradition. The extreme secularism of the Israeli hard left alienates them.
“The Left wanted to escape its Jewish identity and roots, while the Right was closer to the native spirit of its people,” Nisan argues. And that spirit has made itself felt at the ballot box.
The Crack-Up of the Israeli Left is a fascinating read, powerful as well as timely. But most of all, it is a welcome antidote to the shallow, agenda-driven version of Israel fed to the American public by the New York Times and CNN. If you want to really understand the confusing world of Israeli politics today, this is the book for you.
(The Crack-Up of the Israeli Left, by Mordecai Nisan. Mantua Books, 2019. Order through Amazon)
