by Norman L. Cantor

February 26, 2009

The rightward drift visible in Israel’s latest election results is doubtless attributable to numerous factors, including force (or lack of force) of personalities and changing demographics. From a perspective of the last several years, though, a few key influences are apparent. Whether you sympathize with the Israeli population’s perceptions of events or not, here are several of the most important perspectives.

Anxiety about long-term survival — Israelis see constantly increasing existential threats. Iran’s advances in missile technology keep in lockstep with its strident rejection of Israel’s right to exist. Iran vigorously upgrades and replenishes the weapons available to its surrogates Hamas and Hizbullah, both perched on Israel’s borders and equally dedicated to Israel’s destruction. Each generation of rockets extends the Iranian reach to a higher percentage of the Israeli population.

It would only take one nuclear strike to devastate Israel’s highly concentrated population. It is not reassuring that Israel has its own atomic weaponry, nor that part of Europe might also feel threatened by Iran’s weaponry. Nor is it any reassurance that an Iranian atomic strike would kill tens of thousands of Muslims along with Jews. Logic does not seem to constrain lethal events in the Middle East. Recall the hundreds and hundreds of thousands who died in the struggle between Iran and Iraq. That carnage had far less justification than the jihadists have found in their current demonization of Israel.

Given this perceived, looming threat to Israel’s existence, it’s not surprising that the Israeli electorate moved in the direction of those in Israeli politics taking the Iranian threat most seriously.

Frustration with concessions — The formula of land for peace motivated then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s 2000 offer to Yasser Arafat of a Palestinian state with its capital in eastern Jerusalem on almost all of pre-1967 Palestinian territory. The Palestinians then spit on the extended hand. In the wake of rejection of that offer, over a thousand Israelis have died — the bulk of them civilians blown to bits in buses and public places.

From the perspective of Israel’s political center, Israel similarly pursued peace in Gaza (and Lebanon) only to see its efforts boomerang into hostilities. After Israel withdrew from Gaza, Hamas promptly utilized that vacuum by violently wrenching control from Fatah and launching thousands of rockets at Israeli population centers. The unilateral Israeli withdrawals without security-related reassurances have left the public skeptical of the kinds of concessions favored by the left.

Resentment against moral myopia — In December Israel sent military forces into Gaza in an effort to uproot and destroy the Hamas structure responsible for the years of terror directed at Israel’s civilian population. The world press responded with moral outrage, as though the Gaza operation was unprovoked or unjustified. Accusations of war crimes flowed after Israeli forces, seeking out all sources of rocket attacks, destroyed thousands of civilian-owned structures used and often booby-trapped by Hamas fighters.

These international responses left a majority of Israelis startled and appalled by what they perceive as international indifference or hostility to their acutely felt security needs.

At the same time, many leaders on the Israeli left showed little appreciation of the justifications for the use of force in Gaza. For example, left-wing Meretz (a party now reduced to three seats in the 120-member Knesset) wanted to end hostilities after three days — long before Israeli forces had attained their legitimate objectives. That may explain why a portion of left-wing voters migrated toward Tzipi Livni, who firmly articulated the reasons for force and the military objectives in Gaza.

Resentment toward Israeli Arabs’ pan-Arab sympathies — Arab Israelis have every right to be politically restive. Their abstract rights to full citizenship have not translated into equal status in the social, economic, and political spheres in Israel. They face plenty of hardship and frustration domestically, and they empathize strongly with the suffering of their brethren in Gaza and the West Bank.

Arab Israelis have expressed this emotion by casting ballots for rejectionist parties that do not want Israel to survive as a Jewish and/or democratic state. These rejectionist parties showed little or no sympathy with the plight of 300,000 fellow Israeli citizens subjected to bombardment over the years. These parties tended to portray the Gaza operation as unprovoked and unrestrained. They also recoiled from the idea of national civilian service.

Avigdor Lieberman and his Yisrael Beiteinu party attracted many thousands of votes by associating these separatist party positions with disloyalty to the multicultural, democratic state of Israel. (At the same time, Arab-Israelis now have a golden opportunity to correct the temporary tilt in Israeli politics, and to continue their legitimate struggle for full equality in Israel, simply by exercising their potential political muscle in a positive way. Labor and Meretz, for example, could really use that infusion of energy and purpose.)

A multiplicity of factors will determine how long Israel continues to tilt to the right. A resurgence of the political center will most immediately depend on whether the potential peacemakers — especially Presidents Obama and Sarkozy — are sufficiently responsive to the reality that Israel cannot make peace while Hamas, Hizbullah, and Iran are lurking at Israel’s borders and smacking their collective, bloodthirsty lips.

Norman L. Cantor is a professor of law emeritus at Rutgers Law School, Newark. He lives half the year in Tel Aviv and half in Hoboken while continuing his academic writing.

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