Election in Israel Maimon Schwarzschild

Here is a perceptive assessment of last week’s israeli election, by Menachem Kellner at Haifa University:

After the success of Hamas in the Palestinian elections in January 2006, it might have been expected that the Israeli electorate would react by electing a rightwing, hardline government opposed to further withdrawals from territories occupied during the 1967 war. Instead, after Israel’s own poll on 28 March, the centrist Kadima party whose aim is to establish the borders of Israel by 2010 (unilaterally if necessary) and withdraw those settlers living outside (forcibly if necessary) is the largest one in the Knesset with twenty-eight out of 120 seats. Kadima is followed by Labour, which favours a negotiated settlement with the Palestinians, with twenty seats. The Likud bloc, which advocates retaining control of the territories and still dreams of expansion throughout Eretz Yisrael (the land of Israel), received only eleven seats in a bitter defeat….

What does all this mean? Why, for the first time in memory, did the Israeli electorate basically ignore military-security issues in favour of social-security issues? Here the Hamas victory may have indeed played a crucial role. Given a Palestinian Authority in the hands of an organisation committed to the destruction of Israel, one which sees the purposeful murder of civilians as a legitimate means to accomplish that end, most Israelis feel that there is “no one to talk to there” and that, in consequence, the least of all evils is “them there, us here.”

Thus the almost blanket support here for the barrier being erected between “them and us” (the logic of which is the creation of a Palestinian state and the dismantling of most Israeli towns and villages in the West Bank) and a focus on internal matters: social welfare, social justice, the nature of Israel’s public sphere.

Read the whole thing.