Political gridlock endangers Israel’s security
Israelis return from their New Year (Rosh Hashana) celebrations to find their politicians pleading, yet again, for extra time in order to form a new government. Many voters would think a yellow card for time wasting would be more appropriate.
Israel has been in electioneering mode for most of this year. An inconclusive general election on April 9th brought on another inconclusive election on September 17th. Add to that the complication of the long-serving outgoing prime minister Bibi Netanyahu facing indictment on corruption on three counts.
Preliminary hearings on the indictments have begun this week. Mr Netanyahu needs to stay in some sort of office to keep claiming judicial immunity. Out of office for 100 days, he has to face the likelihood of going to trial.
Real politics – including increasingly urgent policies on security and helping the sagging economy – has been put on hold. President Reuven Rivlin has said he would like to see a grand coalition between the two leading parties Netanyahu’s Likud and the Blue and White alliance of the former military chief Benny Gantz, which came out one ahead of Likud with 33 seats last month.
However, Netanyahu has said he would only go into such an alliance if he could take the rotating premiership first – to keep his immunity going, no doubt. Gantz’s team has said no. Once again there is talk of yet another election, the third this year. Most of the electorate – around 70% according to polls – have said they don’t want this. There are very good grounds, principally on security, for thinking a third election would be a risky choice.
“Israeli politics finds itself paralyzed in ‘Groundhog Day’,” wrote David Horovitz, editor of the Times of Israel. His reference is to the now classic movie Groundhog Day in which Bill Murray plays an embittered TV weatherman stuck in a time loop till he becomes a better person. Israeli politics, according to Horovitz, is “condemned to repeat its election cycle over and over again, with no realistic prospect of a significant reordering of our reality.”
A repeated election-loop would be a gross, potentially self-destructive, indulgence for Israel’s leaders. It would ignore, too, the small but significant changes that have taken place from one election to the other. It has inadvertently put into limbo vital decisions on security and peace at home and abroad.
The September vote saw the Joint List of Arab Israelis win 13 seats in the new 120 member Knesset – which makes them significant players as never before. Ten of the new Israeli-Arab members were prepared to join Gantz in a centre-left coalition, though there was not enough support from the small parties to get him the magic majority figure of 61.
The blocking element is the Israeli Home party – Yisrael Beitneu – of Avigdor Lieberman, whose rhetoric against Arabs at times goes beyond the vitriolic. Lieberman, former defence and foreign minister and deputy PM, was once a staunch ally of Netanyahu. He represents the declining bloc of former Soviet Russian Jews. He has brought to the fore the issue of immunity from public obligation of the Ultra-Orthodox, the Haredim, especially on their exemption from military service. This grouping represents 12% of Israel’s population. Many of them do not believe in the Israeli State as such, and wait for the coming of the Messiah in their own terms and their own secluded communities. Lieberman says they must participate. A few, though, have broken away and volunteered for military service, often going to some of the toughest special forces units.
Netanyahu does not agree with Lieberman as any future coalition led by him would rely on parties representing the Haredim, Shas for the Sephardi community, and the United Tora Judaism for the Ashkenazi.
A conspicuous absence from the post-election debate is any serious discussion of the peace plan presented by Donald trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner. Trump himself seems to have abandoned his one-time best buddy Benjamin Netanyahu, and has hardly said a word on Israel since September 17th.
The electioneering arguments between Netanyahu and Gantz have made an Israel-Palestine peace deal more remote. During the election campaign the outgoing prime minister said that if re-elected he would annex all Israeli settlements on the West Bank, including the tiny enclave in the ancient city of Hebron, and the Jordan valley. The centre-left has repeated the possibility of giving up some land in the territories for a full peace deal.
The Netanyahu plan would effectively mean the end of a two-state solution for Israel and the Palestinians. Effectively Israel would then own the destiny of over four million Arabs – threatening its very identity as the Jewish State, given higher Arab to Jewish birth rates overall.
Most Israelis want neither outcome, the best-selling author Micah Goodman argued this week in the New York Times that the Netanyahu approach jeopardises identity and the Gantz approach national security. Goodman argues for “shrinking the conflict” by a package of aid for the Palestinians to improve roads, agriculture, and urban infrastructure for the West Bank, with a shared external security agreement with the Israelis.
That still leaves Gaza, a festering enclave of misery between Israel and the Mediterranean, whose population is about to top two million. Gaza and its people are fast running short of resources and amenities such as clean water, sewerage and electricity. Analysts of both left and right fear more conflict to come in and around Gaza, not helped by the standoff there between militants of Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
The biggest security shock of the campaign came out of the blue with the coordinated cruise missile and drone attack on the Abqaiq facility and Khurais oilfield in Saudi Arabia on the night of September 14th. Almost a third of the Kingdom’s oil lifting capacity was hit.
It was executed by Iranian weaponry, cruise land attack terrain-hugging missiles and drones, launched from parts of southern Iraq held by Shiite militias. The plan, if not the execution, was by Iranian command.
The crucial feature, hardly aired in local and international media, is that the raid of up to 14 drones and cruise got through undetected. The American systems, based on Patriot batteries and AWACs aerial surveillance, didn’t work.
Hitherto, Israel has prided itself in having have one of the best counter-missile systems in the world, a combination of the Iron Dome, Arrow, and Magic Wand rocket and radar networks. Now there are serious misgivings that they might not be able to counter a “swarm” attack – a tactic Iran has perfected on land and sea – especially by new precision rockets Tehran has been supplying to Hezbollah units in Lebanon and Syria.
Hassan Nasrullah, spiritual and political leader of Hezbollah in Lebanon, has lighted on Israeli fears and doubts in recent speeches. The commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in Iran, Major General Hossein Salami, has just gone one further: “We have managed to obtain the capacity to destroy the impostor Zionist regime. This sinister regime must be wiped off the map and this is no longer a dream.” The boast is both extravagant and short sighted – the ultimate victim in any such offensive would very likely be the population of Iran itself.
In Israel there is now real concern that a new missile defence programme, “Tnufa” or “momentum”, using novel laser technology, announced by the new IDF commander Aviv Kochavi has been snagged and delayed in the election marathon.
As new coalition talks crank up, most Israelis aren’t holding their breath. Talk of new elections and a new political groundhog day grows. What about a bit of compromise, or love even? After all they are what got the hapless Bill Murray character out of his time loop nightmare.