An ‘Israeli Spring’? Popular Protest and Political Resignation Converge on Tel-Aviv’s Rothschild Boulevard.

Daniel Bertrand Monk,
  Colgate University
  Daniel J. Levine,
  Colgate University
When young Israeli professionals erected a tent city on Tel Aviv’s Rothschild Boulevard in protest against the Netanyahu government’s indifference to an affordable housing crisis in Israel, they self-consciously modeled their efforts on the popular revolutions commonly referred to as “the Arab Spring.” Handmade signs reading “Rothschild, Corner of Tahrir” invite us to make comparisons between the style of this ‘Israeli Spring’ and the events in Cairo that brought down the Mubarak regime last April. Many commentators have done so as well. 

 “Among the many handmade signs in the Israeli protests is this one prominently stating: “Rothschild, Corner of Tahrir.”

On the face of it, the Netanyahu government’s response invites a similar comparison. Like Mubarak, Netanyahu seems to have been surprised by the extent and commitment of Israel’s “Facebook” revolution. In an echo of Egyptian officials’ efforts to discredit the Tahrir protesters as servants of foreign interests who were selling their loyalties for boxes of fried chicken, Netanyahu’s allies dismissed the Tel Aviv protesters as spoiled “nargileh-smoking, sushi-eating” children. Netanyahu’s cronies, it is true, stopped short of intimating a connection between the Rothschild protesters and al-Qaeda. But the Israeli political milieu provides its own vocabulary for delegitimizing comparisons, as when right-wing Knesset Member Miri Regev (Likud) called the protestors “leftists,” and compared them to Israel’s “Black Panther” movement of the 1970s. Only after 300,000 Israelis took to the streets on August 6 demanding a reordering of national priorities did Netanyahu make public statements indicating that the demands of the protesters were legitimate, even as he sought to buy them off with promises of reform and a blue ribbon commission.

"An Israeli matron reads about the previous night’s protests in a Tel-Aviv café. The newspaper’s headline: “Israel in the Streets. 300,000 protestors. A New Land.”

As with their counterparts in Egypt, none but the most naïve of Tel Aviv’s new “urban Bedouins” have considered the Prime Minister’s proposals to be anything but cynical. Most have vowed to stay the course in the tent city on Rothschild Boulevard even after the rains come to Israel in November. “This regime of capital will crumble,” stated Yossi Baruch, spokesman for the largest tent city in Haifa, in response to the PM’s promises to expedite the construction of 50,000 new low-income housing units as part of a new Housing Committees Law. Many of the protesters see this legislation as little more than an additional giveaway to developer-tycoons allied with the political establishment.   

"3 years military, education, job...no housing"

Though pleasing in their symmetry, these parallels between the Tel Aviv and Cairo demonstrations are misleading. Indeed, in one critical respect they are the reverse images of one another. Participants in the Arab Spring deflected the claims of tyrannical rulers in Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt: threats to national security by Israel or fundamentalist extremists were no longer to be accepted as excuses for again deferring democratic/parliamentary reforms. In an already intensely ‘parliamentary’ Israel, the tent dwellers oft-stated demand for social justice is a deflection, but of a very different sort: an attempt to deny the very real place that the Israel/Palestine conflict holds on the conditions they seek to change. At “Rothschild, corner of Tahrir,” seemingly supra-political demands – the attempt to posit ‘social justice’ as somehow beyond politics as presently understood and practiced in Israel – constitutes an act of denial.

"Could we have a piece of the pie"

The Rothschild Commune provides its own best evidence of this denial. A walk down the tent city from north to south does, indeed, disclose a nerve center of committed geek-hacker-activists and university students who demonstrate remarkable discipline, organization, and clarity in their efforts to roll back Israel’s neo-liberal turn. These people are the ideological core of the movement. But prominent in the mix are also the remnants of Labor Zionism (like the youth group Hashomer Hatza’ir), activists for divorced fathers’ rights, organizations demanding the end of exemptions from military service for yeshiva students, religious ecstatics (“Na-Nach-Nachma” offshoots of Breslov Hasidism who dance on sound trucks when they are not sleeping off the bliss in their tents), and, most incongruously, members of the notorious ‘Youth of the Heights’: second or third-generation settler-hippies, the hash-smoking but also highly militant counterculture of the West Bank settlements. Tel Aviv’s tent city, then, is itself a “big tent” in which space is obtained by a tacit commitment to avoid party politics entirely. 

“The Tent City on Rothschild Boulevard functions as a commune, with free haircuts, seminars, music, religious services, and Arabic lessons”

Eretz Nehederet, Israel’s equivalent of The Daily Show, satirized this situation brilliantly. When its host asked a cast member playing Dafni Lif (the original organizer of the tent protests on Facebook) “what are your demands?” She replies: “Um…the People demand the things everyone agrees on…about…them”). Chiding the host for insisting that she specify the movement’s aims, Lis merely reverts to the most repeated of the protestors’ slogans: Ha’am Doresh Tzedek Chevrati (“the People Demand Social Justice”) 

"If you will it, it is no dream"

In its very construction, the slogan itself – the People Demand Social Justice – discloses the denial at work here. A reaction to the nation state’s political fragmentation appears as a demonstration against social stratification. In shouting ‘The People Demand Social Justice,’ everyone involved in the Rothschild ‘revolution’ agrees to act as if the social and economic consequences of placating settlers, ultranationalists, and the ultra-orthodox – all united by a shared material interest in perpetuating the occupation – has nothing to do with the government’s inability to provide for the needs of ‘the People’. To get 300,000 people onto the streets of Israel without causing a counter-demonstration on the following Saturday night, Israelis identifying with a bazaar of essentially incompatible political positions have tacitly agreed to pretend that Tel Aviv has joined the wave of popular protests in Madrid, London, and Athens against the ‘structural adjustment programs’ that western economies used to impose upon the global south and have now turned against their own citizens.

But the numbers belie this. Israel’s curious coalition of the disaffected has emerged in an economy that is enjoying higher growth in real GDP than Bahrain, Brunei, and Oman. In sharp contrast to Athens or Cairo, Israel has almost halved its unemployment rate since 2003, and 80% of its wage earners are employed in service industries. Many of the “urban Bedouins” of Rothschild Boulevard get up every morning, zip up their tent flaps, and go to work in the high tech sector. If nearly one quarter of Israel’s citizens are now falling below the poverty line (and if its middle class has “vanished,” as former Israel Manufacturers Board chair, Dov Lautman claims), it is because the government of Israel is forced to maintain the costly infrastructure of two para-states – one for the ultra-orthodox and another for the settlers – before it can even begin going about its own business. 

"Commenting on right-wing politicians’ dismissals of the protesters as bourgeois ‘sushi-eaters,’ the Rothschild protesters made a carnival feature in which the average Israelis can see how ‘they are themselves served up as the ‘shakshouka’ [a breakfast stew] to sate the appetites of politicians and oligarchs.”

As we have argued in a previous essay in this series, this ‘retreat of the state’ was largely ignored in a period when most still Israelis felt they had a stake in general economic expansion. For Prime Minister Netanyahu and his cronies, this amounted to a welcome ‘indifference dividend’ concerning the cost of purchasing enough political consensus to maintain a parliamentary majority. But the pie can only be cut so many ways. The issue now is that the maintenance of the para-states is rapidly becoming the government of Israel’s only business, as surrogates for market interests in the Netanyahu administration clamp down on all other spending. The result is a political double standard. Political transfer payments to settlers and ultra-orthodox are accepted as the cost of doing business. For everyone else – from the education and health care systems to the fire service, whose collapse due to sustained budgetary neglect left much of Israel to burn in forest fires last December– an ideology of austerity prevails. There is no addressing “the people’s” demand for social justice without facing this.

"School of the Revolution"

This is why there is something about the Rothschild Commune that fails to persuade. Despite the earnestness of its members, the movement sublimates the political causes of a contemporary crisis by protesting its social effects, and in so doing advances the same curious logic by which the Baron Munchhausen professed to have pulled himself out of the swamp by pulling at his own pigtail. At the same time, there is something important to be learned here. What the current wave of protest teaches us is that in Israel the stalemated politics of the occupation are no longer apprehended directly, but are, instead largely experienced in terms of the costs that come with a capitulation to the occupation’s advocates and beneficiaries. In the everyday life of Israeli civilians, the Israel/Palestine struggle has rapidly become an unacknowledged and at times unconscious resource war between those In Israel who have a stake in the conflict’s perpetuation and, as various protest posters put it: “everyone else.”

In itself, this attempt to wish away an increasingly zero-sum dispute between those whom we have elsewhere called Israel’s ‘statists’ and its ‘radicals’ is nothing new. It draws on a tradition in Israeli state building that is older, in fact, than the state itself. The earnest belief that what appear to be political divisions are in fact administrative or technical problems has a long legacy. From Herzl’s Altneuland (1902) to Shimon Peres’ Imaginary Voyage (1998), the fruits of rational economic and social administration are presumed to dissolve political disagreements – well-stocked hospitals, efficient rail lines, electric streetlights can displace zero-sum contests over the status of the land and the nature of the polities to emerge on it.

It is through such denial that the demonstrations can now somehow not be about ‘politics’ – the moral, economic and human costs of the radicals’ interest in the occupation, and its basic incompatibility with the liberal-parliamentary ideals of Israeli statists. A protest that called that other, deeper, division by name would differ as markedly from the present one as would a Berkeley ‘teach-in’ from a Sorellian general strike. That, we submit, is the true difference between the protests in Rothschild Boulevard and those in Tahrir Square.

Whether by intuitive or intentional cynicism, Netanyahu has been playing on this kind of denial, as when he reportedly cited Herzl’s ‘pragmatism’ to Manuel Trajtenberg (head of his new blue-ribbon commission on Israel’s socio-economic crisis) as a model for his willingness to take seriously the protesters’ demands. It will do Mr. Netanyahu little good. His brand of cynical reason can no more protect the political status quo from the consequences of the bourgeoning ‘resource war’ than the protestors’ enthusiasm for unstated alternatives to the same status quo can protect them from a nasty confrontation with Israel’s ‘radicals’. Given the prevailing level of denial and displacement, one is left to wonder if—when the confrontation between the radicals and ‘everyone else’ comes out into the open—any of the unfortunates caught in the melee will have any idea why.

“Fragile, reads a protest poster displaying the official emblem of the State of Israel.”

The Ugly Stalemate: the Gaza Flotilla and Israel’s Conservative Adventurism

Daniel J. Levine, Colgate University

Daniel Bertrand Monk, Colgate University

Israel’s raid on the relief flotilla bound for Gaza has generated a media firestorm, but one familiar in its broad outlines.  The English-language press has engaged wise elder statesmen to discuss the future of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations; the finer points of international law are parsed in accordance with this narrative or that (here and here); videos of preparations to repel Israeli commandos by ‘terrorists’ on the Mavi Marmara are juxtaposed against images of despoiled relief supplies at the Israeli port of Ashdod.  

A perfect storm is also brewing in diplomatic circles.  Turkey has recalled its ambassador to Israel and PM Erdogan has strongly condemned Israel’s actions; the Arab League, the UN Security Council and Human Rights Commission are calling for enquiries; Israeli diplomats in Egypt, Jordan, Sweden, Denmark, Belgium, Ireland, Norway, Spain and Greece were summoned for clarifications or protests.  US reactions have been muted, but the additional burden to an already strained relationship is apparent. This latest imbroglio seems to suggest that Israeli tone-deafness now spans the full spectrum of force: from botched covert operations like the recent assassination of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai, to high-tempo catastrophes like Operation ‘Cast Lead’ (the 2008/9 Gaza war), to the settlement expansions in East Jerusalem announced during the visit of Vice President Joseph Biden.  

 Indeed, Israel’s apparent and severe indifference to international opinion is now itself a recurring theme: policymakers, pundits and the blogosphere seem not to know what to make of it.   Looking at the extent to which the Netanyahu government is prepared to go to enforce the Gaza blockade – despite the risk of alienating allies on whom Israel has an enormous strategic dependence – observers struggle to make sense of a state that seems intent on meeting allies and enemies alike with a mix of intransigence and incoherence. 

Yet debates over the ‘rationality’ of policymakers turn naturally to the competing interests against which questions of state policy are hashed out.  In earlier essays, we suggested that both sympathetic observers of Israel, and professional policymakers, viewed domestic Israeli political developments through an outdated conceptual framework.  The Israeli state, we argued, was in full-blown retreat.  With its dissolution, the familiar dichotomy of a dovish ‘left’ and a hawkish ‘right’ had dissolved as well.  The larger consensus that had tempered Israel’s fractious politics in the 1980s and early 1990s – one in which both ‘doves’ and ‘hawks’ were united in their larger vision of Israel as a secular-national state, and divided primarily over those compromises that should be made to the Palestinian national movement – no longer exists.  To be sure, those old voices still exist, and many in the Israeli political establishment continue to treat them as the defining fault lines of domestic politics.  Yet they no longer combine to represent a critical mass of political views.

Rather, we suggested, one needed to think of Israeli politics in terms of ‘statists’ and ‘radicals’: between those who see the Israeli state as a political solution to the ‘Jewish Question’ in its nineteenth-century variant (the problem of Jewish statelessness and vulnerability in an era of nationalism), and those who see that state in broader, transcendental terms: as a stepping-stone toward some variation of a "Third Kingdom of Israel,” whether parsed through explicitly Messianic terms, or ostensibly secular ones.  The latter routinely threaten the use force to introduce an alternative form of governance if parliamentary democracy fails to serve their agenda:  by way of example, consider recent Rabbinical rulings calling on religious soldiers to disobey orders that involve the ‘uprooting’ of West Bank settlements.

In the midst of that challenge, statists from both the old ‘left’ and ‘right’ have had to band together. Labor and Likud seem to have converged to keep the essential institutions of the Israeli state – the Defense and Finance Ministries, the military, the courts and the central bank – out of the hands of the radicals.  The statists continue to govern, but they pay for the privilege.  First, by outright political bribery: rewarding junior ministries to the radicals, and showering their educational, social and political institutions with state resources even as public libraries and schools must take up their begging-bowls.  Second, and more importantly, by their inaction: by conceding the power to make substantive political decisions on foreign and security policy.  To remain in power, they temporize: showing intransigence to the Palestinians and the Syrians; by deferring difficult constitutive questions about Israel’s identity as a democratic society and the role of minorities within it; by staving off US and regional peace initiatives, without rejecting them outright.  An ugly, delicate stalemate between statists and radicals is thus – just barely – preserved. 

Israel’s actions on the Mavi Marmara need to be understood In light of this ‘ugly stalemate,’ which has its own political logic and pays its own kinds of political rewards. The statists need to preserve their coalition, lest another election depress their representation in Knesset and the government still further. Increasingly, the state and the coalition have been thus conflated with one another out of brute necessity. Unable to make a deal on Palestine – and under some pressure externally to do so – the statists can only govern by resort to what appears, from the outside, to be rank adventurism.   Yet it is adventurism of a peculiar kind, for it is not revisionist, but conservative: it represents the only possible path for maintaining some façade of statist predominance (and perhaps someday restoring its substance), in the face of challenges that would otherwise force statist into open and perhaps violent confrontation for hegemony with radicals.

Consider here debates within the Israeli cabinet immediately following the assault on the Turkish flotilla.  Israel’s Channel One reported a disagreement within the government: between Justice Minister Ya’akov Ne’eman and the Prime Minister, Defense Minister Ehud Barak and Foreign Minister Yvette Liberman.  What should be done with those 50 or so of the detained Turks who were suspected of links to terrorist organizations?  Should they be tried in Israel or deported?  Ne’eman called for trials, the others for immediate deportation.  One interpretation of this debate suggests a principled defense of the rule of law in Ne’eman’s position and political expediency in that of the PM and his allies.  Yet the Minister of Justice was not seeking to defend the rule of law; he was acting in the name of those sectors of Israeli society which reject rapprochement with the Arab and Muslim worlds.  To try the 50 detainees would perpetuate a crisis which – while detrimental to the interests of Israeli-statist notions of realpolitik, plays directly into the Manichean worldview of its radicals.  Ne’eman, for his part, has been on record advocating for the incorporation of Jewish religious law into the state legal system: the Jewish equivalent of a Sharia state that would transcend the limits of statist realpolitik.  Netanyahu, Barak and Liberman – who in this instance, has shown a Putin-like ability to move between statesmanlike resolve and political thuggery – rushed in to assure deportation.  Only by reserving for themselves the right to abrogate the rule of law could they preserve the statist-radical stalemate – even if doing so ultimately undermined the very ‘statist’ values they were ostensibly defending. 

Israel’s allies misunderstand the starkness of this “ugly stalemate.”  Reading it as simply a moment in Israeli politics where the political ‘right’s’ star is in the ascent, they have chosen to moderate their criticism of the Netanyahu government: why bring down what the Israeli electorate will simply vote back into office?  This is why, in the midst of their condemnation, US leaders are tempering their displeasure with reaffirmations of “Israel’s right to defend itself.” But in fact the problem runs deeper: the left and the right have dissolved into one another, and survive only by eating their political seed corn.  In failing to understand and address this reality, Israel’s allies and well-wishers abroad actually perpetuate it. So do those concerned with the Palestinian cause who understand Israeli adventurism as born of late imperial hubris, rather than weakness.

In the meantime, the statists keep up their end of the “ugly stalemate” only by actions which endanger their long-term political viability.  In the short term, the ‘conservative adventurism’ of the Mavi Marmara raid – like earlier Israeli adventures in Gaza and Lebanon – has garnered considerable domestic support (See poll data here and here.  But viewed over the longer term, there seems little doubt that it is unsustainable.  Consider a comparable imbroglio from Netanyahu’s first term as Prime Minister: in 1997, the Mossad attempted the poisoning of Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal, then in Amman.  The operation went awry: Meshaal’s bodyguards wrested him away from his would-be assassins, who were later captured by Jordanian officials.  Meshaal clung to life in hospital.  The late King Hussein demanded that Israeli deliver the antidote to the poison administered to him; failing that, the Mossad agents would be hanged and Israel-Jordan relations cut.  Netanyahu temporized, but ultimately handed over the antidote.  To smooth over official relations, he then releases some twenty Hamas prisoners (including the movement’s then-leader, Sheikh Ahmad Yassin) held in Israeli jails. 

Then as now, Israeli journalists decried the government’s ad hoc approach to major foreign policy decisions and its maladroit handling of the international press.  Then as now, humanists decried the state’s misuse of power.  Then as now, Netanyahu (“Israel’s serial bungler,” as the Economist would call him) was pilloried in the world media.  Then as now, there were calls for a State Commission of Inquiry. 

Yet then as now, too, Bibi’s ‘bungling’ did not fundamentally endanger him politically.  His parliamentary coalition – composed of statist right-wingers and religious and nationalist radicals – remained sound.  Calls for an independent Commission of Inquiry were staved off.  The Prime Minister instead appointed a ‘clarifications committee’ lacking formal judicial powers or independence, which duly cleared him of wrongdoing.

What ultimately did bring an end to Netanyahu’s government was instructive: not executive ‘bungling,’ but a betrayal of the burgeoning radical-statist status quo.  In October 1998, Netanyahu signed the Wye River Agreement, which promised to transfer some 13% of the territory of the West Bank to the full or partial control of the Palestinian National Authority.  His coalition swiftly abandoned him.  Then as now: Israel’s radicals can abide incompetence.  What they cannot accept are violations of the territorial and political status quo.

Between the attempted assassination of Meshaal in 1997 and the present Marmara crisis, the costs of the ugly embrace between the former left and right wings of Israeli politics have increased in direct proportion to its perceived necessity.  In 1999, ‘new Labour’ leader Ehud Barak was elected; his government would already be in crisis by 2000, and a new era of ‘zigzags’ among Likud, Labor and Kadima – itself a symptom of statist collapse – was inaugurated.   It was here that the old right and left began to dissolve into one another, in response to new political formations arising out of rapidly ‘nationalizing’ ultra-orthodox constituencies, elements within the traditional ‘right’ and immigrant and settler blocs. (This is the political soup out of which the radical camp would emerge).  The old political orders and movements had, by that point, long realized that they were caught in a new kind of political struggle: Shimon Peres, a paragon of old-school statism, explained his failed electoral bid for Prime Minister in 1996 as the “Jews” defeating the “Israelis.”  Moshe Feiglin – founder of the radical settler movement Zo Arzteinu [‘this is our land’] – agreed.  Both understood that what was at stake was not Israel and Palestine, but Israel and a new Judaea. 

The only question was what shape the new political structures and alliances would take: the statist-radical ‘ugly compromise’ was at that point only one of a number of emergent possibilities.  In the late 1990s, it still seemed to statists that a single magnificent burst of political resolve and parliamentary skill could save them, and defeat the radicals.  They are no longer under any such illusions; their weakness is – for now, at least – beyond dispute.  Indeed, in their own scramble to remain politically relevant, the statists have helped perpetuate it.  Today, the resort to ‘conservative adventurism’ represents, however paradoxical this may seem, a desperate effort on the part of the statists to maintain the institutions of liberal democracy.  For the idea of Israel upon which their actions rest – one in which the state is its own end – now only resonates clearly through military action. 

We thank Sara Lipton, Jonathan Rose and Alexander Barder for many of the sources cited in this essay.

Israel-Palestine: No More "Honest Brokers"

Daniel J. Levine 
Colgate University

Daniel B. Monk
Colgate University

The US has been playing (or rather, pretending to play) the wrong role in Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations.  No “honest broker” is needed to bridge differences between the parties.  Former US President Clinton’s bridging proposals of 2000, or something very close to them, remain the best viable template for a two-state solution, and their parameters are well known to all sides.  If such a solution remains in the offing– a point worth arguing in its own right, but not our concern here – it begins with them.  Since the path to their implementation is not marked with clarificatory 'negotiations’ but with political will, it is hard to imagine how the proposed Clinton-Mitchell 'proximity talks' can help either side get closer to them.

Where US intervention is needed is within Israel. Despite appearances to the contrary, the Israeli state is in full-blown retreat: its intransigence on Palestinian and Syrian talks is due not to its strength, but to its weakness. For decades – until the 1970s – Israel was essentially a one-party state: Labor dominated the ‘commanding heights’ of manufacturing, the labor and trade unions, the media, and the influential military and kibbutz sectors.  Control of the government passed to Menachem Begin’s Likud in 1977; yet Labor’s ongoing dominance in economic, military, and social circles, and a series of Labor-Likud unity governments in the 1980s, preserved a clear horizon of political and ideological consensus.   

Since the early 1990s, however, the situation has changed.   Key assets and industries were sold, the mass media was liberalized and marketized, and a series of electoral reforms gave the traditional ‘national’ parties a distinct disadvantage vis-à-vis smaller ‘fractional’ movements.  All dynamics now pulled parliamentary politics toward radicalization: a slimmer public sector could no longer be mined for political patronage by the traditional power-brokers, while single-issue parties proved increasingly adept in wrangling coalition negotiations to deliver political ‘goods’ to their voters.  Into this mix came events that rendered the security consensus of the previous two decades obsolete: the first Intifada and the end of the Cold War.

The collapse of the Oslo-Madrid process has only accelerated these long-term dynamics: the movements that have composed Israel’s traditionally state-centered ‘left’ and ‘right’ seem in a permanent state of implosion.  Since 2000, the former has found itself without a coherent narrative, careening from setback to setback. Ehud Barak’s abortive “rebranding” (a la Tony Blair) of the Labor movement in 1999 stressed physical separation from the Palestinians over any serious discussion of national reconciliation, leaving the party ripe to be outflanked by Ariel Sharon’s centrist Kadima party after the collapse of the final status talks.  A revitalized social-democratic agenda seemed in the offing with the election of Amir Peretz to Labor leadership in the mid 2000s, but hopes were dashed by his ill-advised support of the 2006 Lebanon “summer war.”  Labor and its traditional parliamentary allies seem a spent political force.   

Likud has fared better at the polls; but that pearl has been bought at great price.  Its traditional base – the adherents of Jabotinsky’s “Revisionist” Zionism – find themselves outflanked by a new generation of radical, single-issue movements, united only by their rejection of Labor: Russian ultra-nationalists, Sha's, and a new generation of radicals and settlers who abandon realpolitik and geopolitical calculi in favor of received truths, whether divine in their origins or wholly intramundane. Likud’s survival depends on Netanyahu’s ability to keep this fractious group – only just – together.  Its precarious nature actually grants him considerable freedom of action, but in a negative sense: the radicalism of his coalition partners provides him cover for not doing anything substantive on the Israeli-Palestinian and Israeli-Syrian fronts.

This, then, is the key point about Israeli politics that often fails to ‘translate’: the traditional, state-centered ‘left’ and the ‘right’ no longer exist as positive political forces: they are imaginary points of reference for an electorate that is either increasingly radical or increasingly disaffected.  Israeli electoral politics is divided between those who acknowledge and fear a reality in which the state has come to symbolize only a means to an (essentially contested) end, and those who are not only partly responsible for this condition, but also willing to hold everyone else hostage to threats that they may finish the job if ‘pushed too far’ – viz., any number of variations on a “Third Kingdom of Israel,” and the neutralization of opponents within the Israeli body politic who might stand in the way of the ethnic cleansing necessary to achieve a hegemonic eschatology.  For some years, one of the more macabre jokes among members of the Israeli left has gone thus: Q: “Why does every Leftist in Israel have a friend among the radicals?”  A: “So that they can wangle a better job in the concentration camps.” In light of this reality, Israeli political commonsense for those living within the Green Line is obvious: “Until circumstances force us to make any ‘fateful compromises,’ it is better to let sleeping dogs lie.” 

In this larger context, Labor – the natural ally of the present US leadership – is caught in a Gordian knot: if it leaves the government, it abandons everyday policymaking – issues of citizenship, women’s and minority rights, education – to religious and nationalist radicals. Yet if it stays, Labor alienates its base on key foreign policy issues: peace and reconciliation with the Arab world, sustaining good relations with the US, Europe and the larger international community.  Labor's latest poll numbers are a dramatic testament to this losing proposition: to halt the Israeli state’s immediate slide into Peronism, they must sacrifice their medium-term survival. Since parliamentary elections would likely wipe them off the map, their constant decline in the polls binds their fate ever more tightly to Netanyahu's intransigence. 

For its part, the traditional right finds itself in an obverse paradox: it can form governments by entering into coalitions with the radicals, but only if any hope of governing effectively is checked ‘at the door.’  Interior Minister Eli Yishai’s (Sha's) announcement on settlement construction in East Jerusalem during US Vice-President Biden’s recent visit – and Netanyahu’s otherwise inexplicable inability to control the timing of such announcements – makes sense only in the context of this paradox. The remnants of the ‘traditional’ left and right are thus bound in a death-embrace: Netanyahu needs Labor and Barak so as to not be overcome by radicals from outside Likud and within it; Labor needs Likud because without a place in government it has nothing left to offer. 

Sustained US pressure can materially affect this complex state of affairs, but it needs to be aimed at those disaffected ‘statist’ voters who have chosen to surrender government to the radicals to avoid domestic confrontation. The dichotomy that characterizes American discussions on Israel – between the notions that Israel’s strategic interests and those of America diverge, or else that it is inappropriate for one ally to pressure another– misses this point entirely.  The tacit strategic ‘choice’ of the disappearing Israeli center has been to purchase short-term domestic harmony at the cost of accepting an untenable, unending grinding-down of Palestinians’ rights and hopes.  To confront the radicals on these points is to risk civil-cum-holy war: a return to the confrontations of the mid-1990s. Since the ‘statists’ pay no immediate price for having abandoned the Palestinians to the tender mercies of their political rivals, that ‘bargain’ (if one can call it that) is not without its benefits.  Political pressures that expose and alter that tacit strategic ‘calculus’ must be brought to bear.  Only if ‘statist’ Israelis are faced with the dimensions of this capitulation, and with paying a price for it, can it be squarely confronted – let alone revisited.  

“Friends” of Israel from without would thus do well to reconsider their knee-jerk objections to criticism of the present Israeli government.  They might ask what would happen if a ‘statist’ discourse were to collapse completely.  Only a vibrant, engaged and relevant Israeli state, focused on political interests and willing to balance those interests against those of allies and rivals, can preserve a genuine alliance between Israel and the US: one, that is, with its own center of gravity outside of the deep pockets and lobbying acumen of AIPAC and the Christian right.  At present, these “friends” feel more like “enablers”: in helping subsidize a losing truce between Israel’s statists and its radicals, they both prolong the occupation, and defer a meaningful domestic conversation within Israel.  The domestic face-off needed can be helped along, before it descends into full-blown crisis: thus minimizing its hardships, and containing the damage.  

This, however, is not the work of so-called “honest brokers,” nor will even-handedness do the trick.  To understand the extent of the shift that is necessary in US foreign policy in the region one need only contrast the contemporary history of diplomacy among “friends” with a precedent in US-Israeli relations: in which, as it were, friends refused to let friends drive drunk.   After the IDF conquered the Sinai Peninsula in Fall 1956, Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion stood on the rostrum of the Knesset and announced: “the armistice agreement with Egypt is dead and buried and cannot be restored to life.”  “In consequence,” he continued, “the armistice lines between Israel and Egypt have no more validity.”  For good measure, Ben-Gurion also declared that Israel would not consent to the stationing of “foreign forces” – a UN mission – in the territory it had captured.  Within months, all traces of Israel’s presence in the Sinai would be gone, UN peacekeepers having replaced them. The Eisenhower administration refused to treat seriously the directives of an Israel that had, for the first time but not for the last, come to believe that it could dictate terms to others instead of coming to terms with itself.  

The present Israeli government’s drumbeat of rejectionism conceals a muffled cry for intervention from a body politic that has lost its way.  They might yet find their way back: but they could use a little help from their friends.