Politics
The death of the Israeli left
Published 05 February 2001
The imminent election of Ariel Sharon represents the collapse of a whole way of thinking. Lindsey Hilsum reports
An amiable old man with plump cheeks and twinkling blue eyes watches over Israel from banners and billboards. Saccharine-voiced girls sing his campaign song: "Ariel Sharon will look after you. Only Sharon can bring peace."
Amnesia has engulfed Israel. Four months ago, many thought they were on the brink of peace; now they are about to elect as prime minister a man once accused of being a war criminal.
"People are forgetting who Sharon is, and they're falling for the good old white-haired grand-daddy," says the avant-garde film-maker Avi Mograbi. "He looks like that. But he's not." Mograbi is a prophet, but - as any biblical scholar will tell you - in the Holy Land prophets tend to be ignored. Four years ago, Mograbi made a film called How I Overcame My Fear and Learnt to Love Arik Sharon (Arik is Sharon's affectionate nickname - these days some call him "King Arik"). In the film, a left-wing film-maker - played by Mograbi himself - sets out to expose Ariel Sharon's brutal military history and extreme right-wing politics, only to fall for the politician's charisma. The film-maker's wife keeps whispering, "Remember Lebanon, remember Sabra and Shatila", but the film-maker has been seduced. In the end, his wife leaves him.
"The moral of the tale is exactly what we see today," says Mograbi. "People have forgotten who Sharon is. This person was responsible for the war in Lebanon, for the massacres at Sabra and Shatila, and for the chain of settlements in the West Bank. Sharon is the most dangerous person in Israeli politics."
Israelis do remember that their parliament censured Sharon after he allowed Israel's Christian Phalangist allies to rampage through the Sabra and Shatila camps outside Beirut in 1982, massacring hundreds of refugees. But they don't seem to care. Such is the panic after the violence of the past few months, that the country is lurching into elections like a wounded cow stumbling blindly across a motorway.
If Israel elects Sharon as prime minister on Tuesday - as now seems inevitable - it will be because the Israeli left has crumbled, its ideology battered and its confidence destroyed. A majority of Israelis see the current Palestinian intifada not as an expression of frustration, but as proof of Palestinian ingratitude and enduring hatred for Jews. The Labour prime minister Ehud Barak's policy of dividing Jerusalem and returning most of the occupied West Bank was rejected by Yasser Arafat, so most Israelis have concluded that Ariel Sharon was correct when he said the Palestinians do not want peace and they just want the Jewish state obliterated.
The shift is profound. It is not just that voters have switched allegiance - they did after all vote for the right-wing Bibi Netanyahu in 1996 - but that left-wing leaders and cultural icons have lost confidence in dialogue with the Palestinians. They see that Arafat has manipulated the violence which followed Ariel Sharon's provocative visit to the Muslim site of Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem in October. No matter that, to date, almost 400 Arabs have been killed compared to 38 Israeli Jews: they feel the violence as a betrayal of their goodwill.
In December, after Yasser Arafat raised again the question of Palestinian refugees forced into exile when Israel was founded in 1948, a group of left-wing writers and artists, including novelists Amos Oz and Meir Shalev, signed a petition declaring their opposition to the right of return.
"My European friends kept ringing me to ask: why, why?" said Shalev. "But this is the destruction of Israel. This means we have to pack our bags and wander the world again." Shalev believes left-wing Israelis were setting themselves up for disappointment by believing they could have anything more than a cold peace. Shalev will not vote for Ariel Sharon, whose militaristic approach he regards as dangerous and doomed, but his version of peace sounds more like the "non-belligerence pact" Sharon espouses than the inter-dependent, peaceful Middle East envisaged by Shimon Peres and the late Yitzhak Rabin. Shalev has watched disappointed left-wingers turn into right-wing ideologues. "I hear people who went with me to Peace Now demonstrations saying there has to be a transfer of population, we must move all the Arabs out. These things belong to ultra-right-wing politics in Israel."
But much that is mainstream now would have been antithetical in 1993, when the Oslo accords were signed. Both left and right believe in almost total separation, with physical borders of walls and barbed wire that would keep citizens of a putative Palestinian state from entering Israel without passports and permits.
Like Ariel Sharon, Udi Rosen employs Thais rather than Palestinians as labourers on his farm. He walks along rows of potted herbs, neatly laid out on trays, explaining that Thais work harder and that Arabs bring political problems. "I don't think that in the future we'll be able to combine the economy of Israel and the West Bank," he says. "They will have to find their own way."
The real failure of Oslo may not be that Ehud Barak and Yasser Arafat did not do a deal before these elections, but that Israelis still fail to understand what it feels like to be a Palestinian under Israeli occupation. Most Palestinians say that the experience is worse since Oslo. Under Labour governments, the concrete and cranes of Jewish settlements, which first boomed in the late Seventies when Ariel Sharon was agriculture minister, have continued to spread. Left-wing Israelis say that of course settlements must be moved, but Palestinians see the settlers and soldiers as Israel's representatives in the West Bank and Gaza.
As fewer Israelis employ Palestinians, poverty has deepened. Humiliation at checkpoints is routine. The Israeli military is capricious in its decisions on whether to give permits that allow Palestinians to enter the Jewish state. The joke is that before the Palestinian Authority was created, you had to go and see a man called Shlomo if you wanted to enter Israel or travel abroad; now, you have to go and see a man called Ahmed, and he goes to see Shlomo. Israelis say curfews and closure - when Palestinians are corralled into the West Bank and Gaza - are only imposed when the Palestinians have been violent. But collective punishment foments collective anger. Acutely aware that any control they have over their lives is at the mercy of Israel, few believe a Palestinian state born now would be very different.
At a rally near the border with Jordan, Sharon is careful to strike a moderate note. His campaign strategy is to say almost nothing for fear of disturbing his double-digit lead in the polls. His diehard supporters, however, reveal themselves at their most extreme. A young man with a ponytail of jet-black curls says: "On day one, I want him to close out all the fucking Arabs. No money, no jobs. We have to show them who's boss."
The majority of the audience are Sephardic Jews of Middle Eastern origin. Israel's traditional Ashkenazi left, the descendants of European Jews who came to Israel to found kibbutzim and create an idealistic, secular, socialist state, lost their control of Israeli politics years ago. Russian immigrants and traditionally right-wing Sephardim play an ever more influential role. But the demise of the left now reflects not just demographic change in Israel, but the collapse of a whole way of thinking. The Israeli left blames the Palestinians for letting them down.
Lindsey Hilsum is the Channel 4 News diplomatic correspondent
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