Kadima wins Israeli election

[Partridge]

Kadima hails Olmert as next PM, leaders declare victory for party
Haaretz

Kadima lawmakers hailed party leader Ehud Olmert as the next prime minister Tuesday night, shortly after exit polls gave the party the most number of seats, with a predicted range of 29 to 32.

"Kadima has won today. The next prime minister is Ehud Olmert," said Roni Bar-On, a Kadima legislator, who followed Ariel Sharon from the Likud to his new party.

"In any final outcome, this is a victory for Kadima," said another former Likud member, Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz. "Kadima will form the government. The intention is to fulfil all of our commitments to the voters."

"What is important is that Kadima is alive and kicking," said Kadima MK Ruhama Avraham. "All options are open to Ehud Olmert."

Labor figures also responded positively to the exit polls, which predicted that between 20 and 22 Knesset seats would go the party.

In praise of the party's chairman, Shelly Yachimovitch (Labor) called Amir Peretz the "undisputed leader of the Labor Party."

Former prime minister Ehud Barak, who refrained from campaigning for Peretz due to political differences between the two, congratulated Peretz for preserving Labor's strength.

Labor MK Yuli Tamir said that the party will sit in a coalition only if its political and social platform is adopted. "We have clear guidelines for a coalition we're willing to sit in," Tamir said.

Dan Yatom of Labor said the results of the exit polls showed a defeat for Kadima and victory for Labor.

"According to these exit polls this is a severe defeat for Kadima. This is a big achievement for the Labor party," he said.

"As far as the coalition is concerned, we will wait and see. I am very satisfied with these results."

Labor MK Isaac Herzog said the results vindicated his party's social agenda.

"Before the elections, everyone was lamenting the Labor party, which has succeeded in changing the national agenda," he said.

"We proved that we united the nation. We brought together religious and secular citizens, settlers and those in the Gush Dan region. Our most important achievement was bringing everyone together," Yisrael Beiteinu Chairman Avigdor Lieberman, whose party won 12-14 seats, said Tuesday night.

"This is only the beginning. I am happy that we became a large party in the nationalist camp, and I'm sure that next time we'll win the elections. We have a lot of work ahead of us. This is the beginning of the fight for Israel's future. This achievement belongs to the activists, volunteers and fellow party members. We'll do everything to ensure the security of Israel's citizens, be it from outside sources or from internal criminal sources," Lieberman said.

The exit polls also predicted seven seats for the Pensioners' party. Party leader Rafi Eitan said Tuesday night that his party would only join a coalition that would safeguard the rights of the elderly.

[PhilosophyGenius]

Thank goodness Netanyaho didnt win...but then again, what's the difference?

[Partridge]

Ah, the best part of any election - save for your party winning - the post election analysis! Here we go, here we go...

The Ethnic Cleansing Party Outpaces Likud: The Rise of Israel's Avigdor Lieberman
Saree Makdisi - Counterpunch

Everyone is talking about the successful-albeit lackluster-performance of Ehud Olmert's Kadima party in Tuesday's Israeli elections. Kadima won a marginal victory, gaining 28 seats in the Knesset, and giving Olmert the opportunity to form a government.

But in a sense the real winner of the elections was Avigdor Lieberman, leader of Yisrael Beiteinu, which pushed past Likud to become one of Israel's major parties-turning Lieberman into a potential kingmaker. This is a remarkable development because Lieberman's party stands for one thing: an Israel finally cleansed of the remainder of the indigenous Palestinian population.

Lieberman was born in Moldova in 1958. In 1978, he moved to Israel. Since he is Jewish, he was eligible for instant citizenship under Israel's Law of Return.

It was evidently not enough for Lieberman that, as a Russian-speaking immigrant fresh off the plane, he was instantaneously granted rights and privileges denied to Palestinians born in the very country to which he had just moved (not to mention those expelled in during the creation of Israel in 1948). The very presence of an indigenous non-Jewish population in Israel was, in effect, unacceptable to him.

In 1999, he formed a party called Yisrael Beiteinu ("Israel our Home"), made up largely of other Russian immigrants for whom the presence of Palestinians is also unacceptable.

Lieberman's party believes what all Israelis believe: that Israel is a Jewish state. Unlike the more respectable Israeli parties, however, Lieberman's party is willing to add that since Israel is a Jewish state, non-Jews are not welcome. Even if they were born there.

Since Israel has-somewhat conveniently-never declared its own borders, Lieberman proposes that the state's borders be drawn in such a way that Jews are placed on one side of it, and as many Arabs as possible on the other. Ethnic purity is the operative ideal. The mainstream Israeli parties, and even right wing politicians like Moshe Arens, denounce what they regard as Lieberman's racism.

The difference between Lieberman and mainstream Israeli politicians, however, is not that they believe in cultural heterogeneity and he does not: for they are as committed to Israel's Jewishness as he is.

The difference, rather, is one of degree. Mainstream Israeli politicians agree that a line of concrete and steel ought to be drawn with Jews on one side of it and as many Arabs as possible on the other. But they argue that it is OK to have a few Arabs on the inside, as long as they behave themselves, and don't contribute too heavily to what Israelis refer to ominously as "the demographic problem."

Contending themselves with the platitude that Israel is a democracy, mainstream Israeli politicians ignore the fact that, in matters of access to land, questions of marriage and family unification, and many of the other normal rights and duties associated with citizenship, Israel's Palestinian minority faces forms of discrimination not faced by Jewish citizens of the state.

This is hardly surprising. As the state of the Jewish people, Israel is, after all, the only country in the world that expressly claims not to be the state of its actual citizens (one fifth of whom are non-Jews), let alone that of the people whom it governs (half of whom are Palestinian).

Non-Jews have always been, at best, an impediment to Israel's Jewishness. The only question has been what to do about them. Lieberman's suggestion is hardly novel. Until he was assassinated, the Israeli cabinet minister Rehavam Ze'evi used to refer to Palestinians as "lice," and compared them to a "cancer" destroying Israel from the inside. He thought that Palestinians should simply be expelled. Lieberman's solution to "the demographic problem" may seem a little less inhumane, but it is just as racist.

The point, however, is that-as the Israeli journalist Gideon Levy points out-Ze'evi and Lieberman are no more racist than mainstream politicians like Ehud Olmert. The difference is simply one of modalities. "Lieberman wants to distance [Palestinians] from our borders," writes Levy; "Olmert and his ilk want to distance them from our consciousness." Racism, Levy concludes, is the real winner of the 2006 elections.

The question is whether this represents some new development, or merely a sign that Israeli politics are becoming truer to the nature of Israel itself-a reminder that the quest for ethnic purity, no matter how it's dressed up, is inherently ugly.

Saree Makdisi, a professor of English at UCLA, is the author of Romantic Imperialism: Universal Empire and the Culture of Modernity (Cambridge University Press, 1998) and William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s (University of Chicago Press, 2003). He can be reached through his blog.

[Partridge]

The Israeli Elections: What the Hell has Happened?
Uri Avnery - Counterpunch

The most dramatic and the most boring election campaign in our history has mercifully come to an end. Israel looks in the mirror and asks itself: What the hell has happened?

On the way to the ballot box, in the center of Tel-Aviv, I could not detect the slightest sign that this was election day. Generally, elections in Israel are a passionate affair. Posters everywhere, thousands of slogan-covered cars rushing around ferrying voters to the ballot stations, a lot of noise.

This time - nothing. An eerie silence. Less than two thirds of the registered citizens did actually take the trouble to vote. Politicians of all stripes are detested, democracy despised among the young, whole sectors estranged. Those who decided not to vote, but at the last moment relented, voted for the Pensioners' List, which jumped from nothing to an astonishing seven seats.

This was a real protest vote. Even young people told themselves: Instead of throwing our vote away, let's do them a favor. Old people, sick people (including the terminally ill), handicapped people and the entire health and education systems were the victims of the Thatcherite economic policies of Netanyahu, backed by Sharon, which Shimon Peres (of all people) called "swinish".

That vote was a curiosity. But what happened in the main arena?

At the beginning of the campaign I wrote that the whole of the political system was moving to the left.

Many thought that that was wishful thinking, sadly removed from reality. Now it has actually happened.

The main result of these elections is that the hold of the nationalistic-religious bloc, which has dominated Israel for more than a generation, has been broken. All those who announced that the Left is dead and that Israel is condemned to right-wing rule for a long, long time have been proved wrong.

All the right-wing parties together won 32* seats, the religious parties 19. With 51 of the 120 seats in the Knesset, the rightist-religious wing cannot block all moves towards peace any more.

This is a turning point. The dream of a Greater Israel, stretching from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River, is dead.

Significantly, the "National Union", the party that is completely identified with the settlers, has won only 9 seats - more or less like last time. After all the heart-rending drama of the destruction of the Gaza settlements, the settlers remain as unpopular as ever. They have lost the decisive battle for public opinion.

Netanyahu declared that the elections were going to be a "national referendum" on the withdrawal from the West Bank. Well. It was - and the public overwhelmingly voted "Yes".

The main victim is Netanyahu himself. The Likud has collapsed. For the first time since its founding by Ariel Sharon in 1973, it has been subjected to the humiliation of being the fifth (!) party in the Knesset.

The heartfelt joy about this rout of the Right is tempered by a very dangerous development: the rise of Avigdor Lieberman's "Israel our Home" party, a mutation of the Right with openly fascist tendencies.

Lieberman, an immigrant from the former Soviet Union and himself a settler, draws his main strength from the "Russian" community, which is almost uniformly extremely nationalistic. He calls for the expulsion of all Arabs (a fifth of Israel's population), ostensibly in a swap of territories, but the message is clear. There are also the usual hallmarks of such a party: the cult of the Leader, a call for "law and order", intense hatred for "the enemy" both within and without. This man got 12 seats and has overtaken Netanyahu. His main slogan "Da Lieberman" ("Yes Lieberman" in Russian) reminds one of similar historical salutes.

For those who are interested: the fascist group that called for my murder as part of their election program has failed to attain the 2% necessary to gain entry into the Knesset. But, of course, an assassin does not need 2% to follow such a call. (I would like to use this occasion to express my heartfelt thanks to all those around the world who expressed their solidarity.)

The joyful scenes at the Labor Party's Headquarters may seem at first glance exaggerated. After all, the party got only 20 seats, as against 19 last time (to which must be added the three of the small party led by Amir Peretz at the time). But the numbers do not tell the whole story.

First of all, the political implications are far-reaching. In parliament, it is not only the raw numbers which count, but also their location on the political map. In the next Knesset, any coalition without the Labor Party has become impractical, if not completely impossible. Amir Peretz is going to be the most important person in the next cabinet, after Ehud Olmert.

But there is more to it than that. Peretz, the first "oriental" Jewish leader of any major Israeli party, has overcome the historic rejection of Labor by the immigrants from Muslim countries and their offspring. He has destroyed the established equation of Oriental = poor = Right as against Ashkenazi = well-to-do = Left.

This has not yet found its full expression in the voting. The increase in Oriental voters for Labor has been only incremental. But no one who has seen how Peretz was received in the open markets, until now fortresses of the Likud, can have any doubt that something fundamental has changed.

And most important, when Peretz arrived on the scene, hardly three months ago, Labor was a walking corpse. Now it is alive, vibrant, hungry for action. It's called leadership, and it's there. Peretz is on his way to being a viable candidate for Prime Minister in the next elections. Until then, he certainly will have a major impact both on social affairs and the peace process.

That is, of course, the main question: Can the next government bring us closer to peace?

Kadima has won the elections, but is not happy. When it was founded by Sharon, it expected 45 seats. The sky was the limit. Now it has to be satisfied with a measly 28 seats, enough to head the government but not enough to dictate policy.

In his victory speech, Olmert called on Mahmoud Abbas to make peace. But this is an empty gesture. No Palestinian could possibly accept the terms Olmert has in mind. So, if the Palestinians don't show that they are "partners", Olmert wants to "establish Israel's permanent borders unilaterally", meaning that he wants to annex something between 15% and 50% of the West Bank.

It is doubtful whether Peretz can impose another policy. Possibly, the whole question will be postponed, under the pretext that the social crisis has to be addressed first. In the meantime, the fight against the Palestinians will go on.

It is up to the peace movement to change this. The elections show that Israeli public opinion wants an end to the conflict, that it rejects the dreams of the settlers and their allies, that it seeks a solution. We have contributed to this change. Now it is our job to show that Olmert's unilateral peace is no peace at all and will not lead to a solution.

On our election day, the new Palestinian government was confirmed by its Parliament. With this government we can and must negotiate. At the moment, the majority in Israel is not yet ready for that. But the election results show that we are on the way.

* All numbers mentioned in this article are those published with 97% of the votes counted. There may be slight changes in the final count.
Uri Avnery is an Israeli writer and peace activist with Gush Shalom. He is one of the writers featured in The Other Israel: Voices of Dissent and Refusal. He is also a contributor to CounterPunch's hot new book The Politics of Anti-Semitism. He can be reached at: avnery@counterpunch.org.

[Partridge]

The Irony of the Israeli Elections: Does Kadima's Victory Put the Peace Process in Reverse?
Neve Gordon - Counterpunch

Israelis went to the polls this week with the hope of resolving the Israeli Palestinian conflict once and for all. The new political party Kadima, which means ìforwardî in Hebrew, promised as much and therefore won the day, while the country's long-established ruling parties, Labor and Likud, lost their traditional place at the helm.

Although the refreshing social justice discourse introduced by Labor's new leader, the Moroccan born union advocate Amir Peretz, did inject energy into the shattered party, he failed to reap the support many had hoped for. His position regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been rightly criticized as incoherent, and it also appears that many of Labor's longtime Ashkenazi voters have deserted the party ranks because they are unwilling to be led by a Mizrahi Jew.

Likud's situation is much worse. Following the creation of Kadima it lost almost 75 percent of its cohorts not least because it has been increasingly characterized as an extremist party that represents the settler's uncompromising ideology. Perhaps more importantly, during his tenure as Minister of Finance, Binyamin Netanyahu introduced unpopular Thatcherite policies that pushed hundreds of thousands of Israelis under the poverty line. After the election's humiliating results -- in which Likud won less than 10% of the Knesset seats and has been relegated to the fifth largest party -- many believe that Netanyahu should resign.

Even though the extreme right lost many seats, Avigdor Liberman's party Israel Beiteinu (Israel is our Home), garnered 12 seats, four times more than it won in the previous elections. This is a worrisome development since Liberman is Israel's version of France's Jean Marie Le Pen, a shrewd politician who captivates right wing voters by appealing to atavistic sentiments of Jewish blood and soil.

Whereas Liberman may have been the election's surprise, Kadima was its victor, gaining 28 seats. Kadima's meteoric ascent in the polls is due, in part, to a pervasive yearning for a centrist party that will solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. While the party has very little to say about the country's other social ills, Ehud Olmert's bold declaration that Kadima will unilaterally determine Israel's international borders is one of the secrets behind its noteworthy achievement.

It was actually the party's founder, a man who is currently lying in a coma, who managed to persuade the public that he will make the Palestinian problem disappear. In the weeks leading up to the elections Kadima simply exploited Ariel Sharon's promise, and much of the support the party enjoys reflects the enormous respect many Israelis developed for the former prime minister.

Kadima had a straightforward message and the Israeli public bought it. The thrust of its claim is that there is a contradiction between Israel's geographic and demographic aspirations: as the settlement project deepened its hold on the Occupied Territories, the very idea of Israel as a Jewish state, where Jews are the majority, has been undermined. In other words, the fact that the majority of people living between the Jordan Valley and the Mediterranean Sea are not Jewish underscores the impossibility of achieving the vision of a greater Israel while maintaining a Jewish state.

The party's idea is to unilaterally redraw the borders between Israel and the Palestinian territories, and thus to radically alter the region's demographic and geographic reality. Last summer's Gaza pull-out constituted the plan's first stage. This move was regarded both in Israel and among the international community as a positive step towards solving the conflict. Few seemed to care that it was carried out unilaterally and that the new reality limited Gazans even further in terms of resources, mobility and decision-making.

In a recent interview for Ha'aretz, Olmert outlined the plan's next stage, explaining that Sharon's so-called security barrier will become Israel's political border. But he failed to explain what exactly will the conversion of the security barrier into a political border entail.

Demographically, the barrier will surround 48 Jewish settlements from the east, so that 171,000 of the West Bank's settlers will be incorporated into Israel's new borders. The wall being built in East Jerusalem is meant to reinforce the 1967 annexation of this part of the city, and to further consolidate the 183,800 settlers living there. In this way the government will not have to evacuate 87 percent of the settlers now living in the West Bank, and Jews will have a clear majority within Israel's unilaterally determined borders. The price Israel will have to pay for such a solution is the evacuation of 52,000 settlers.

Geographically, however, the barrier qua political border (including Israel's plan to maintain control of the Jordan valley) does not resemble either one of the two traditional visions for peace: the two-state solution or the bi-national polity.

An examination of the barrier's route reveals that the future Palestinian ìstateî will be divided into three if not five areas (including Gaza). Each area will be closed off almost entirely from the others, while Israel effectively continues to control all of the borders so as to enforce a hermetic closure whenever it wishes. What is new about Kadima's vision is not the attempt to create isolated enclaves in the Occupied Territories, but rather the effort to transform these into quasi-independent entities that will ostensibly constitute a Palestinian state.

Examining the make up of the new Knesset, it appears that anywhere between 65 and 85 members out of 120 will support Olmert's proposal. The brilliancy of Kadima's political plan is that it solves Israel's demographic problem and presents its solution as the two-state option, regardless of the fact that this will be the first time in history that a so-called ìindependent stateî will not have power over any of its borders. Indeed, Kadima's plan elides the fact that Israel will continue to control the Palestinians, whose living conditions will be even further limited. The methods of control, though, will have to be more remote and technologically sophisticated, using biometrics, video cameras, robots and surveillance aircraft.

The Palestinians, in turn, will no doubt employ all means at their disposal to resist Israel's attempt to transform the West Bank and Gaza into remotely controlled Bantustans. Consequently, one should not be surprised if Olmert's plan were to be met by Qasam missiles being launched from the West Bank towards Jerusalem and Tel-Aviv.

The ultimate irony is that Kadima's political vision actually puts the peace process into reverse. On the one hand, it is trying to persuade the public that it can make the Palestinian problem disappear by reintroducing the age-old Zionist trope of an iron wall. On the other hand, it has abandoned all forms of dialogue and negotiation, which Israeli leaders since the early 1990s understood to be the only way to reach a solution with the Palestinians. Kadima is accordingly an oxymoron. While the party's name means forward its political program will effectively take Israelis several steps backwards.

Neve Gordon teaches human rights at Ben-Gurion University in Israel and is the editor of From the Margins of Globalization: Critical Perspectives on Human Rights. He Can be reached at nevegordon@gmail.com.

[Partridge]

Haaretz Election Coverage page

[Partridge]

Narrow victory for Kadima in Israeli elections
World Socialist Website

The victory of Kadima in Israel’s general election has been hailed as a popular mandate for the unilateral redrawing of the country’s borders by 2010 and the creation of a new “political centre-ground.” In reality, the vote reveals a deeply fractured society that is politically, economically and socially unstable.

On a record low turnout Kadima, the party led by Ehud Olmert since its founder Ariel Sharon fell into a coma, performed much worse than expected. It won only 28 seats instead of a projected 35 to 40. It will rely heavily on the support of the Labour Party, which did better than predicted by winning 20 seats, and still needs the support of smaller parties to form a government.

The dominant sections of Israel’s ruling elite, Washington and the European powers backed Kadima’s policy for unilateral separation from the Palestinians—what is in fact an attempt to permanently annexe much of the West Bank, including Jerusalem. But it was the support of Labour and other nominally left parties that enabled Sharon’s policy to be portrayed as a more realistic path to peace and the elections as a plebiscite on disengagement, with no other alternative to the demands of the far right for war until total victory.

The pro-Labour Haaretz insisted, “Anyone who wants to perpetuate Israel’s control over the Palestinian people should vote for one of the parties on the right. Anyone who admires the courage demonstrated by Ehud Olmert, who presented the voters with his plan for a withdrawal from most of the West Bank and a corresponding evacuation of settlements, and even promised that his coalition will include only parties that promise in writing to support the withdrawal, should vote for Kadima, or for Labour or Meretz, both of which support an additional withdrawal.”

Notwithstanding such efforts to focus attention exclusively on the disengagement plan, growing social antagonisms found a partial and distorted expression in the election result.

Labour was able to win increased support because its new leader, Amir Peretz, made limited promises to safeguard the more impoverished sections of society. His election campaign coupled pledges to join Kadima in a coalition government so as to push through separation from the Palestinians with calls for raising the minimum wage and other social measures.

The seven seats won by the Pensioners Party, one of the major shocks of the election, was another manifestation of the social tensions that have been created by the drive to destroy Israel’s once extensive welfare network. The party came from nowhere by campaigning for pensions for all citizens and for medical care to be subsidized by the state.

On the right, the collapse of Likud, from which Sharon split in order to form Kadima, was in part due to the deep unpopularity of its leader Binyamin Netanyahu. As finance minister he has become indelibly associated with the austerity measures imposed since 2003.

Kadima’s poor performance and its heavy reliance on Labour and possible inclusion of the Pensioners Party, the ultra-orthodox Shas and other smaller formations have given risen to concern over the possibility of forming a stable government. This would necessitate reliance on an electoral base that is objectively in conflict with the neo-liberal economic programme demanded by the major corporations and banks. Israeli shares fell as soon as the stock markets opened yesterday.

Ultimately, the electoral manoeuvres with Labour and the Pensioners Party cannot prevent the development of explosive class tensions within Israel. There is no basis for any party that upholds the interests of Israeli capitalism to resolve any of the pressing social problems afflicting working people. To the extent that Peretz honours his commitment to back the government in slashing public spending, his demagogic appeals to the poor will be undermined, exposing the ephemeral character of Labour’s increased support.

Instability is also made inevitable by the disengagement plan itself. Though this is deliberately concealed by most of the media, there is no possibility of establishing peace based on land grabs that reduce the Palestinians to an impoverished ghetto existence.

As Britain’s Economist magazine admitted, “A Palestinian state under such constraints would not prosper. So long as Israel controls its borders, it would not even count as sovereign. It would be much like Gaza since the disengagement. Citing intelligence reports of planned terrorist attacks, Israel has kept Gaza’s main border-crossing for goods closed more often than open since the start of the year, causing serious food shortages and leaving Gazan fruit and vegetable exports worth millions of dollars to rot. Such friction between security and economics would keep the West Bank poor and angry, encouraging attacks across the border.”

There is no consensus behind the disengagement plan that is meant to have created a new centre. Rather, the adoption of Sharon’s perspective by most of the so-called left is indicative of a lurch to the right within official Israeli politics that also finds expression in the growth of the far-right parties.

Labour’s support for Kadima is the end product of the two-state solution championed by the entire Zionist left. Sharon relied directly on Labour to remain in government. He formed Kadima with the backing of Labour’s former leader Shimon Peres in order to break the grip of the right-wing settlers and pave the way for the renewal of an effective electoral bloc with Labour.

Although Yossi Beilin’s Yachad-Meretz party, the political wing of the Peace Now group, may not join the government it has described disengagement as opening “a window of opportunity for the renewal of the peace process.” It no longer calls for a withdrawal to Israel’s border prior to the 1967 war, but calls them a guide to negotiations on a final settlement “with the goal of removing the smallest number of settlers possible from their homes.... Both sides will consider the facts on the ground and re-evaluate the borders accordingly.”

The capitulation of the left has left the far right as the only significant political opposition to Kadima.

The Labourites have routinely justified their support for Sharon as a necessary compromise that would serve to neutralise the influence of the settlers and the ultra-orthodox parties by creating a stable “centre.”

But such efforts to rebrand the core leadership of Likud could never provide a basis for resolving what is a profound crisis of rule within the Israeli state. Instead it has paved the way for explosive political developments that pose grave dangers to the Israeli and Palestinian working class.

Likud’s collapse to just 11 seats benefited the far-right parties that were once only able to influence state policy by exerting pressure on their far larger ally. Likud, once seen as the most aggressive militarists, has been overtaken by parties that advance policies once associated with Rabbi Meir Kahane’s Kach party, considered so extreme that it was banned from running for office in 1988.

Yisrael Beiteinu, with 12 seats, is led by Avigdor Lieberman and counts on support from Israel’s 900,000-strong Russian immigrant population; “Israel is our home”demands the ethnic cleansingof some 500,000 Arab Israeli citizens and subjecting those remaining to a “loyalty test.” The National Union-National Religious Party, from which Lieberman split, also secured nine seats.

Together with Likud, these far-right formations control over a quarter of the seats in the Knesset (parliament). They can mobilise a social base which, though numerically small, is ideologically driven and enjoys the support not only of sections of the army but also a powerful Zionist and Christian fundamentalist lobby in the United States.

Not only will these right-wing parties continue to do everything in their power to worsen hostilities with the Palestinians, but their efforts to this end will be used to justify Kadima’s own acts of military and economic aggression.

See Also:
Israel announces plans to annex more Palestinian land
[23 March 2006]

[Partridge]

The New York Times Covers Up Discrimination against Palestinian Citizens of Israel
Patrick O’Connor, Electronic Intifada

One of the major developments in March 28th's Israeli elections was the sudden rise of Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu party which became the fourth largest Israeli party. Yisrael Beiteinu advocates transferring a number of Palestinian towns in Israel to Palestinian Authority control, thus revoking the Israeli citizenship of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. The popularity of this proposal fits with the results of a poll released last week which showed that sixty-eight percent of Israeli Jews would refuse to live in the same apartment building as a Palestinian citizen of Israel, and forty percent of Israeli Jews believe the state needs to support the emigration of Palestinian citizens.[1] However, because of the way Israel is portrayed in the mainstream US media, such blatant discrimination would likely surprise the US public.

Israel’s obfuscation of the second-class status and even of the very existence of Palestinian citizens, 20% of Israel’s population, is a crucial component of a broader Israeli strategy of presenting the public face of a liberal democracy while simultaneously repressing Palestinians. The US mainstream media, with the New York Times in a leading role, collaborates with this strategy. The US media emphasizes the Israeli narrative and focuses coverage on Palestinian terrorism, while minimizing the central Palestinian experiences of Israeli occupation and seizure of Palestinian land, Israeli state terrorism, and systematic Israeli discrimination against Palestinians living in Israel, the Occupied Territories and the diaspora.

Three news articles on “Israeli Arabs” and the Israeli elections published in March in three of the most trusted and widely read US newspapers – The New York Times, Los Angeles Times and Washington Post provide one example of US media support for the Israeli narrative. Israel uses the term Israeli Arab rather than Palestinian citizen of Israel as one tool in the longstanding effort to “divide and rule”, and to cover up the familial, historical and cultural relationship between Palestinians living in Israel and those living under occupation. None of the articles challenges the use of the term Israeli Arab, and none questions whether a Jewish state with a substantial non-Jewish minority can be democratic and ensure equal rights. While mentioning discrimination, the three articles completely omitted Yisrael Beiteinu’s proposal to revoke the citizenship of many Palestinians.

This disregard for Palestinian citizens of Israel is consistent with the findings of a recent research study I conducted on the publication of op-eds by Palestinian and Israeli writers over the last five years in the five US newspapers with the greatest circulation.[2] Though these newspapers published 201 op-eds by Jewish citizens of Israel, they published just a single op-ed by a Palestinian citizen of Israel currently residing in Israel.

However, The New York Times, commonly viewed as the most influential US newspaper, follows the discriminatory Israeli narrative on Israel’s Palestinian citizens to a much greater degree than the Washington Post and LA Times. This also corresponds with my op-ed research findings. From 2000-05 the New York Times published 3.4 op-eds by Israeli writers for every op-ed by a Palestinian writer, while the LA Times published 2.3 Israelis per Palestinian, and The Washington Post published 1.4 Israelis per Palestinian.

Throughout Dina Kraft’s March 21 New York Times article, “Politicians Court a Not-so-Silent Minority: Israeli Arabs”,[3] Kraft maintains a rigid dichotomy between “Palestinians” and “Israeli Arabs.” Kraft provides no hint of family ties, shared identity, history or culture between Palestinian citizens of Israel and Palestinians living in the Occupied Territories. Kraft describes Palestinians citizens of Israel as a distinct group from Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, “Almost 20 percent of Israel's 6.8 million citizens are Arabs (a group distinct from the Palestinians in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza Strip)….”

In contrast, in the May 25 LA Times article “Israeli Arabs Feel Little Stake in Vote,”[4] reporter Laura King calls them “brethren”, noting “a central dilemma for Israeli Arabs: whether they should identify more strongly with their Palestinian brethren in the West Bank and Gaza Strip or seek to strengthen their own identity within Israel.”

The Washington Post’s Scott Wilson reports valuable information in his March 5 article, “Israeli Arabs See Lesson in Hamas Victory”[5] that “The Arab families who remained in their villages during Israel's 1948 war of independence account for roughly 20 percent of the Jewish state's 6 million people… They are also viewed with suspicion by Israel's security services, who fear they might be a Palestinian fifth column concentrated in a strip of towns running north from here along the 1949 armistice line into the Galilee region.”

Kraft’s complete separation of “Israeli Arabs” from “Palestinians” is particularly audacious given her article’s dateline from “Baqa Al-Gharbiyeh,” a town which dramatically illustrates Israel’s systematic separation of Palestinians in Israel from those in the Occupied Territories. Baqa Al-Gharbiyeh is a Palestinian town inside Israel, just west of the Green Line. Connected, just east across the Green Line and inside the West Bank is the Palestinian town of Baqa Al- Sharkiyeh. “West” and “East” Baqa in Arabic, are really one town straddling the Green Line, but now separated by a 25 foot high concrete Wall which divides families and friends. Though from the same families, Baqa Al-Gharbiyeh’s residents are typically identified as “Israeli Arab” citizens of Israel, while Baqa Al-Sharqiyeh’s residents are “Palestinians” under Israeli military occupation.

In contrast to the other two newspapers, The New York Times describes discrimination against Palestinian citizens of Israel in an ambiguous manner. In the LA Times, Laura King notes that: “Joblessness and poverty rates are much higher among Israeli Arabs than among the Jewish majority. Arabs as a rule do not serve in the Israeli army, which gives many young Israelis a boost in their career prospects… Arab cities and towns inside Israel receive substantially less funding than Jewish municipalities. And a poll last week suggested that a majority of Israeli Jews regard Arab citizens as a threat to national security.” Scott Wilson in the Washington Post mostly repeats these points, but adds discrimination in land ownership. Wilson also mentions the Israeli police and military’s killing of 49 Palestinian citizens in 1956 during the 1948-66 period when Palestinians in Israel were under military rule, and the killing of 13 Palestinian citizens in 2000.

The Washington Post and LA Times describe the discrimination as a fact outlined in the reporter’s seemingly objective voice, but in The New York Times a Palestinian citizen of Israel explains discrimination. "People live under continued and planned discrimination when it comes to the economy, education and job…," said Ali Haider, co-executive director of the Association for the Advancement of Civic Equality.”

Most American readers, accustomed to hearing competing viewpoints from “both sides”, are more likely to trust Kraft’s “objective” reporter’s voice which adds, “Arabs in Israel have higher levels of education, medical care and standards of living than their counterparts elsewhere in the Middle East. But they compare their lives with those of Israeli Jews, who are generally better off.”

Kraft’s statement reflects a startling tolerance of a discriminatory understanding of the rights of Palestinian citizens of Israel – that the rights of an ethnic or religious group in a “democratic” state should primarily be compared with ethnically or religiously similar people in other countries, and as an afterthought compared with the privileged majority in the same country. Would the Times endorse ethnically or religiously differentiated citizens’ rights for other self-proclaimed democratic states?

The three articles exemplify how the US mainstream media collaborates in maintaining a fictional narrative of Israel as a liberal, democratic state inexplicably beset by Arab/Muslim terrorism. Maintaining that narrative requires covering up the historical reality that in 1947-48 Israel drove over 700,000 Palestinians from their homes in what is now Israel. It necessitates denying that Palestinians who remained in what is now Israel are Palestinians, from the same families and sharing the same culture as Palestinians living in the Occupied Territories and the diaspora. It involves whitewashing Israel’s systematic discrimination against all Palestinians, including Palestinian citizens of Israel, simply because they are Palestinian Muslims and Christians and not Jews, and avoiding the central question of whether a Jewish state can provide equal and democratic rights to non-Jewish citizens.

The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times news reports provide some information that allows a careful reader to question parts of the dominant Israeli narrative. The New York Times, the US’ newspaper of record, chooses to swallow and sell wholesale the discriminatory Israeli understanding of Palestinian citizens of Israel.

Endnotes

[1] http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/objects...?itemNo=697458

[2] Israeli and Palestinian voices on the US op-ed pages: A Palestine Media Watch Report (PDF) Patrick O'Conner (28 February 2006)

[3] Politicians Court a Not-So-Silent Minority: Israeli Arabs, Dina Kraft, New York Times (21 March 2006)

[4] Israeli Arabs Feel Little Stake in Vote, Laura King, LA Times (25 March 2006)

[5] Israeli Arabs Reflect on Hamas Win, Scott Wilson, Washington Post (5 March 2006)


Patrick O’Connor is an activist with the International Solidarity Movement, and Palestine Media Watch.

[Partridge]

Israel is united in avoiding real peace
Jonathan Cook - Daily Star (Lebanon)

The low margin of victory aside, Kadima's success in the Israeli election on Tuesday is far from the political and ideological upheaval most analysts were predicting. The most notable event was the humiliation of Likud, Ariel Sharon's old party and the one he hoped to sabotage by setting up Kadima shortly before he himself was felled by a stroke. Likud's fortunes foundered after most of its supporters, following in Sharon's footsteps, deserted either to Kadima or to the far-right Yisrael Beiteinu. Given the record low turnout, and the challenges posed by the Palestinians' recent backing of a Hamas government, the scale of the Likud failure was all the more shocking. Apparently even some of the settlers abandoned it.On learning of his defeat, Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu told supporters that the party would "not bend to the winds of fashion." If so, he was writing certainly his own political obituary and possibly that of his party too. For if there was any lesson to be learned on Tuesday, it was that what Israelis expect from the many parties they voted into the next Knesset is that they blow precisely with those winds.

In Israeli politics, where coalition governments are a fact of life, the parties are often judged not only in terms of their platforms but in terms of with whom they will work. Kadima's victory assured, some voters may have wanted to guide its hand in office by choosing its most likely partners. Other Israelis, it seems, chose not to vote at all. Those parties that backed Kadima's program in relation to the Palestinians most enthusiastically prospered: from Labor under Amir Peretz to Yisrael Beiteinu. Those that demurred, notably Likud, paid the price.

Kadima's policy comes in various guises: "disengagement," "unilateral separation" and "convergence." In plain speaking, however, they all mean expanded Israeli borders that will enclose swaths of Palestinian land in the West Bank while appearing to give the Palestinians a state. Not a state of the kind that could ever challenge Israel's control over their lives but one that may win the approval of the international community and ensure the Palestinians are held responsible if they reject the new order.

Even Ehud Olmert, the colorless technocrat who inherited Sharon's mantle, could not quite tarnish the alchemy bestowed on the new party by its commitment to "unilateral separation." But what makes this policy compelling, both to voters and to most of the other parties?

Kadima, far from seeking the realignment of the Zionist natural order, as is commonly supposed, has ensured its effective consolidation. The new "center" party has triumphed not because it broke with the left and right, but because it incorporated them. Observers have often pointed out that although Sharon was identified with the right - he even founded Likud - his political roots lay in the leftist Zionist traditions of the Labor Party. It is therefore unsurprising that Sharon's final legacy was a party that fused those two competing traditions in relation to Israel's core obsession: how to manage its conflict with the Palestinians' over their dispossession.

In fact, Labor and Likud have never been far apart in their view of the goals of Israeli policy toward the Palestinians: both hoped to find a way to ensure Israel's continuing grip on the land of "Greater Israel." What separated them was how to achieve it.

In the tradition of Vladimir Jabotinsky, most in Likud believe the Palestinians can never be made willing accomplices to their dispossession. Because they will always struggle for their freedom, the Palestinians must be ruthlessly subjugated or expelled. Which of these two courses to follow has been the paralyzing dilemma faced by Likud ever since.

Labor, on the other hand, has tried various ploys to win a degree of Palestinian acceptance of the Israeli occupation, whether it was the corrupt, limited "self-government" of the Palestinian Authority established by Oslo, or Shimon Peres' attempts to set up Israeli-run industrial parks close to the Green Line - Israel's post-1948 war border - in the hope that Palestinian workers' obeisance might be bought on the cheap. But during the second intifada Israelis came to understand not only that Oslo had failed but that Sharon's attempts at reinvasion and direct reoccupation were leading the country nowhere either.

With the Labor and Likud approaches discredited, Sharon changed tack. In creating Kadima, he found a way to transcend the differences of left and right. He created, in his own words, an "Israeli consensus." Like Likud, Kadima admits that the Palestinians will never surrender their dreams of nationhood, but like Labor it believes a strategy can be devised in which the Palestinians are made powerless to resist Israeli diktats. Kadima squares the circle through a policy that maintains Likud's insistence on "unilateralism" while not forgoing Labor's pretence of "separation."

The question now is what coalition Olmert will bring together to carry through final, limited withdrawals from the West Bank. Unusually for an Israeli prime minister, he may find himself spoilt for choice. With the exception of Likud and the settlers' National Religious Party, the sizeable parties look ready to jump into bed with him. Labor, the Sephardic religious party Shas, the new Pensioners' Party and the peace camp of Meretz may try to push him leftward on social and economic policy, but will not oppose the central planks of the separation program. The rabidly anti-Arab Yisrael Beiteinu, under Avigdor Lieberman, will seek a harder line on separation, more to Israel's advantage, but the indications are that it will not stand in his way either.

In fact, with the ideological glue of Kadima at the center of the coalition, even ideological enemies like Meretz and Yisrael Beiteinu have said they would happily sit together in government. In Olmert's words, Israel has finally been born as a "united people, a people without camps."

The only people who won't be partners in the next stage of Israeli policy are the country's 1 million Arab citizens. None was placed in a realistic slot on Kadima's list, and it is a certainty that none of the Arab parties will be invited into the coalition. The consensus Sharon wanted and Olmert has delivered is an all-Jewish affair. With a Kadima government up and running in the coming days and weeks, it will be Israeli unilateralism as usual. And a real peace will be nowhere on the agenda.

Jonathan Cook (www.jkcook.net) is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth. He is the author of the forthcoming "Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State," published by Pluto Press. He wrote this commentary for THE DAILY STAR.

[Partridge]

Finished with Likud: Poverty not disengagement that determined the outcome of the Israeli elections
Graham Usher - Al-Ahram Weekly

The emotions said it all. Israel's next prime minister, a subdued Ehud Olmert, said the victory of his Kadima Party in the Israeli elections on Tuesday was an endorsement of his "convergence" plan. Over the next four years, he averred, Israel will determine its permanent borders, mostly in the occupied West Bank, to ensure its "Jewish and democratic" character. "If the Palestinians are wise enough to act, then in the near future we will sit together at the negotiating table to create a new reality. If they do not, Israel will take its destiny in hand," he said.

Kadima clearly won the elections and will form the next government but with nowhere near the mandate anticipated. Kadima will have 28 seats in the next 120- member parliament. Less than a week ago polls were predicting 35.

Amir Peretz -- with tears in his eyes -- said under his leadership the Labour Party had ceased to be the party of Ashkenazi (European) privilege. It had become the "truth" of "social justice" and "the right to earn a living in dignity". This too was stretching things. Labour will have 20 seats, only one more than it got in the "defeat" of 2003. But it had survived the "tsunami" of Kadima and the fear of a racist backlash against Peretz's Arab origins.

Binyamin Netanyahu presided over the worst performance of his Likud Party's 23-year history, reducing its 38-seat majority in the last parliament to a rump in the next. He looked pale and sweated profusely on Tuesday but vowed to "continue on the path we started to ensure the movement recovers. If we unite the ranks, we will restore Likud to its rightful place in leading the country," he said. Netanyahu then went to a crisis meeting of the Likud leadership. Israel's former foreign minister, Silvan Shalom, did not attend. He is preparing to challenge Netanyahu, "un-uniting the ranks".

So were Israel's 17th elections a "referendum" on "convergence", the euphemism for Olmert's plan to consolidate Israel's permanent rule over Jerusalem and the West Bank? The answer is only a little.

There was no doubt one of the deepest sentiments in the elections was most Israeli Jews desire to "separate" from the Palestinians as well as to give up on futile attempts to resolve the conflict through negotiation. This was most clearly seen in the 12 seats won by Avigdor Lieberman's racist Yisrael Beiteinu Party. Lieberman seeks not only separation from the Palestinians in the occupied territories but also from the 1.3 million Palestinian citizens of Israel, either through transfer or redrawing Israel's borders "demographically" to exclude them.

But separation has been a feature of Israeli policy since at least the Gaza disengagement last year. The elections merely confirmed it. More than separation these elections were a referendum on Netanyahu's economic policies during his tenure as finance minister in the last Israeli government. These enhanced Israel's growth rates and created an investor- friendly economy. But they also pushed 1.4 million Israelis into poverty, devastated entire towns and massively increased the disparity between Israel's rich elite and mass poor. It was "swinish capitalism" of the worst kind and Likud's traditional constituencies rejected it in droves.

The middle classes voted for the "gentler" capitalism of Kadima. The hard-line nationalists went to Lieberman. And the poor went to Shas (13 seats), the Pensioners Party (seven seats) and, in some cases, to Labour. But it was Peretz who inserted the social agenda into the election campaign, denting Kadima's rise and precipitating Likud's fall. "It was his biggest political achievement," said Isaac Herzog, number two on Labour's parliamentary list.

But it is a problem for the Palestinians. Israeli elections determine their fate every bit as much as Israelis. And while few believe negotiations -- let alone peace -- are anywhere on the horizon, Palestinians are aware the kind of coalition Olmert puts together will affect the dynamic, severity and temper of the conflict. If it is a "centre-left" government -- made up of Kadima, Labour and religious parties like Shas -- the future could be one of conquest but containment, where Israel and the Palestinian Authority observe a practical détente on the ground. If it is a centre-right coalition -- with Lieberman -- the future could be one of conquest, confrontation and collapse of the PA.

Neither coalition is especially stable. There are differences within Kadima on how to proceed with the Palestinians, let alone across the coalitions as a whole. Shas and the other orthodox parties are against any un-negotiated withdrawal from occupied Palestinian land. So is Lieberman. Labour is in favour of disengagement if negotiations fail. Peretz has also said he won't sit in a coalition with Lieberman, a man he describes as "a new kind of Le Pen".

The only sure thing is that the conflict will continue. On Tuesday Palestinians in Gaza for the first time launched a Katyusha rocket into Israel. It was claimed by Islamic Jihad as an attempt to disrupt the Israeli elections. It landed harmlessly south of Ashkelon. But one day a Katyusha will hit Ashkelon and Israel will respond with something more than assassination and artillery fire. And separation will then visibly become what it has always been, even if denied by the Israeli electorate -- a war by other means.