Tikkun Magazine, May/June 2006

MASH DOWN BABYLON

A Social Revolution? 

By Joel Schalit

Sometimes twenty seats can seem like a whole lot more, especially if you listen to the leaders of Israel's Labor Party analyzing the significance of their own groundbreaking achievements in Israel's 2006 elections. Under the circumstances, Labor didn't just poll well (unlike the Likud, it held onto all of its Knesset seats); it also created something far more lasting: a new public sensibility about the necessity of addressing Israel's mounting social crises. Now, nearly every Israeli political party must declare its willingness to confront Israel's mounting social and economic problems and propose a viable plan of action.

One need look no further than Israeli neo-conservatism's most historically influential proponent, Benjamin Netanyahu, to see how profoundly the emergence of this discourse shook up Israel's political establishment. Desperately seeking votes to shore up his rapidly shrinking Likud party, towards the end of the election campaign the former finance minister found himself apologizing to those who'd been adversely affected by his ruthless economic policies. For such a notoriously unapologetic ideologue to acknowledge criticisms of his free market politics clearly meant that Israeli politicians were taking the public's embrace of these concerns seriously.

From the opposite side of the tracks, the objections to Labor's electoral strategies raised by many peace activists after the election also attested to the significance of Labor's achievement. Why choose to focus on economic issues when the Left's chief responsibility ought to be convincing the Israeli public to accept a bilateral and comprehensive withdrawal to the 1967 borders? By choosing to concentrate its electoral efforts on addressing domestic problems, the Labor Party had essentially conceded to Kadima the battle over the character of the forthcoming withdrawals, and in doing so had failed to offer an alternative foreign policy ideologically consistent with its questionable domestic agenda.

Clearly, Labor has something to boast about. Forcing Israel's Right into a defensive posture on economic issues and drawing intense criticism about its electoral priorities from fellow progressives, Labor's social platform succeeded in moving Israeli political discourse to the Left in a manner entirely analogous to how Ariel Sharon's December 2004 decision to disengage unilaterally from the Occupied Territories helped legitimate the Israeli public's growing discomfort with the Occupation. Granted, Sharon wasn't necessarily interested in prosecuting a truly just and honorable withdrawal. But by choosing even to consider one, no matter how half-hearted, Sharon helped unleash a tsunami's worth of resentment about the cost of the Occupation that no mainstream Israeli political party has yet be able to satisfactorily channel into a plan to fully return to the 1967 borders.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the success of Labor's social platform is its significance when viewed in terms of wider global struggles with neo-liberal socio-economic policies in the West. Ideologically speaking, much of the analysis that Labor put forward about Israel's program of privatization and divestment from its traditionally large public sector, and about the government's increasing promotion of market-based solutions to social problems is no different from what has been offered by the anti-globalization movement over the course of the past ten years. What is so surprising is the degree to which Labor has been able to translate these ideas into a mainstream party's political platform in contemporary Israel, a highly industrialized first-world country undergoing the same economic transformation—from manufacturing to high tech—as the United States.

Though Labor's social platform is by no means unprecedented among progressive political parties in the West—take, for example, the French Left's criticisms of neo-liberalism, which contributed to France's rejection of the EU constitution in 2005—what makes it so unique is its geographical displacement. Despite the fact that Israel is in many respects a Western nation, it remains a Middle Eastern one as well, plagued by many of the same conflicts that afflict neighboring states, from the role that religion plays in public life to the disproportionate influence of the military on civil institutions, and the concentration of immense amounts of wealth in the hands of increasingly small elites. By having succeeded in promoting a Western social platform in an Israeli context, Labor proved that the global Left's struggle against neo-liberalism can be reinvented in Hebrew vernacular.

Joel Schalit is managing editor of Tikkun. His back catalogue of recordings with 1990s agitprop artists Christal Methodists will be reissued this summer through Apple's iTunes store. He is currently working on Israel vs. Utopia, his third book for Akashic.

Source Citation

Schalit, Joel. 2006. A social revolution? Tikkun 21(3):16.