Tikkun Magazine, March/April 2006

I Dream of Ideology

By Joel Schalit

For many Left-Wing observers, it was their worst nightmare come true. A brand new political party without a platform was polling higher in election surveys than any of its long-entrenched competitors. Out of either disenchantment or desperation, the majority of Israelis indicated that they were willing to put their nation's fate in the hands of the unknowable. Some pundits even went so far as to argue that the public's preference for Kadima was a sign of the collapse of Israel's party system. Rejecting every parliamentary list as unsatisfactory, Israelis weren't so much placing their faith in a non-existent alternative as they were rejecting politics altogether.

To more conservative commentators, Kadima's popularity signaled a new political sensibility that had taken root in the wake of the Disengagement's success. Combining the Left's historical antipathy towards the Occupation, the settlers, and religion with a neoliberal social agenda and a conservative outlook on security matters, Kadima's growing legion of enthusiasts was evidence of a growing centrist consensus overtaking Israel's radically polarized political sphere. Rejecting such ideologies as Right and Left as outdated and extreme, this phenomenon gives every indication that the average Israeli voter has finally come of age.

Neither analysis is entirely wrong. In a perverse way, each complements the other. The first evinces a well-founded fear of a disillusioned protest voter who, bludgeoned by terrorist violence, government corruption scandals, and declining social services, has had every ounce of idealism squeezed out of them and is thus willing to back any party capable of changing the status quo. The second imagines an increasingly commonplace, middle-class Israeli desire for a Third Way liberal party (not unlike Tony Blair's New Labor) that understands the needs of high-tech labor and emphasizes market-based solutions to social problems. Both kinds of voters, regardless of their differences, inevitably collaborate with each other to bring about the election of the same political party.

Clearly, Israel's pre-election mood is complicated. As accurate as both of these interpretations are, the problems with them are even more important than the phenomenon that they describe. Both rightfully replicate the paralysis Israeli politics has been mired in over the course of the past fifty-eight years. And on that basis, during a time of radical uncertainty, both understandably project that this situation will continue on into the future. But they are both mistaken in assuming that the Disengagement has brought about a wholesale move to the political center. Instead, it destroyed Israel's post-Six Day War political consensus, which subordinated every issue of national concern to the settlement project and the defense of the territories, blowing apart the entire fabric of Israeli party politics.

The problem with the new centrism is that it's being promoted as though it were a new consensus, when in fact it is a potential ideology of a political party that hasn't yet determined what it believes. Even more distressing is how convincing an argument it makes for itself as a generalized political phenomenon when the two Israeli parties that historically have been the most influential—Labor and Likud—have, in the wake of the Disengagement, become more ideologically distinct than ever. With the former now the standard bearer of a newly confident Left, and the latter now the party of the extreme Right, one would be hard pressed to say that Israeli politics is entering a new period of ideological homogeneity.

This is exactly why Kadima is polling so well. Without an identity, led by former members of both Labor and Likud, it epitomizes the schizophrenia of a country recently—though not totally—freed from a history of stifling political conformity. However, this does not mean that we need not worry about Kadima, because we should. Given the political histories of its leadership, we have every reason to fear that the ideology Kadima will espouse is neoliberal, and though the party may distance itself from the irrationality of the Occupation, what it's really in search of is a kinder and gentler form of conservatism.

Joel Schalit is managing editor of Tikkun. He is currently hard at work on his third book for Akashic, Israel vs. Utopia, and producing the forthcoming Elders of Zion album.

Source Citation

Schalit, Joel. 2006. I dream of ideology. Tikkun 21(2):15.