IsraLeft salvage: …and who is left

Sadly, we have decided to shut down IsraLeft due to lack of activity – some of us opened our independent English blogs (e.g.), while others simply didn’t feel like writing for a very long time (a more formal announcement will be posted on the blog itself soon). I myself wrote five posts over the half-year between IsraLeft’s opening in July 2009 and January 2010, and stopped contributing until June 2010, when I cross-posted a couple of posts from here. I’m not sure what it says about me that I am so selfish that I cannot consistently contribute to a blog that isn’t just mine. In my defense, I wasn’t the only one who lost interest. Since December 2009 collectively we didn’t produce even an average of one post per month. And since nobody wrote, nobody else wrote. Maybe I shouldn’t overthink this – blogs die every day. I have more that a few corpses scattered across the internet of blogs that didn’t survive more than a couple of posts. Some of them didn’t make it through the design phase. I can’t even promise that this blog will survive for as long as a year. And yet we blog.

At any rate, I’m starting a salvage project to move my old posts, as well as posts of other authors on IsraLeft who would so wish, to here, in chronological order. This is my first post there, an introduction to Israeli politics for the uninitiated reader. The title, “…and who is left” was my original suggestion for the title of the blog. I have a penchant for crappy titles. Anyway, here it is.

As the resident Political Scientist on the blog, I thought it might be prudent to write my first post on an issue that might confuse non-Israeli readers of a blog that features the word “left” so prominently in its title.

Throughout the civilized world, the word “left” means something on the continuum between social-democrats and communists. The US, for example, is known to not actually have a left-wing party – they have a conservative party (right) and a liberal party (centre-right) (and even then the two can’t stay in place for more than a few decades). Generally speaking, “politics” in the democratic world is normally understood as “economic policies”. It’s the economy, stupid, said the famous banner in Clinton’s campaign headquarters, and many a theory predict elections results based primarily on the economic well-being of the state. Campaign promises revolve around taxes, investments, social security, health care, privatization or nationalization. The politics of identity is always relegated to the fringes – the extremist nationalist parties on the one hand, and civil society organizations on the other.

But in Israel, the economy rarely figures in political debates and electoral campaigns. The left-right dimension in Israel is defined strictly based on attitudes on the Israeli-Arab conflict. Thus, ultra-neoliberal Shinui had no problem being a part of the left-wing Meretz between 1992 and 1999; Israel’s main right-wing party, the Likud, has no problem depicting itself at times as a “social” party (one off-shoot of the party, Gesher, was unwittingly labeled by its creator leumit-hevratit – “national-socialist”). Not only is the economy not the main dimension in Israeli politics, it’s not even the second most important one. The second dimension of political classification is religiosity, ranging from secularist parties such as Meretz (and the now defunct Shinui) to ultra-orthodox parties Shas and Yahadut HaTorah. Avraham Diskin found in one of his studies that when Israelis are asked to define themselves as “on the left” or “or the right” regarding issues of economy or church-and-state, they tended to define themselves according to the left-right position of their party, based on the security issue (i.e., Labour voters would define themselves as left-wing, while Likud voters as right-wing), but when asked about concrete policy options in those fields, there was no correlation whatsoever between their self-definition as left or right, and their opinions.

What, then, defines this primary dimension of politics that we Israelis refer to as “left-right”? Sometimes it is defined as dovish vs. hawkish: the left seeks a peaceful resolution to the conflict based on a (usually) geographical compromise, whereas the right emphasizes the importance of maintaining a position of power to prevent or limit hostilities from the other side. One might note that these are, strictly speaking, policy options, not really ideologies. It is the construction of the left-right dimension based on policy options that enables us to look at Israeli-Palestinian nationalist parties such as Balad and position them on the left of the political map: if the right agrees to cede no land, and the Jewish left agrees to cede some land, the “extreme left” demands Israel should cede all land and cease to exist.

This works for most Israelis. Much like Converse¹ found for the American public, most Israelis don’t really have much in the way of an ideology. They have opinions on practically everything – oh boy do we have opinions! – but when you really put them to the test, there’s nothing coherent there. But, like in the US, that the systems of belief of the masses are incoherent does not mean that the more “sophisticated” voters and political elites have no ideology either. In fact, the reason the “unsophisticated” voter can afford to not really have an ideology is because the political elite does. As cognitive misers, the average citizen doesn’t have the time and, frankly, the will to develop a coherent view of politics. It’s much easier just picking somebody based on the most salient of topics, and then conforming the rest of one’s “ideology”² to whatever that person says.

The ideology behind the dovish-hawkish dimension is much closer to the ideology behind the socialist-capitalist dimension in Western democracies than the two dimensions would seem to be on their own. This shared continuum can be described as universalism-particularism, or liberal-republican. The left seeks as much equality as possible for all, the right seeks as much privilege to those most deserving (however you define “deserving”). When looked at in this light, Israel doesn’t have much more of a left-wing than the US does. Particularism abounds. It is telling that the phrase “a state of all its citizens” is considered a code word for the destruction of the state of Israel by the majority of Israelis, including many self-described left-wing Israelis — much like words such as “socialism” and “welfare” are frowned on, to say the least, in American politics.

A left-winger, then, would eschew the privileges of the Jewish population in Israel in favour of a truly equal citizenship. This is easier said than done, of course, even with the best of intentions. The long conflict in the region has eroded any and all shreds of trust and goodwill between the two nations that occupy the land between the Jordan river and the sea. Every step taken by the Jewish population further away from sharing the state of Israel with its Arab citizens, is reciprocated by another step taken by the Arab citizens towards a fuller identification with their brethren across the Green Line, in the occupied territories and the Palestinian Authority. And every such step merely justifies Jews in distrusting their Arab compatriots.

–

This is the situation we are in now. This is the tangle that we, as left-wing Israelis, are trying to straighten out. This is anything but a simple task, just like the situation we are in is anything but a simple situation. This is why I (and, I believe, we) feel it is important to share with readers outside Israel our dilemmas, our views, our ideas. This is why it is crucial for the world to realize that these debates exist within Israeli society; that there is an alternative to the vehement nationalist discourse on both sides of the conflict; but at the same time that even if nationalism was quelled completely on both sides, the resolution of the conflict requires still more investment in building trust between two peoples who have raised two generations of hatred and distrust already, and are now bringing up a third.

I am writing this not in defense of my country, nor to attack it. I am writing this because my country needs your help, and because I think that it should be the wish and desire of all peace-loving people that this bloody conflict should end. I am writing this because I fear without the assistance of those who share the left-wing ideology throughout the world, Israel, the country I know and love, would fade away – not into black, but into thick, stinking red.

(Originally posted July 23, 2009)

1. Hat tip to John Sides of the Monkey Cage for reminding me of this wonderful piece of literature. [↩]
2. but not one’s policy preferences! [↩]