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November 15, 2002/Kislev 10 5763, Vol. 55, No. 12
Israel misunderstoodEditorialJust as the dust was settling on America's political battles, news came that Israel was about to embark on a brief election cycle for a new Knesset in late January or early February 2003.Readers looking to the American media for information about the Israeli election will have a major problem: wrongheaded biases about Israeli politics. The starting point for these biases concerns labels. American journalists apply labels to Israelis that don't necessarily fit. According to them, the Israeli electoral spectrum is a chicken with only one wing: a right one. The Likud Party is universally referred to as "right-wing" or "hard-line." Such labels have contributed to the American belief that the party is led by a pack of lunatics. By contrast, the Labor Party is referred to as "moderate" or "centrist." That makes them, in contrast to Likud, the "good guys." But the truth is, Labor is not any more or less extremist than Likud. Each is dogged by minority parties to their flanks that seek to win votes by portraying the larger party as a loose coalition of compromisers and opportunists. Israel remains a country without a centrist party, as both factions vie for those "floating" voters in the middle who decide the outcome. American editorial writers and correspondents have also refused to understand the shift to the right in the last two years. Ariel Sharon's landslide victory over Labor's Ehud Barak was based on the fact that the Israeli electorate understood that despite the clear failure of the Oslo gambit, Labor hadn't let it go. Unfortunately, most American journalists are such partisans of the Israeli left that they haven't reconciled themselves to the new alignment. Their only advice for Israeli leaders is to go back to where they were when the Palestinians rejected Barak's peace offer and instead chose war. The contest for prime minister of Israel will be decided in the Likud primary between Sharon and Benjamin Netanyahu. Expect to hear endless labeling of the two as hard-liners. What we probably won't hear is why either of these two pragmatists will probably trounce the winner of the Labor primary. To the extent that this question is answered, it will generally be in terms that put down the Israeli people as driven by fear instead of the hard-nosed common sense that actually informs that electorate. Excerpted from a commentary in the Philadelphia Jewish Exponent. |
