06.06.1996

Zionist defeats Zionist

The state of Israel has held its parliamentary elections as well as an unprecedented direct election of its prime minister. The result has been, at one level, a “close-run thing”, as Wellington said of the battle of Waterloo. The margin of victory for the winner, Binyamin Netanyahu, was incredibly small - 29,507 votes out of 3.1 million. Indeed, it was thought at first that the incumbent Shimon Peres had narrowly held on to office, until later results clarified the picture.

However, unlike Waterloo, this is a battle fought by Wellington against Wellington. This is not how it has been portrayed in much of the international bourgeois media. They treasure their Middle East ‘peace process’. They felt that Peres was the one to keep this process marching ever forward. They fear that Netanyahu, the candidate of the rightwing Likud coalition, might be so committed to breaking Arab bones in the fight against ‘terrorism’ that he would forget the need to throw a few crumbs to the Palestinians.

In reality, the candidates’ views and deeds were not polarised opposites. Peres might be the kind of man that the ‘international community’ likes to reward with the Nobel Peace Prize, but so was Menachem Begin, who received this ‘honour’ before he launched Operation ‘Iron Brain’, the 1982 invasion of Lebanon. In the same way, Peres ordered the Israel ‘defence forces’ to subject Lebanon to intensive bombardment earlier this year, supposedly as a response to rocket attacks from Lebanese islamic fundamentalists. What really happened was that Peres needed to engage in a particularly bloody form of election canvassing. Netanyahu was concentrating on what Israelis like to call the ‘security’ question. Peres felt compelled to show that he too could take Arab lives in the name of ‘security’.

And of course, the entire Zionist project depends upon uprooting and exploiting the people who actually lived in Palestine before Theodor Herzl and his successors got their big idea for a Jewish state there. Peres and Netanyahu are equally the exponents of this chauvinist ideology, even if their tactics are different.

This is not to say there are no differences between them or the people who voted for them. Israeli Jews in fact come from many different cultural and ethnic backgrounds, and this often determines party political preferences. The Zionist ideology does not always paper over the cracks. Netanyahu’s supporters are a case in point. Some are ultra-orthodox Jews with a world view strangely similar to that of any mullah in Iran. Others are immigrants from Russia. They hate socialism as much as the ultra-orthodox do, but the Russians belong very much to this world as opposed to the next one.  

The issue of Jewish settlements on the West Bank will prove to be a test case for Netanyahu’s brand of Zionism. One of his followers told Time magazine (June 10) that the defeat of Peres meant there would soon be a half million Jews settled on the West Bank. This can only be achieved by displacing yet more Arabs. On the other hand, US backing for Israel is vital to that state and Netanyahu will be under pressure from that quarter to continue the ‘peace process’. This entails giving the Palestinians some crumbs and halting the building of settlements. Either way, there is no Zionist exit from misery and exploitation - especially if you are a Palestinian Arab.

John Craig