Aluf Benn’s despair

Aluf Benn, the editor of the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, has been a steady voice of moderation and common sense for a long time amid the dogmatism and extremism of so many other observers, but he is about to give up. This is what he wrote after last Tuesday’s election. “Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s bloc does not command a majority of the Israeli public, but no stable government can be formed without Likud [Netanyahu’s party]. Voting is driven by identity and by tribal loyalties, not by voters’ reactions to external events or by their desire to reward or punish the outgoing government for its policies.” Israel has reached a dead end, in other words. The country has got so tangled up in its own fears and fantasies that it literally cannot respond intelligently to real-world events, however striking they may be. Benn continued: “Israel has experienced upheavals, each of which would have been difficult to imagine separately, let alone in such rapid succession: a judicial coup initiated by the prime minister to establish unchecked rule; mass protests against the government; Hamas’s invasion and the October 7 massacre; hundreds of Israeli hostages held in tunnels;” Wait, there’s more: “the devastation of the Gaza Strip and the killing of tens of thousands of Palestinians; the assassination of arch-enemy Hassan Nasrallah and seizure of territory in Lebanon and Syria; an Israeli-American war against Iran; accelerated settlement expansion and Jewish terrorism in the West Bank; Qatar’s penetration of Netanyahu’s inner circle; ” and still more: “the normalization of Kahanism, racism and ideas of population transfer; and mass emigration by secular and educated Israelis who have grown disillusioned with life here.” (Kahanism is an ultra-nationalist Zionist ideology officially designated as terrorist by the US and Israel.) All that in less than four years, and yet at the end of it: “These upheavals have had almost no effect on public opinion. All these events, however momentous and unexpected, have failed to move the needle.” One sympathises with Benn, who has spent his life struggling to preserve the vision of a democratic and inclusive Israel, but it is still too early to despair. Most Israelis are stuck in their tribal trenches, unwilling and maybe unable to move even as the region changes rapidly and radically around them, but there are some new players at the table. More than one-fifth (22%) of Israeli citizens are not Jews but Muslim or Christian Arabs, theoretically with exactly the same rights and duties as other citizens (except that they are exempt from military service). In practice, of course, they are less well served by the state in many ways, but they do have the vote. In the past, with one brief exception, Arab political parties were excluded from the coalitions that are always necessary to put a government together in Israel. There was no law against cooperation, but an undeclared agreement between all the Jewish parties worked just as well. So eventually few Arabs even bothered to vote. This time was different. It was clear to anybody who could count that Netanyahu’s coalition would be unable to form a government if it lost only a few seats in the election. However, if the Jewish opposition parties wanted to form a government without Netanyahu instead, they would need to make a deal with the Arab parties. All the Jewish opposition parties promised publicly before the election not to do any such thing (the old unspoken deal spoken out loud), but the Arab parties suspected some of them would give in to the temptation of power once the voting was past. So the two main Arab parties, Ra’am and the Joint List, worked really hard to get out their vote this time. The Arab parties won nineteen seats in the 120-member Knesset. That’s close to a ‘fair share’ in terms of population, and certainly enough to make the Arabs king-makers in the coalition negotiations that start this week. IF, but only if, some of the Jewish opposition parties are willing to make a deal. There is no good reason not to. The Arab parties, as Palestinians, obviously are not keen admirers of the Israeli state, but they are loyal to the democratic values that Israel still embodies (just). The people they represent were born in Israel and still live there. Cooperation is not only possible but necessary. The Arab parties and the Israeli opposition parties also share an overriding desire to dethrone Netanyahu and send him back to the courts for his trial on corruption charges. There is a genuine opportunity here, if they have the will and the wit to seize it.