BY JOEL BEININ
In the early stages of the campaign for Israel's January 28 Knesset (parliamentary) elections, there were no armed attacks by Palestinians on Israelis. During the same six weeks, Israeli forces shot dead some 75 Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip. This is what passes for "a period of calm" in Israeli parlance.
However, any illusions that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's policies had succeeded in bringing about an end to armed Palestinian resistance to occupation were shattered on December 28 when gunmen belonging to Islamic Jihad killed four people at the yeshiva (religious seminary) of Otniel, in the Hebron hills in the southern West Bank.
A week later, two suicide bombers of the al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade killed 23 and wounded about 120 people — a high proportion of them foreign migrant workers — in attacks near Tel Aviv's old central bus station.
Another marker of the election campaign was the Bank of Israel's announcement that 2002 was the worst year for Israel's economy since 1953. Projections for 2003 are no better. The national unemployment rate is now running at more than 10%.
In some "development towns" — largely populated by Middle Eastern (Mizrahi), and more recently Russian, Jews — and in Palestinian-Israeli municipalities the unemployment rate is closer to 20%. The local factors causing the collapse of the Israeli economy are the sharply increased cost of defending the settlements in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and the withdrawal of foreign investment following the breakdown of the Oslo process at the end of 2000. The global context is the bursting of Silicon Valley dot-com bubble, to which many of Israel's high-tech firms were linked.
Neither "security" nor the economy — the two most vital issues for the future of the country — has been a major topic of discussion in the Knesset election campaign. Instead, the Israeli media and the buzz on the street have been almost entirely devoted to the growing number of scandals involving Sharon's Likud party.
Scandals
The first concerned the selection of the Likud's Knesset list. In Israel's electoral system, each party presents a list of 120 candidates for the Knesset. Parties which exceed the threshold of 1.5% of the national vote are awarded parliamentary seats proportional to the percentage of their vote. For example, if a party gets 10% of the vote, then the top 12 members on its list become members of the Knesset and so on. Hence, the order of placement on the party's list is crucial.
Likud's Knesset list is selected by the 2940 members of its central committee. Before the committee met on December 8, influential members offered to secure "winnable" places on the Knesset list for candidates, in exchange for between US$200 and $300. On the day of the meeting, these "vote contractors" were seen distributing wads of cash to central committee members.
Michael Elnekaveh, a newly elected member of the central committee and an associate of Sharon's son, Omri, rented 15 rooms for Likud activists at the posh Sheraton City Tower Hotel in Ramat Gan on the eve of the central committee meeting. Elnekaveh's guests apparently worked out an arrangement concerning which Knesset aspirants to back. One of them was Omri Sharon, who won the 27th place on the Likud list. Nahman Shechter, who was vying for the 27th spot, told police that Likud activists approached him for bribes of up to $12,500 to secure a place on the list, but he declined to pay up.
Among those caught up in this scandal is the former deputy minister of infrastructure, Naomi Blumenthal. Sharon dismissed Blumenthal after she invoked her right to remain silent during a police investigation of the matter.
Likud and most other Israeli political parties have engaged in such vices for many years. The innovation in the 2003 campaign is that elements linked to Israeli organised crime were able to buy a winnable place on the Likud Knesset list and to influence the central committee's selection process. Number 28 on the list is Inbal Gavrieli. She has no political experience or higher education. Gavrieli's Likud-activist family has been questioned frequently by police in connection with its gambling interests.
As a result of these machinations, well-known Likud figures like Jerusalem mayor Ehud Olmert (33 on the Knesset list) and communications minister Reuven Rivlin (37) received places below relative neophytes. Public disgust at the vote-buying imbroglio hurt the Likud in opinion polls, reducing the number of Knesset seats the party could expect to win from 41 to 31.
During this wave of revelations, Ariel Sharon, despite suspicions about the involvement of his son Omri, remained relatively untouched. His dismissal of Blumenthal preserved his image of propriety. However, several of Blumenthal's supporters described her as a scapegoat.
Illegal contributions
The prime minister's position deteriorated dramatically after January 7, when the liberal daily Ha'aretz published charges that Sharon had received $1.5 million in illegal campaign contributions, from a US company called Annex Research, during his race for the party leadership in 1999. The paper identified Cyril Kern, a South African businessperson and long-time family friend, as the source of a $1.5 million loan used by Sharon to repay the contribution. Israeli law prohibits foreign donations to politicians.
On January 9, Sharon called a press conference to denounce the Labor Party, the media and other "enemies" of Likud. About 10 minutes into the broadcast, the chair of the Central Elections Committee (CEC), Judge Mishael Cheshin, ordered the broadcast halted on grounds that it violated the rules for election campaigning.
Sharon and Likud are apparently recovering from the severe blow to their standing inflicted by the latest incident. Polls published in the Hebrew press on January 13, which should be taken with a grain of salt, suggest that Likud will win 32 or 33 Knesset seats, up from an estimated 27 to 30 in the immediate aftermath of the campaign donation allegations.
The Labor Party, Likud's main traditional rival, has benefited only marginally, increasing its projected strength from 21 to 24 seats. So far, the main beneficiary of Likud's woes is the Shinui Party, led by the demagogic and racist former journalist, Tommy Lapid. Shinui is projected to win 17 seats. Lapid is adamantly anti-Mizrahi and anti-Arab, while his economic positions are drawn from hard-core neo-liberalism.
Real problem ignored
Public and media preoccupation with political corruption during a critical election for the future of Israel and the Palestinians reflects the incapacity of most Israeli Jews to come to grips with the real problem facing them: the occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and its economic and social costs.
The fact that one Likud member likely to enter the Knesset is a former senior security service officer who killed a handcuffed Palestinian prisoner by bashing his head in with a rock has aroused little comment or protest.
According to recent polls, most Israelis believe that neither Sharon nor Labor Party leader Amram Mitzna have solutions to the political or economic problems facing Israel. Focusing on corruption and scandal avoids the main issues and keeps political debate within the boundaries of the Israeli Jewish community. Palestinian Israeli citizens are marginal to the discussion, as only a small number of them would consider voting for Likud under any circumstances.
The CEC explicitly tried to exclude Palestinian citizens from the political process by disqualifying Azmi Bishara and his National Democratic Alliance from running for the Knesset. Bishara, whose party advocate cultural autonomy and civil rights for Palestinian citizens of Israel, is a vocal critic of Israel's self-definition as a "Jewish and democratic" state. Israel should be a "state of all its citizens", Bishara states.
In January 2002, Israeli attorney general Elyakim Rubinstein filed still unresolved charges of "endangering national security" against Bishara, because of visits he made to Syria during which he allegedly incited Arabs to violence against Israel.
The CEC similarly voted to disqualify Ahmad Tibi, who is known for his close ties to Palestinian Authority leader Yasser Arafat. Tibi is number three on the list of the left-wing, Arab-Jewish Hadash list, a coalition led by the Communist Party.
The Israeli Supreme Court has overturned both these decisions. But the prevailing winds of Israeli politics send a clear signal: Arab citizens who ask whether a "Jewish state" can be democratic are not a legitimate part of the Israeli political process.
'Us here, them there'
Exclusion of Palestinian non-citizens, or "separation" as it is politely termed, is the basis of the Labor Party's political orientation. Mitzna has made bold statements about a unilateral Israeli evacuation from Gaza and the more remote settlements in the West Bank. These statements may have cost Mitzna some votes among traditional Labor Party supporters who favour a more hard-line approach to the Palestinians.
But he has popular support for his position in favour of constructing a gigantic wall-and-fence complex separating Israel from the West Bank. Mitzna and much of what passes for dovish sentiment in Israel (aside from a small number of Jews and Arabs with an internationalist outlook) hold that the solution to the conflict with the Palestinians is, as former prime minister Ehud Barak used to say, "Us here, them there".
Such a vision is based on a racist premise and is, in any case, not viable. Even if a Palestinian state were to be established on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, a stable peace with even a modicum of justice would require cooperative economic and social relations with Israel, including access by citizens of the Palestinian state to the Israeli labour market and to their families living in Israel.
The futures of both Israelis and Palestinians are inextricably linked. Whoever does not recognise this has no solution to the conflict.
[Joel Beinin is a professor of Middle East history at Stanford University. Abridged from Middle East Report Online, produced by the Middle East Research and Information Project. Visit the MERIP web site at <http://www.merip.org>.]
From Green Left Weekly, January 22, 2003.
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