In case you had not noticed, the Left in Israel hardly exists. Meretz, the socialist party which had mustered 12 Knesset seats in 1992, won only three miserable seats in the last elections. Labour, which had led the Zionist movement, built the land and established the State of Israel, was decimated as well, moving from 44 MKs in the mid-1980s to a mere dozen today, with some leaving the party in disgust, never to look back again.
Israel, then, looks like it has been fully taken over by the Right. Indeed, on the political and socio-economic fronts, Israelis do prefer a "rightist" stance to a "leftist" one. Therefore, Israel has a right-wing government (Labour serves as a fig leaf), and capitalism reigns unchallenged, with social and economic gaps skyrocketing.
Recently, however, there has been some talk about the revival of the Israeli Left. There seem to be three reasons for that: The release, last week, of the findings of a commission of experts who had investigated the reasons for Meretz's failure in the last elections; a litany of newspaper articles discussing the "comeback of the Left"; and more specifically, a rally in Sheikh Jarrah in east Jerusalem last Saturday, where some 3,000 Israeli and Palestinian leftists gathered to protest the Jewish settlement in that Arab neighbourhood.
But the fuss over the Left's resurrection is premature. The recommendations in the Meretz report were just too many and too diverse. (Add more women, highlight environment, join other parties etc). And I was in Sheikh Jarrah that night. With the kind of ultra-radicals assembled there, the Left will never truly take off.
Paradoxically, over the years, the Left has won great victories. Who in the '70s dared push for talks with the PLO, or, a decade later, call for a Palestinian state, except for a score of leftists? Yet this is the consensus among Israelis today.
Why, then, has the Israeli public punished the Left? Because of the old truism, that "in Israel, only the Right can carry out the policies of the Left".
When the Oslo process went astray, and suicide bombings shattered our cities, the Left found excuses for the Palestinians. When in 2000 Ehud Barak offered Yasir Arafat the moon only to get a rejection and another intifada, the Left said we didn't do it the right way. This is not what most Israelis felt.
Socio-economics is another area where the Left has drifted from the Israelis. Forget about Labour, membership of which became a form of lip service for the plutocrats who still had some remorse over their astronomical paycheques. It was Meretz which failed to challenge the capitalist tsunami with a clear socialist platform, and instead offered ambiguous liberal slogans drafted by PR experts.
No wonder that the lower working class, instead of being empowered by a true socialist movement, chose the easiest way, offered by Shas, of dependence on the welfare state.
It is bon-ton to ridicule the Left today but, actually, I write these lines with a touch of sadness. My father, may his soul rest in peace, must be turning in his grave. A Labourite, he left medical school in Europe to become a pioneer in the Upper Galilee in the 1930s, working 12 hours a day, fighting malaria, hunger and the Arabs, and yet he walked miles at night to listen to a writer sent by Labour to talk about ideals.
When the Left in Israel is ready to connect again to the hearts and minds of the Israelis, I'll give them serious consideration on election day.
Uri Dromi was the spokesman of the Rabin and Peres governments (1992-96)
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