Yair Lapid with “Yesh Atid” activists (photo: Yotam Ronen / activestills.org)

LIKUD VICTORY RALLY, TEL AVIV – After months of predictions for a comfortable right-wing win, Israel reeled tonight at a surprising near-gridlock between the “Right” and “Left” parliamentary blocs, with the Netanyahu-Liberman union barely scrambling past 30 seats, instead of the 45 42 they held between them in the departing parliament. But Netanyahu’s ratings were in steady decline ever since the union pact in late November and not least thanks his petty and paranoid attacks on settler leader Naftali Bennett.  The true surprise of the landslide vote was ultra-centrist candidate Yair Lapid. Lapid, a TV personality who avoided taking any remotely controversial stand on almost any issue, careened past rivals right and left to end up with 17 to 19 seats, rendering him the kingmaker of these elections. Bennett himself, the other golden boy of the 2013 elections, is currently forecasted to win 12 seats, a solid achievement but a far cry from the utopian poll projections of 15-19. Kadima, the centrist party that led Israel to wars in Lebanon and Gaza during its first term in the Knesset, and imploded in a series of ill-judged political manoeuvres at the end of its second term, has not made it to a third term at all, evaporating from Israeli politics with zero seats in the exit polls.

On the Left, Shelly Yacimovich doubled Labor’s seats but fell far, far behind her promise to oust Netanyahu or even to restore Labor as a significant force in Israeli politics. To add insult to injury, after making every possible effort to depoliticise and centralise Labor’s toxic brand, she was overtaken by an ad-hoc party led by a man who lacks any of the political structures, networks and traditional strongholds of Labor, but whose neutral and consensual public image made him more apolitical than she could ever hope to be. The great winner on the left side of the map is Meretz, raised from the dead by new leader Zehava Galon to go from three to seven seats; unlike Labor, Meretz never harboured illusions about premiership, so it can be content with its significant victory. Hadash, the only Jewish-Arab party running, is left with four seats, having failed to rejuvenate its front ranks and thus also failed to capitalise on the social justice movement in which its activists played a significant part (stay tuned for separate stories on social justice and Hadash tomorrow).

Theoretically (or rather, purely arithmetically), Lapid is now in a position to make a bold bid for premiership. Although earlier attempts to herd the centre-leftist cats into a unified bloc ahead of the elections failed miserably, the tantalisingly small gap between the Left and Right in the exit polls could give Lapid enough of a momentum – to hammer together a centre-left government of small parties, to persuade Shas to switch sides (by reminding them they’d hold much more sway in such a fractured coalition than in a strong right-wing one), and to solicit the external support of Arab parties (among which Hadash is usually lumped), eventually creating something akin to Rabin’s government in 1992. But, to the tune of “you are no Jack Kennedy,” Lapid is no Rabin, and 2013 is not 1993. Lapid is risk-averse and lacks a political program or vision; while the negotiated two-state process, a novel idea in Rabin’s time, has been tested and failed in the 21 years since. What’s more, hostility towards the Arab parties is immeasurably greater than it was in the 1990s. Any party overpowering the Right with these parties’ support will be seen as an usurper. Lapid may well launch a bid for premiership – but this is likely to be a negotiation ploy designed to mark him as not just a coalition member, but a partner in a “national unity” government, a title with considerably more clout and gravitas.

Poison, sir?

The more likely outcome, then, is a strong right-wing government with Lapid’s party as its safety belt and fig leaf. In such a scenario, Lapid can look forward to appointment as foreign minister, which would reward him with prestige and the limelight he is long accustomed to, and would reward Netanyahu with a telegenic, charismatic and unoriginal moderate face in the world arena. If Netanyahu sees Lapid more as a rival than a partner, however, he might offer him the Finance Ministry instead – a poisoned chalice if there ever was one. While a highly prestigious position and well in tune with (upper class) Lapid’s self-appointed role as emissary of the middle class, the Treasury is the least enviable fiefdom Netanyahu can offer anyone. Israel is facing an NIS 40 billion deficit and is poised on the brink of an austerity drive set to affect primarily Lapid’s own electorate; getting him to deliver the blow to his own crowd will neutralise him even more effectively than leaving him out of government. The same, with slight amendments, applies to Naftali Bennett and several other candidates; the Finance Minister appointment will tell us where Netanyahu sees the greater threat – from the Centre or from within the Right – and who he considers his most dangerous rival.

If she holds by her vow never to enter Netanyahu’s government (even if he offers her, say, the Finance Ministry), Yacimovich now has the opportunity to forge a combative and determined opposition. Such a move, if played patiently and committedly, will pay off with interest over the long term, especially in the wake of the anticipated austerity drive. This move can be impeded not only by tempting offers from Netanyahu, but primarily from within Labor – the most patricidal (or matricidal) party in Israeli politics. The knives will be out for the leader whose campaign was characterised by self-promotion and by a neglect, to put it mildly, of some of the strongest potential Labor candidates who came into the party of their own accord (Stav Shaffir and Merav Michaeli being the lead examples,) in favour of loyal but utterly lacklustre apparatchiks.

Tomorrow morning Israel will wake up to the real results fairly similar to the exit polls (despite the latter’s margin of error), and while a complete tie between Right and Left or a slight advantage to the Left can generate a modest momentum for an attempted leftist government, the right-by-centre-right coalition is the likeliest outcome. The only question is how tough a negotiator Lapid will prove to be – he could condition his entry into government on, say, complete exclusion of all ultra-Orthodox parties – and how protracted negotiations will be as a result. This might be more significant than a mere inconvenience: Israel is currently without a budget (Netanyahu threw down the cards on budget negotiations in the spring as pretext for gambling on elections) and is weighed down by a 40-billion-shekel deficit. Delay in putting together the team that will cover up that black hole will make the fabled Israeli stock exchange very antsy and drive a pin into Israel’s financial stability balloon – setting the stage for a much more heated contestation over economy, far from the Right’s familiar playing field.

“Right-wing bloc’s majority slashed,” read the headline over today’s election poll in Haaretz. “The gap is closing,” according to the poll in today’s Yedioth Aharonoth. Both surveys showed the right-religious bloc getting 63 Knesset seats and the center-left-Arab bloc getting 57, and both showed the steadily weakening Likud-Yisrael Beiteinu down to 32.

Even if it is still clear to everyone that Netanyahu will lead the next government, many people will likely gather from these findings that maybe the next government isn’t going to be “the most extreme in Israel’s history,” as has been the expectation.

Forget it. This will be the most extreme right-wing government in Israel’s history, because what passes for the “center-left” is actually the right. There are two overriding questions in this country, two issues that define left and right: occupation and war. Occupation and war are the status quo, and there’s no center about it: You’re either trying to end it, which puts you on the left, or you’re not, which puts you on the right.

Under Shelly Yachimovich, the Labor Party has emphatically stopped trying to end the occupation, and continues in its support of any war any Israeli government wants to start. Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid party follows the exact same line. Meanwhile, Hatnuah’s Tzipi Livni has focused her campaign on ending the conflict with the Palestinians, which would seem to put her on the left, but her positions are so vague – except her refusal to accept even one Palestinian refugee back into Israel – that it’s hard to take her seriously. Worse, she seems bent on joining the next government; if she’s not decisively on the right yet, that appears to be where she’s heading. And if Shaul Mofaz’s Kadima gets the two seats that the Haaretz and Yedioth polls give him, he’ll go into Bibi’s government like a freight train.

But the most obvious thing that makes the “center-left-Arab bloc” an illusion, that prevents it from being even a potential alternative, is that none of these so-called center-left parties would ever form a government with any of the three Arab parties. (The oldest of them, Hadash, has a Jewish Knesset member and many Jewish supporters, but remains predominantly Arab.)  No Israeli prime minister, no Zionist party, ever sought to include any Arab faction in its coalition. Yesterday, Livni said she wanted to form a “central, Zionist unity government,” which explicitly leaves out the Arabs and would seem to include the aforementioned status quo parties plus Shas, which is as right-wing as Likud-Yisrael Beiteinu, just more religious.

This is an alternative? Shelly Yachimovich and Yair Lapid, who openly support the settlers and run from the label “leftist” like they would from the label “child molester” – they’re an alternative?

No, Tuesday’s election will indeed produce the most extreme right-wing government in Israel’s history, so long as Bibi Netanyahu’s Likud is joined in it by Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu and Naftali Bennett’s Habayit Hayehudi, which is a virtual certainty. I wouldn’t go so far as to call this a fascist leadership, but neither would I call it a democratic one; the term “authoritarian” sounds fair. The likely addition of a Haredi party would reinforce this identity,  and any so-called center-left party that supports the status quo even now would, in such a government, be a fig leaf that fooled no one.

As far as I’m concerned, today’s polls continue to show a right-wing bloc of just over 100 Knesset seats and a left-wing bloc, including Meretz and the Arab parties, of 17 or 18.

For anyone who considers the status quo untenable, the reason to vote for Meretz, Hadash, Balad, United Arab List-Ta’al or Da’am (a truly integrated party that won’t make it into the Knesset but which definitely belongs there), is not because there’s a chance to stop the country from sliding further towards hell next week; that’s going to happen. The reason, instead, to vote for one of the above-mentioned parties is because this country poses an acute, rising danger to itself and others around it, and it requires a fighting, principled opposition to keep it alive, to let the Palestinians and the rest of the world know that there’s something here to work with, something to build on in the future, because authoritarian Israel will not change the status quo on its own; it will have to be forced into it by the Palestinians and the rest of the world. Tuesday’s election will confirm this, and so will the next government.

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A real alternative? Tzipi Livni is far worse than Netanyahu

Until yesterday, the occupation was not an issue in the Israeli election campaign; the only parties running against it were Meretz and the non-Zionist, Arab or largely Arab slates, all of which are marginal to the country’s politics. But with Amir Peretz’s departure from the Labor Party for Hatnuah (The Movement), where he will be No. 3 after Tzipi Livni and Amram Mitzna, there is now a mainstream party with a critical mass of leadership material at the top whose focus is on ending the conflict with the Palestinians, and whose message is that it’s possible – that Israel has a partner for peace in Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority.

This is not to say Hatnuah could lead a left-center or even left-center-Arab bloc to defeat Netanyahu and the right-religious bloc in the January 22 elections. Bibi and Likud Beiteinu are going to lead the next government; that, as Noam Sheizaf wrote, is as certain as anything can be.

But what Hatnuah does is give Israel what it has needed and lacked like nothing else for these last several years: an opposition.  A pro-peace opposition that can push back against the inexorably rightward direction the country’s been taking. One that can put some other ideas in the air, that can suggest other future possibilities besides dictatorship and war. And finally, one that is big enough and whose leaders are prominent enough in the eyes of the general public to have an impact – and to be seen as a credible contender for power in the years ahead.

Hatnuah gives Israel a mainstream liberal camp, something that every Western democracy has, but which Israel hasn’t had since 2006. In that year the post-disengagement rocketing from Gaza convinced the public that the conflict was insoluble, that the best Israel could do was “manage” it, which has come to mean “cutting the grass” – Operation Whatever – every two or three years.

Since 2006, the National Camp has ruled exclusively; Israel has effectively become a one-party country, the party of dictatorship and war, with the only debate being between right and further right. By nature, this is a dynamic that keeps moving in one direction only. The current election campaign marked a giant leap rightward: Likud joined up with Yisrael Beiteinu, while both of the viable mainstream “opposition” parties – Shelly Yacimovich’s Labor and Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid – lined up squarely behind the status quo in the occupied territories and sucked up to the settlers. These parties are not an opposition, and not “center-left,” either – they are part of that one big party and can’t wait to join Netanyahu and Lieberman’s next government.

So now comes Hatnuah. Like most everyone else, I have heavy doubts about Tzipi Livni as a political leader. But she still has national leadership stature (if not nearly as much as before), she was a serious, trusted peace negotiator opposite the PA as foreign minister, and she started Hatnuah (less than two weeks ago) on one issue: reviving the peace process. She backed up her words by choosing as her No. 2 Mitzna, who has proven his commitment to peace since his army days 30 years ago when he defied Sharon in the Lebanon War. Finally, she solidified the party by bringing in Peretz, who, as mayor of Sderot in the 80s, organized peace festivals in the Negev and used to go to Gaza to meet with Fatah elder statesman Haider Abdel Shafi – crazy, impossible stuff for that time and place. And his views haven’t changed.

But I have doubts about Peretz, too. He was a lousy Labor Party leader; at one point in the coalition wrangling he threatened to join forces with super-right-wing National Union. As defense minister in the Second Lebanon War, he ranted that “Hassan Nasrallah will remember the name Amir Peretz!” Like Livni, he has tremendous ambition, and there’s no guarantee it won’t get in the way of his political principles (which are clearer and stronger than Livni’s). But while ambition no doubt figured strongly in his decision to leave Labor, ideology did too;  one of the main, if not the main, reasons for his feud with Yacimovich was over her determined shift to the right.

What worries me the most about Hatnuah is Livni’s refusal to rule out joining the next prospective right-wing government; she claims she doesn’t have to prove herself on that score after turning down continual opportunities to be Netanyahu’s No. 2, and even forgoing a chance at being prime minister because she wouldn’t pay the ultra-Orthodox Shas party’s price. But until she declares flatly that her party won’t join a right-wing-led government, there’s a possibility it will.

Another obvious worry is that Livni, as leader of Kadima for the first three years of the Netanyahu government, was about the weakest opposition leader imaginable. She was a dishrag when she was awake at all. As leader of the opposition in the next Knesset, she would either have to change dramatically or let Peretz do the talking and shouting.

I have no illusions – Livni, Peretz and Mitzna are all politicians (the first two much more than the third). They have to appeal, more or less, to the center if Hatnuah is to become a major party, so I can’t rule out the possibility that when the time comes, they’ll sell out, too. (Mitzna never has, but that’s no guarantee for the future.)

For a leftist, then, voting for Hatnuah is a risk – more of a risk than voting for Meretz or Hadash. But I feel that these are the sorts of times when one has to take risks – when the chance of striking a real ideological blow against the empire is so vitally necessary that it’s worth taking the risk – a small one, but still a risk – that you will, God forbid, end up striking a blow for it.

Something big and new happened yesterday: For the first time in a long time, we have a chance to make the bastards sweat. With all due respect to Meretz and Hadash, the only hope in this election on the Israel-Palestine front – pending developments, of course – is Hatnuah.

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It’s hard to see how Mitt Romney could have been any more pro-occupation or anti-Palestinian than Obama’s been since getting reelected three and a half weeks ago. (That’s all it was!)

First Rashid Khalidi’s old friend supports Operation Pillar of Defense as an exercise of Israel’s “right to self-defense,” without any mention of the people in Gaza (or the West Bank) living under Israel’s thumb for nearly half a century, or, God forbid, that they may have a right to self-defense, too.

And now this at the UN. The “good guys” did it again. The Obama administration actually lobbied the world not to recognize a Palestinian state, arguing that the way to go is for Abbas to negotiate with Netanyahu – on Netanyahu’s terms, without preconditions. The U.S. line remains identical to Bibi’s. (And Obama’s most influential domestic supporter, the New York Times, made the same case – no to Palestine at the UN, yes to peace talks without preconditions – in an editorial.) The president and his people warned and are still warning the Palestinians not to use their new status to take Israel to The Hague. About the only downgrading in the administration’s UN performance from the first time around, in September of last year, is that instead of Obama himself flacking for Bibi at the podium, UN Ambassador Susan Rice did it from her seat.

What’s going on? Obama and the rest of them can’t really believe this crap. They can’t believe Netanyahu wants to negotiate a deal with Abbas, or that the Palestinians were being rash (!) in going to the UN – they know that if Abbas accepts their advice, he and the Palestinians will get nothing but more Israeli contempt for their weakness. The folks in Washington aren’t stupid, they don’t like Bibi one bit, and they don’t have Likud in their blood, either. Everything Obama, Rice, Clinton and the rest of them have been saying since November 6 on Israel and Palestine is, for them, a lie. So why, when they don’t have to worry about Jewish voters in Florida or any other electoral consideration, are they still slinging it for Israel’s No. 1 Republican?

Any number of possible reasons – they don’t want to go back on their “strong for Israel” campaign rhetoric so soon and alienate a lot of supporters; they don’t want to admit, even to themselves, that they were bullied for the last four years; they’re saving their political capital to stop Bibi from bombing Iran – who knows? But the why of it, while interesting, doesn’t matter – the important thing is that Obama, freed of pre-election restraints, and with a long list of offenses from Netanyahu that he would be expected to want to avenge, is not only not avenging, he’s continuing to do this Republican hero’s bidding.

As for the why, my guess is that the administration has decided that it’s futile and self-destructive to try to play Middle East peacemaker again, so why not try to reap some benefit at home by playing Israel’s defender? But whatever the reason, the reelected Obama administration’s support for Israeli aggression in Gaza and rejectionism in the UN shows that it is not going to do a 180 one of these days and commit itself to getting Israel off the Palestinians’ necks. It would be just too weird. Too out of character. The post-November-6 war in Gaza and UN vote have been a compound moment of truth for Obama. What’s left to say? Only zeh mah yesh, if you’re Israeli, or, if you’re American, what you see is what you get.

It’s just like with Shelly Yacimovich, the ex-leftist who took over the Labor Party and is now pro-war, pro-settlement and altogether Bibi-compatible on the occupation – how could it be, she doesn’t believe this insanity, she’s just saying it to get elected … but Shelly’s been saying it now for years, at every opportunity, until you realize that this is who she is, this is what she stands for. People change, for all sorts of reasons, not always good. She’s one example. Barack Obama is another. On Israel-Palestine, not only is he not part of the solution, he’s no less a part of the problem than he’s been for the last few years, and that’s saying a lot to his discredit. There’s been no change in Washington, and hope will have to come from other sources.

If there is one loser in the U.S. election outside the U.S., it is Benjamin Netanyahu – and all of Israel knows it. No one is fooled by his denials that he backed Romney and opposed Obama as demonstratively as he possibly could. The widespread conviction, now that Obama has won four more years in the White House, is that Bibi has endangered Israel’s relationship with America in a way that is unprecedented in its recklessness. No Israeli prime minister ever took sides in a U.S. presidential election like Netanyahu just did, and his side lost.

If Romney had won, people here would be hailing Bibi right now as a genius, a prophet. But Obama won, which makes Bibi, in Israeli eyes, a screw-up of historic magnitude. He went and tracked mud on the Oval Office carpet right in front of the president’s eyes. The president couldn’t say anything during the campaign because of American domestic politics, but the campaign’s over and now Israelis are wondering when and how this newly-liberated president is going to take revenge on them for their prime minister’s spectacular arrogance. Conclusion: The only way to get America back on our side is to get rid of Bibi.

That, I believe, is the mood in Israel on this fine morning.

It presents an opportunity, one that most people despaired seeing in the coming years, if ever – the opportunity to elect a left-of-center “peace government” on January 22. Because of Netanyahu’s awesome blunder, the Israeli right is vulnerable as it hasn’t been in 12 years, since the left’s implosion at the start of the Second Intifada. Until today, the public was ready to go along with Bibi and the status quo for lack of an attractive alternative – but now the status quo is no longer tolerable. In the view of the broad Israeli center, Bibi has to go.

Which leaves the question – who is the alternative? Not Lieberman – Obama won’t be able to stand him, either. It cannot be anybody from the right, it has to be somebody from the center, or center-left.

I don’t think Yesh Atid’s Yair Lapid or the Labor Party’s Shelly Yacimovich can win because they just don’t have the requisite leadership stature, and thank God for that, too. Lapid and Yacimovich are cowards who have built their campaigns on trying to airbrush the occupation out of existence, on pretending that “there’s no left and right anymore,” that it’s all economics now. And when it comes to the Palestinians, the less said, the better. The status quo is fine with them.

It happens that the only politicians who have the leadership stature to defeat Netanyahu are also the only ones who are saying, above all, that Israel must negotiate peace with the Palestinians, and that by stonewalling Mahmoud Abbas from day one, Netanyahu turned his back on the most conciliatory Palestinian leader there ever was or ever will be, and threw away a chance for peace that may not come again.

The politicians making this case are Ehud Olmert and Tzipi Livni. Separately or together, in Kadima or in a new party, they have the potential to knock over Netanyahu in January, form a center-left coalition government, and resume the negotiations they started with Abbas in 2007, when Olmert was prime minister and Livni foreign minister, then left off at the end of 2008 when they launched Operation Cast Lead.

Because of that war and the long siege of Gaza that preceded it (which continued under Netanyahu), I have no love for Olmert or Livni. My natural inclination is to vote for Meretz. But regardless of which left-wing party one votes for, it is absolutely necessary that Olmert and/or Livni enter this election, because there must be a major party running on a peace platform, and only they can fill the bill. For all of their monstrous past abuses of Gaza and maintenance of the occupation in the West Bank, they made a very credible try at negotiating a peace agreement with Abbas, and if given another chance, it is possible they’ll succeed.

It happens that the two are expected to declare their candidacy very soon, hopefully by the end of the week. They were waiting to see if Obama won, and now the wind is at their backs.

It’s unbelievable to be writing this. Ordinarily, I would say it’s too good to be true. But in the new light of this morning, I realize it’s equally plausible to say that the last several years in Israel have been too awful to go on indefinitely. By the law of averages, things were bound to change some time. But who thought it would be this soon, and this sudden?

Of course, Bibi’s still the prime minister, and he could get reelected and everything could go on like before. But a few hours ago, when it became clear Obama had won and Bibi’s candidate had lost, an opportunity was born to change this country’s direction and give Israelis and Palestinians a future. No, the revolution did not burst upon us, but the possibility of it did.

Congratulations to Benjamin Netanyahu and Shaul Mofaz. I’ve been fond of Mofaz for a while now. Ever since he served as defense minister in Ariel Sharon’s government during the disengagement from Gaza, Mofaz has been building himself up as a serious politician and perhaps even a statesman. It was during the disengagement that Mofaz morphed into a political dove, and despite the takeover of Israeli politics by the right-wing settler movement, he has stood his ground.

Then in 2009, during a period of political stagnation, he introduced a gutsy plan for a peace process and when asked, did not rule out negotiating with Hamas. In his plan, Mofaz emphasized that “our control over another people, and the burden of responsibility and occupation, will come to an end in a clear and concrete way…” The plan also contains that magic number, the one that terrorizes Israeli politicians: ’67.

Shaul Mofaz, as a former IDF chief of staff, could have placed himself comfortably within the ideological zone of typical generals-cum-politicians – like Ehud Barak, Moshe (Bogi) Ya’alon and others – but he opted not to. In early 2011, even before the social protests, Mofaz began developing a plan for social-economic reforms with a team of eight young researchers from the economic, legal, and public policy spheres, led by Yishai Mishor. The plan called to increase in the employment of Israeli Arabs and the ultra-Orthodox, make higher education more accessible, offer housing solutions and a more equal health plan, and more.

In that plan, Mofaz did not shy away from slaughtering one of the most (un)sacred cows in Israel’s history: the defense budget. “As head of planning in the IDF, Chief of Staff, and Defense Minister, I have resolved that we can effectively decrease the defense budget by NIS 4 billion per year, without damaging the IDF’s readiness,” he said in an interview to TheMarker (Hebrew), an economic daily newspaper.

Quietly, step-by-step, Mofaz has also proved himself skilled at politics. In his first campaign for the leadership of his party, he lost the internal Kadima elections to Tzipi Livni by a slim margin. In the second recent round, he claimed victory in a knockout. While everyone eulogized him as the tragic future loser of the 2012 elections, he saved Kadima and himself, and prevented – together with Netanyahu – unnecessary elections, which ultimately would have maintained the status quo.

All the frustrated political opponents and journalists who feel “tricked” into believing that elections were around the corner are left with little to do but obsess about Mofaz’s “credibility” problem. He said he wouldn’t leave the Likud party, and he left. He said he wouldn’t join the Netanyahu government, and he joined.

But so what? Who cares if Mofaz is in Kadima or in Likud? What exactly is the difference between them anyway? What matters is policy, not politics, and Mofaz deserves credit as a politician with a clear-cut agenda. It’s only beneficial that as of today his agenda is now part of the coalition.

Up to now, former Kadima leader Tzipi Livni got the credit for being credible – because she did not join the Netanyahu government, refusing to give billions of shekels to the ultra-Orthodox. But Livni is the one who stole votes from the left with the Kadima campaign “Either Tzipi or Bibi” then did little as opposition; under her leadership Kadima was among the initiators of the “Boycott Law”; under her watch, Kadima initiated and helped pass a draconian amendment to the libel law and the selection committees law (which de facto prevents Arabs from living in certain communities) and let’s not forget the Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People. After repeatedly abusing and neglecting her role as opposition leader and misguiding her supporters, her bitter response to the Netanyahu-Mofaz move, would be outrageous, if it hadn’t been so insignificant.

Shelly Yacimovich and Yair Lapid are considered the two big losers from the coalition deal.  But neither has a sincere or bold agenda anyway. As an MK, Yacimovich has not touched upon the occupation, nor the peace process, the anti-democratic legislation, nor the Arab minority in Israel. She is a social-democrat whose emphasis on the democratic side of the equation is marginal. It’s not clear how she will promote significant economic changes, since she is unwilling to confront her stronghold of support, the Histadrut.  On the other hand, Yair Lapid brought no message at all to the table. Lapid is waning, without leaving a trace of policy or ideology on any issue.

Netanyahu and Mofaz can do great things in the coming year, ranging from legislating an alternative to the unsuccessful Tal Law for drafting Haredim into the army, through to the peace process, to which I believe Mofaz is sincerely committed. Yet the most significant change this duo can undertake is to break away from the suffocating grasp of the settler right, which is threatening to destroy Israeli democracy. This will be the real test for Netanyahu and Mofaz. The rest doesn’t matter nearly as much.

Roni Schocken is a candidate in the Tel Aviv-Berkeley LL.M. program (2012) and in the Harvard Business School MBA program (2014). He has clerked for the Supreme Court and served as the director of the government relations department in The Abraham Fund Initiatives.

Last night, after the Israeli election was set for September 4, I saw a guy wearing a T-shirt that I thought summed up the public mood, which the main ”opposition” candidates have been and will be catering to. The T-shirt showed a comically wide-eyed, frightened John Cleese and his classic line from Fawlty Towers: ”Don’t mention the war!”

Perfect. The prime minister has the whole world scared to death that he’s going to bomb Iran, every poll shows that a great majority of Israelis don’t want him to do it – but it’s not an issue in Israeli politics and it almost certainly won’t be in the campaign. People don’t want to talk about it or hear about it. They sit silently as Netanyahu drips the fear of another Holocaust into their brains, softening them up for the war he’s waiting for the opportunity to start, then they go on about their business, a little more tenderized than before.  Except for the marginal left and a couple of rogue ex-Mossad and ex-Shin Bet chiefs, nobody challenges this “duty” of every Jew and every non-anti-Semitic gentile to choose war over a nuclear Iran.

Look at how the opposition and the public have reacted since ex-Shin Bet head Yuval Diskin accused Netanyahu and Barak last Friday of being “messianics” who can’t be trusted to deal reasonably with Iran. None of the three candidates purporting to offer a centrist alternative to Bibi - neither Kadima’s Shaul Mofaz, Labor’s Shelly Yacimovich nor Yair Lapid of Yesh Atid (There Is A Future) – grabbed the flag Diskin raised. His words, like those of Meir Dagan before him, caused a huge storm in the media, even overseas - but didn’t have the tiniest effect on the Likud and right wing’s control of the political arena. A Haaretz-Dialog poll published yesterday showed Netanyahu being more popular than Mofaz, Yacimovich and Lapid combined. It also showed him enjoying 2-1 public support against Diskin and his accusations.

In their hearts, Israelis would prefer that their government not start a war with Iran, but if somebody, such as the prime minister, tells them he’s going to do it anyway, they’ll go along. When push comes to shove, they’ll support it. The Israeli public is so weak, so intimidated by anybody who might stand up and accuse them of cowardice and treason if they don’t nod their heads to the proposal of the day for screwing the Arabs. They’re putty in the hands of a guy like Netanyahu.

The ”opposition” leaders know this, so they run from any issue in which they would have to position themselves to the left of Bibi (since right-of-Bibi is, of course, already overcrowded). They don’t challenge him on Iran, they don’t challenge him on the occupation, they don’t have anything to say about what most everyone else in the world thinks of when they hear the word “Israel” – war-mongering, trampling on Palestinians, militant Jewish fanaticism. These are the things that define Israel, the whole world knows it, and you won’t hear about any of this in this election campaign.

What will you hear about? Drafting the Haredim (ultra-Orthodox) and high prices. These are the hot-button issues in the country today, this is what people want to hear about, this is what it’s safe for both voters and politicians to scream and yell about – because it’s not right wing and it’s not left wing, it’s consensus, nobody will call you a coward or a traitor, everybody agrees, the goddamn haredim should serve the country like everybody else and these prices are too goddamn high.

Again, perfect. This is what Israelis really want, this is what Netanyahu, Mofaz, Yacimovich and Lapid are going to promise to deliver - and everybody knows everyone’s jerking each other off because nobody’s going to draft the Haredim – they won’t go and nobody’s going to make them go – and nobody’s going to lower prices, either, because this country’s economy is a piggish capitalist one and Netanyahu, who everybody knows will win the election, is the last guy on earth who wants to change that.

So the issues shaping up as the central ones of the campaign are not just trivial, they’re not  issues at all because in Israel 2012, nothing can or will be done about them.

As for the real issues, it’s not that there’s an elephant in the room that everyone’s pretending not to see, it’s that there are several elephants - war with Iran, the occupation, war with Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Egypt and/or Turkey, the rise of McCarthyism, the dread that Israel doesn’t have a future – which will continue to go unmentioned in polite, mainstream company during this supposed season of decision.

Boy, what a vibrant democracy we live in.