'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

Israelis, mainly peaceniks, Pt. 2: Naomi Chazan

Naomi Chazan was one of the founders of Meretz, which was founded in 1992 as a leftist and pro-peace party.  She was one of Meretz’s MKs from 1992 through 2003, serving from 1999 through 2003 as a deputy speaker of the Knesset. She is currently Chairman of Meretz’s party congress and president of the New Israel Fund, which tries to support pro-peace and social justice projects within Israel.

She was one of the few Israeli public figures who spoke out publicly against the war from the very beginning. (By contrast, Meretz’s current leader Haim Oron actively supported the war in its early days, only coming out against some of its later phases.)

On March 1, I talked with Chazan at some length about the decline of the Israeli left.  I suggested that a good starting point might be the time in September 1982 when, as news about the massacres that had been carried out under the the IDF’s auspices in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps south of Beirut  started to hit the international airwaves, a massive crowd estimated at some 600,000 people gathered in Tel Aviv to protest the IDF’s involvement in the affair.

(I still, personally, think that was the Israeli peace movement’s finest hour. 600,000 people was roughly one-fifth of Israel’s entire Jewish population at the time. It was huge. They succeeded in forcing the government to form the Kahan Commission, which ultimately came out with its well-known censure of  Defense Minister Sharon. They forced prime minister Menachem Begin to suddenly understand the degree to which he had been duped by Sharon. And they showed that organized mass action can have a serious effect, even in a society as heavily militarized in all respects as Israel’s.  Of course,  as Daphna Golan and many others have noted, there was  no protest activity on anything like that scale during Israel’s barbaric recent war in Gaza—and that was one where the IDF undertook its own barbarism rather than, as in 1982, subcontracting it out to Lebanese Maronite subordinates.)

Anyway, Chazan argued that 1992 rather than 1982 should be taken as the starting point of an attempt to chart the decline of the Israeli left--

In  the elections of 1992, remember, Labour won 44 seats, and they were down to 13 in this past election. In ’92, Meretz had 12 seats, and they are now down to just three.

So that’s the scale of it… And yes, there is just now the start of an auto-critique inside Meretz. We think we lost two seats to Livni and some votes to Hadash.

Daphna Golan had argued to me—and did so in print here-- that Meretz’s failure to put a strong field of women into the top of its election list harmed it at the polls. (And indeed, Kadima’s Livni, the outgoing foreign minister, seems to have won some noticeable amount of support simply by being a strong and capable woman.)

Chazan said, regarding Meretz, that its “lack of clarity” on the recent war was one of the proximate causes of its poor showing in the February polls—

But that’s not the deep cause. The deep cause really still is that the idea that there is ‘no partner for peace’ remains powerful here in Israel. And deep down, not many people here have been prepared to consider changing the kinds of flawed basic parameters on which the whole post-Oslo peace process has been built.

She referred back to the excellent critique of these parameters she had delivered at the New America Foundation in Washington DC, back in early December, as I had blogged about here. (Oh goodness, was that only December? Why do I feel as though years have passed since then?)

She continued:

Israelis are still not challenging the ‘demographic’ framing of the issues that has underlined much of the way the peace process has been presented to the public since Oslo. This encouraged the growth of ethno-nationalism here—or something even worse.

… This whole allegedly ‘pro-peace’ camp in the country was 90% about security, not peace.

She later admitted that there had already been

a tremendous amount of infighting and headrolling inside Labour and Meretz since the election. Labour can’t even be considered ‘left’ any more, and Meretz is ambiguous.

The infighting has been worse in Labour than in Meretz. They couldn’t even hold their Party Executive meeting last week. It blew up after 20 minutes because of all the screaming and recriminations.

She argued, very persuasively imho, that what Israel needed was a major rethinking of what constitutes ‘the left’, or ‘the progressive movement’:

We will have to rebuild the whole movement from the bottom up. We will have to redefine the vision—no, actually, to define it well, for the first time.

We also need to figure out what coalitions we are going to build.

Right now, there are fellers going out between Meretz, Labour, and the three green groups. Or another approach would be a Meretz-Hadash partnership, which is what I favor.

We need to restructure the whole political spectrum! It needs to be restructured ideologically, sociologically, and politically… There will be much discussion over all the possible different combinations.

She said she was also seeing considerable ferment in Israeli civil-society organizations as well as in the political movements:

The links between social justice issues and peace process issues need to be much more firmly established… You know, the economic crisis really was not an issue in the election. Indeed, its effects are only now starting to hit Israel in a big way.

Thinking back to the February 10 election more broadly, she said,

Really, there was no real election campaign at all. There were a few things that happened in the run-up to it that moved maybe five or six seats. Bt there were only two weeks between the end of the war and election day.

She reported that the abstention rate had been 35%-- two percent smaller than during the previous election.

Chazan’s analysis, which seemed fairly novel to me, was that Likud leader Binyamin Netanyahu had been “the big loser” in the elections, from the decision to go to war:

Netanyahu lost ten seats in the course of the war—and that, even though he had been the main advocate and cheerleader for it.

He was the big loser.

He lost some to [Beitenu Yisrael’s head Avigdor] Lieberman, certainly.  Lieberman picked up strongly on the anti-Arab sentiment that was generated by the war, using a fascist election slogan: let us say it clearly.

She judged, however, that Lieberman had not picked up as many seats as some people had expected during the war.

In general, she said the political effects the war had had seemed anomalous. For example, defense minister and Labour leader Ehud Barak had been, she said, “the most popular person” during the war. But then his party made only a poor showing at the polls.

Of course, there was also the question of the amazing mishandling of the ending of the war! You can’t believe they would be so muddled and incompetent! I  believe Barak suffered some politically because of that.

Now, the calls to “finish the job” in Gaza still continue. But there is an increasingly broad realization that we’re not going to be able to do that through war; it will have to be done through deterrence.

On the coalition-formation negotiations then underway among the heads of Israel’s big parties she said:

Some of my friends say ‘Let Israel have an all-rightwing government. That will clarify things! Let things be shaken up by that.’ But I say we need to start shaking them up now, especially on Israeli-Palestinian issues, whatever happens in the coalition negotiations.

At this point, the shaking-up has to be done from outside, because they are so complicated at the level of internal politics inside both the Israeli and the Palestinian camps.

Referring, I think, specifically to the Americans, she said:

You can’t stand by and watch things continue to deteriorate here. It would be unethical and irresponsible. We need some completely new ideas, and a new approach… We might need to go back to the idea of a trusteeship, by the international community.

There is no possibility for success in a purely bilateral negotiation because the parties that can succeed at that simply don’t exist.

… And a way has to be found to include Hamas in the negotiations. We have to find a way to finesse those three ‘conditions’ defined for it.

We need to involve other international actors, too, including the Europeans and the Arab League.

She spoke thoughtfully about the implications of the success Israel’s hard-right parties won at the recent polls:

The success of Lieberman’s party and of the National Union party, which brought Michael Ben-Ari, a wellknown Kahanist racist, into the Knesset is the legitimization of a racist stream that hasn’t been legitimized in Israeli politics until now.

It was always present. But now it seems to have received much more open approval.

Like all smart people of that ilk, Lieberman comes up with a lot of other attractive-looking things that he sais he supports, like civil unions, or the broad attack he makes on the court system in this country. But these are really just ways of trying to minimize the politics of ethnocentrism that he espouses…

This is not the religious fanaticism that we’ve been more familiar with before, but ethnic fanaticism.

Despite the clarity of the analysis she presented about Lieberman, she declined to answer a question about whether a government with him in should be boycotted by other governments.