AMONG nearly all of the Israelis I spoke to while visiting the country over winter break, there was one point of agreement on the subject of what is going to happen to Israeli politics following the sidelining of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon due to a severe stroke: Nobody knows what will happen. For those not familiar with the situation, Sharon, a lifelong right-winger who angered many conservatives by pulling Israel out of the Gaza Strip this summer, left his conservative Likud Party to continue pursue a more centrist agenda. In order to do this, he created a new centrist party called Kadima ("forward" in Hebrew), which has been drawing substantial numbers of Likud moderates as well as ranking members of the left-wing Labor Party. With elections coming in March, Kadima had been slated to win a strong bloc of seats in the Knesset, Israel's parliament, which would have kept Sharon in charge as prime minister and kept Israel moving in step with him.
His current condition, however, has thrown all of this into doubt. The Kadima party seemed to be built entirely around Sharon and the people's trust in his leadership. In Israel, common sentiment portrayed Sharon as the only man capable of making the hard choices necessary for peace, such as dismantling settlements in Gaza and the West Bank, while at the same time being sufficiently wary of the Palestinians, who time and time again have proven to be rather unreliable negotiating partners. However, when evaluating Sharon's importance to Israeli politics and the effects his absence will have upon it, it is important to keep in mind an observation made by Prof. Reuven Hazan of Hebrew University in Jerusalem: Sharon was a politician, not a statesman. The difference is that statesmen forge bold paths and convince their constituents to follow them, while politicians sense the direction the people want to go in and transform that willingness into a political reality. It was at this that Sharon was a master.
Public opinion in Israel has been making a slow but steady march toward the center of the political spectrum. It is important to note that the Israeli political spectrum does not match our own. The right and left are defined largely by foreign policy approaches, with the former being insistent on keeping all of the occupied territories and the latter maintaining that a substantive peace agreement can be negotiated with the Palestinians. Both of these positions are losing ground to the view that a large segment of the West Bank will have to be relinquished but that the handover will happen on Israel's terms and the Palestinians can fend for themselves. This center-of-the-road approach has been Sharon's brainchild, but the motivation driving its support in the Israeli public is, as Hazan noted, that Israel is battling to retain both of its defining characteristics: its democratic government and its Jewish identity.
Most Israelis have come to accept that Israel cannot be both democratic and Jewish while holding onto the West Bank. The issue at stake is demographics, and it provided Israel with two incentives for abandoning Gaza. Firstly and most obviously, an area with 9,000 Israelis and 2 million Palestinians was simply too much of a drain on Israel's resources to be worth protecting. Another pressing consideration, however, was that those were 2 million people from whom Israel had to withhold the right to vote for fear of undermining its identity as a Jewish state.
Along with their Arab compatriots inside Israel, Palestinians amount to about 40 percent of the region's total population, according to the American Enterprise Institute. As such, incorporating the Palestinians into Israel as citizens has been almost entirely off the table as a policy option. However, with Gazans removed from that figure, the number drops to 33 percent and if Israel were to release the West Bank, it would enjoy a solid Jewish majority of about 80 percent. Thus, Arabs inside Israel proper currently enjoy full rights as citizens. Make no mistake about it, Israelis are democrats, and they are troubled by their state's undemocratic occupation of the territories and the stigma that occupation has given them in the eyes of the world, even if those concerns often appear to be overshadowed by matters of security.
In December, Tel Aviv University's Peace Index poll showed that while nearly two thirds approve of a Palestinian state, another 63 percent believe that Palestinians haven't even accepted Israel's right to exist. The substantial overlap is the new Israeli center. Most recent polls have Kadima gaining just as many if not more seats than when Sharon was at the party's helm, a firm sign that the party is more than a movement built around a man, but rather a manifestation of a public shifting its priorities. The road ahead in Israel is an uncertain one, as it has always been. But if Sharon's successors are anywhere near the caliber of politician he was, we'll be seeing a movement towards withdrawal from most of the West Bank sooner rather than later, whether the Palestinians are interested in cooperating or not.
A.J. Kornblith's column appears on Mondays in the Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at akornblith@cavalierdaily.com.
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