Smart analysis of Labor Party’s dissolution in Israel, from Daniel Levy at Foreign Policy. A few different moods in the piece. 1, Dark:
For the time being, Israel’s future will be decided according to how political and ideological arguments play out within the Likud revisionist camp. That is a reality that would have seemed inconceivable to Israel’s founders, although they are perhaps partly to blame for never developing a sufficiently progressive and inclusive vision of Israeli democracy, ceding the ideological debate at key moments to a more narrow, nationalist agenda which eventually became the majority and is now utterly hegemonic…
Ehud Barak today, in what was perhaps his political swansong, chose to further undermine an already fragile Israeli democracy. By any standards, Barak’s act was a deeply undemocratic act. The very phenomenon of military generals going straight into politics, the story of Ehud Barak, is a problematic one.
2, Time for US to break with Israel:
If the US places itself on the wrong side of these developments, wielding its UN veto, or failing to stand up to an ever-more pugnacious Netanyahu-Lieberman-led Israeli government for instance, then one can expect a further and perhaps worrying erosion of America’s ability to wield influence and power, to build alliances, overcome adversaries, and avoid bloodshed.
3, hopeful; the political process is bankrupt; the future is in the streets, civil society:
The opposition has been strengthened, not only numerically but also by removing the fig leaf of national unity and centrist positioning that Netanyahu’s government claimed by virtue of Labor being a partner…. If Israel is to be a functioning liberal democracy long into the future, one that is in anyway recognizable to its supporters in the West (who are not religiously-oriented) to empathize, then a new progressive camp will ultimately have to build itself. That camp will not emerge from the Knesset machinations of factions within factions of a party. It would have to be part of a longer process that thoroughly examines Labor’s failings and that creates a new and progressive democratic story of Israel and Israel’s future.
Outside of parliament, that progressive democratic camp is beginning to take shape. 20,000 demonstrated in Tel Aviv this past Saturday night against the McCarthyite interrogation of human rights NGOs just initiated by the Knesset. Crucially this camp will have to take an egalitarian approach and be integrally made up of both Jewish and Palestinian Israelis (Labor failed in that mission long ago). It will not be competing for political power anytime soon but it is crucial for Israel that it be part of the political debate.
