Does Israel have any Left left at all?
This is a segment from The “End of Consensus?” Edition.
And now it’s time for our second discussion.
So Linda, there’s this phrase in Hebrew, “Yerida le’shem aliyah,” going down for the sake of going up.
If the way up starts by going down, then Israel’s left has a very bright future indeed, don’t you think?
For sure.
You may have missed it through the fog of war, but the Zionist left in Israel lately went from being in great disarray to being in still greater disarray, and as close to simply not existing as it has ever come in the 118 years since the Jewish Social Democratic Workers’ Party, Po’oleit Zion, was established in 1906.
This when earlier in the month, Labor Party head, M’Rav M’cha’eli, announced that she would soon resign, adding, “I will do everything I can to hand the reins to the next Labor leader in the best possible way, to rebuild the party and our country.
Out of this terrible crisis, Israel must have a restart.
” It is unclear whether at the other end of the reins that M’Rav M’cha’eli will soon hand over, the horse, to follow her metaphor, is alive or dead.
The last time a poll showed the Labor Party passing the minimum election threshold was back in April, just when the protests against the proposed judicial reforms were getting going, long before October 7th and the war that followed.
This week, in at least one of the “if elections were held today, who would you vote for” polls, the Labor Party got the support of a dismal one-half percent of the vote, one-fifth of what it would need to actually return to the Knesset.
If you go to the Labor Party website today, what you’ll find is a big white expanse with the Labor Party logo with its kibbutzy “Stalks of Grain” in socialist red, and underneath it are the words “The site is under renovation.
” Symbolism anyone?
What’s more, in light of the fact that the other traditional Zionist Left Party merits did not pass the minimum threshold in the last election, it is suddenly easy to imagine that in the next Knesset, maybe there will be no leftist Zionist parties at all, though most polls these days predict that merits will return to the Knesset with four seats after the next election.
It’s hard to know just what polls taken right now mean about our future politics, but it is safe to conclude that the state of the Zionist Left in Israel is dire.
Of course, politics abhors a vacuum, and though this is a difficult and unseemly time to be organizing and campaigning, behind the scenes things are happening.
Longtime Labor MK and one-time Minister of Diaspora Affairs Nachman Shai wrote in an op-ed in Ma’ariv headlined “We cannot let the Labor Party disappear from the political landscape,” in which he argued that the three sitting Labor MKs who might replace Mayrav Mikhaeli, Na’ama Lazimi, Efrat Reitan Marom, and Rabbi Gilad Kariv, instead of entering a leadership fight, should together seek a political alliance with a stronger party, maybe Benny Gantz’s centrist Machanei HaMamlachti party.
For his part, Rav Kariv seems to be weighing a run for party leadership, holding that he himself can bring the party back to some sort of popularity without melding it into something bigger.
Meanwhile, former Deputy IDF Chief of Staff and former Merits MK Yair Golan offers a different future for the left.
It is very relevant that on October 7th, on his own initiative, Yair Golan drove down to outside of Gaza and ferried people to safety from the area around the Nova music festival that was still overrun by terrorists, saving dozens of lives in a spectacular way, becoming perhaps the single biggest hero of that awful day that produced hundreds of heroes.
After that, lots of people said, “This man, cut from the same cloth as a military hero like Yitzhak Rabin, is the man we need to lead the left.
” And Yair Golan was inclined to agree.
Since then, there have been reports that he is forming a new leftist party that he hopes will hoover up the remains of Labor and Merits both, combining their constituents and bringing back voters who abandoned the left over the past decade for the centrist parties of Yair Lapid and Benny Gantz.
The party’s tentative name is Hitororut, or reawakening.
Of it, Rav Gilad Kariv said this week that the last thing the Israeli left needs is still another party.
As Yair Golan is fomenting a reawakening, one of the leaders of the anti-judicial reform demonstrations, Moshe Radman, is busily building the groundwork for still another leftist party, this one tentatively named Zehazman, Now is the Time.
Radman says that in just a few weeks, “hundreds of thousands will be in the streets saying, we want this government changed immediately.
We want new elections.
” Moshe Radman is a 40-year-old successful high-tech entrepreneur who made his fortune in educational software.
And as befits his station, he seems to be a kind of free market sort when it comes to the economy.
In fact, we know very little about his political views on most issues, where he stands on settlements and the occupation, for instance.
Since his public profile is based almost entirely on his part in leading impressively the protests against the judicial reforms, mostly what we know of his politics is that they are what he calls liberal, meaning in favor of reducing the role of religion in society, in favor of strengthening the courts, and against Benjamin Netanyahu and his supporters.
Before October 7th, this was a political profile that had mass appeal, and it could well be that it still does.
All of which leads us to our questions.
Alison, what the hell is going on on Israel’s left?
Is there a way for the left to revive or reawaken itself?
And if so, what is it?
What should we make of the new parties being formed as we speak?
What should we make of the old ones struggling to survive as we speak?
Well, I don’t think we can be so specific what the hell is going on on Israel’s left.
I think it’s a more general question of what the hell is going on in general.
I think that this, you know, chaos, nature does abhor a vacuum and what we have on the left in the Israeli political landscape is a complete and total vacuum because Meretz disappeared and Labor now has no leader.
Rumor has it that not only Gilad Kariv, but all three of these MKs want to take a stab at running for the leadership.
So it looks again, a fraction of a fraction of a fraction.
Yair Golan, apparently he got 11 mandates in one of the polls that if he ran independently, you know, I’m very skeptical before he became a hero, he had kind of a runaway mouth.
I think we’ve even dedicated whole discussions to some of the shit he was saying that wasn’t very smart shit.
I mean, maybe, you know, he’s undergoing a transformation, but I have trouble seeing him as the holy grail of the Israeli left.
But I think, you know, before we start talking about parties and personalities, I don’t mean to distract from the purpose of the discussion, but what is the Israeli left after this?
What is a Zionist left?
What are the principles that we believe in?
It just seems like October 7th shattered a lot of people’s basic preconceptions.
You see a lot of people who were on the left move to the center, move to the right.
So before we talk about people and personalities, you know, it’s telling that this Moshe Rabin thing is, yeah, change the government.
Well, change it to what?
What do you want?
You know, what are we looking for?
It seems like, you know, the left has collapsed because the idea of peace, the vision of peace has completely gone out of the public discussion.
You know, no one even thinks about peace.
Our arguments have been, how do we manage conflict?
The model of managing conflict was, you know, try to ignore or downplay or bribe those parts of the other side, the Palestinian side that want to kill, murder, slaughter and destroy us and focus on the ones that we could maybe talk to.
And now what do we see?
We see a message that has gotten through to a lot of the public of, you know, no, the ones that we have to pay attention to are the ones who want to do terrible things to us because they actually mean what they say and they actually do.
It’s discredited the left a lot.
So you know, I understand that we’re talking about parties and personalities, but I just think that the whole essence of what is it to be on the Zionist left in Israel after October 7th in the middle of this war, that’s what’s going to have to be sorted out before we can really think about, you know, what configuration, what political configuration we’re going to be in.
If you ask me, no more new parties, force merits and, you know, like if I could rule that it would be against the law for any Israeli left wing person to try to form a new party, I think I would pass that law and just think, you know, anyone who identifies in any way as being on the left, everybody has to sit down, get together and decide, you know, what the fuck you all have in common and not focus on, you know, arguing with each other and get the left to act together.
If I were czar of the left, that’s what I would do.
Well, all the more so because I feel as though I see, I could be completely wrong about this, but I see what left is rising and it’s not actually really to my taste in particular, but it will be to the taste of a lot of people.
And it’s a little bit like what the Labor Party and merits were like in the 1970s, I think.
I think that what we saw through the protests in those months leading up to October, you know, from January through October, was the reassertion of this old kind of, this old worldview that I associate with, not to use a bit of like horrible jargon, with the Ashkenazi elite that’s like secular, that still valorizes and bless them for this, but still valorizes kibbutzim and the history of Zionism and the pioneers, and that thinks that there’s no more important service to the country than serving in the army.
And that has the kinds of values that, frankly, were presented as the alpha and omega of Israel when I was a kid in a youth movement, where people look like Yitzhak Rabin with the hair like that and where Hebrew poetry is beloved and where the old religious forms and all the return to religion just seems kind of like icky backsliding in some way.
I think that that is the left that’s emerging.
I think that that was at the very, very core of those protests.
I think that’s who Moshe Radman is.
I think that’s who Sheikh Mahabresler is.
I think that that’s— But Sheikh Mahabresler is not on the left, she says.
That’s part of my criticism of this, is that I don’t actually see it very much as being leftist.
Like in the old, old days, some of these people were actually socialists, and that’s no longer really part of the ideal, though it is sort of romanticized, kibbutzim and moshavim and working the fields and agriculture and that kind of thing.
But I think that what is going to be called the left is going to be traditional secular Zionism.
How do you distinguish—sorry to interrupt—how do you distinguish that from what Lapid and Gantz are offering?
Well, I don’t think that it’s all that different than what Lapid and Gantz are offering.
I just think it’s going to call itself like the continuation of the Labour Party and with some reason.
And the reason why I don’t like this is because what it is not, what it is attempting to leapfrog backwards over is all the changes that I think that have been quite good and important in Israel, the most obvious of which is change in the status of women.
Anyone that doesn’t see—basically, the new politics is very male.
It’s very back to the generals, back to the army.
And you don’t hear any—even except Bono Alternativa is a feminist group, but you don’t hear really any—women are not really very much a part of the emerging politics.
And part of the rejection of Meirav Michaeli is a rejection of—she was one of the great feminist politicians, explicitly feminist politicians of all of Israeli history.
So that’s gone.
But what do you expect during a war?
And then also the rise of Mizrahim.
What do you expect during a war?
I mean, you know, and I also feel that— I expect the voices on the left to be saying it’s outrageous that the five men who are deciding on the direction of the war are all men and that there’s not a woman in the room.
And you don’t hear that from politicians.
You do hear it from feminists.
But does that seem unreasonable to you in a time of war?
No, it doesn’t seem unreasonable.
But I just think that, you know, this is what’s—and I also think that the whole Israeli public, you know, I look at my daughter, who was clearly on the left, and the war has moved her to the center, maybe even the right.
And she said, “I don’t think there’s anyone to talk to.
I don’t think we can make peace.
I think we’ve been fooling ourselves all these years.
” All these things that you hear.
And she’s quite thoughtful and reads a lot and is, you know—now, this is, you know, and she always voted merits and she went back and forth between merits and labor, mostly because she liked Meirav Michaeli.
So if somebody like this, who’s thoughtful, young, politically aware, if she’s moving to the right, so is the Israeli public.
I mean, and polls show that as well.
So is what you’re saying that there’s just not going to be very much of a left left?
I think there won’t.
I think there’ll be center and right.
What’s hard—I wanted to say this in our previous discussion—what’s difficult to parse out when you look at the polls and when you look at the feeling of the Israeli public is it seems like it’s a contradiction, but as much as the country is moving anti-Netanyahu, it’s also moving right.
So if you are trying to define the right as equaling Netanyahu, it’s confusing.
But I think that everybody’s taking a giant step to the right and at the same time is disgusted with Netanyahu.
And that’s kind of, I think, hard to parse out when you’re trying to analyze what’s going on politically.
But to the right, by which you mean in terms of stopping the occupation?
Just that.
Well, we’ve got—what do we have?
We have our economic right and left.
We have our economic right and left.
We have our security right and left.
And we have our sociocultural, you know, feminism, you know, identity politics right and left.
So if I’m focusing right now on the whole security, you know, how much to compromise and move towards diplomacy and how much not to be militaristic, I think that, you know, October 7th is just a watershed in Israeli politics.
And I think that on the security/take chances for peace/look to the diplomatic solutions front that I think that, wow, we’re taking a giant step to the right.
Maybe.
I don’t know if that’s true.
Really?
Yeah.
I mean, I think that if you run our history a thousand times, then some number of hundreds of times this ends up being a turning point on the direction to a two-state solution.
If maybe not 500 times, maybe it’s 50 times.
I don’t know.
But if in 10 years you see Benny Gantz on the White House lawn signing some kind of agreement, we will look back and say that this was the moment when that began.
Now, you might say, a lot of people might say, and maybe you’re all right, that the chances of that happening are vanishingly small.
I would love to be wrong.
I would love to be wrong.
I would love for that to be true.
I mean, I just think that now it’s entirely, to me, it’s entirely unclear what happens after this.
And it’s also not hard for me to imagine a majority of Israelis in the right circumstances supporting that as well.
I don’t know if your daughter, Linda, is in a position where her new positions are fixed and they are unchangeable.
No, you might be right.
There’s a story that when Anwar Sadat flew to Jerusalem, his plane was surrounded by Israeli sharpshooters because they thought it was a trick.
And polls showed that the vast majority of Israelis opposed withdrawing from Sinai in exchange for a peace treaty with Egypt.
And after he addressed the Knesset, Israelis became convinced that he was sincere and the polls changed overnight.
Yeah.
