‘Left’ and ‘Right’ in Israeli Politics - Meaningless?

For revolutionary Leon Trotsky, politics was about principles and ideas: permanent revolution, opposition to socialism in one country, internal party democracy. For Josef Stalin, the Soviet leader, who sent his NKVD to murder Trotsky with an ice-ax on August 20, 1940, politics was mostly about the quest for personal power. (*)

Mercifully, by 2015 when Binyamin Netanyahu ousted the last of the followers of Ze'ev Jabotinsky from Likud, no ice-ax, God forbid, was involved. 

The Prime Minister needed to solidify control of the party. 

Having principled naysayers piping up about liberalism, tolerance, the rule of law, or setting personal examples of probity was just not on.

The 1949 First Knesset was comprised mostly of ideological parties very much concerned with principles and ideas: Mapai (including Hapo’el Hatza’ir and Ahdut Ha’avoda) led by David Ben-Gurion; Mapam (Soviet-leaning socialist); Religious Bloc (Mizrahi, Hapo’el Ha’Mizrahi, Agudat Yisrael, and Po’alei Agudat Yisrael ); Herut (Jabotinsky-oriented, liberal nationalist, Menachem Begin-led); General Zionists (liberal-capitalist); Progressives (European-style liberal); Sephardic; Communist (pro-Soviet, mixed Arab-Jewish); Arab (Mapai-affiliated Arab list); Fighters’ List (Lehi-affiliated); Women’s International Zionist Organization, and Yemenite Party

I do not much mourn the withering of dogmatic Left-right ideological parties from Israel’s scene. The disappearance of principles and rectitude that had usually gone hand-in-hand with the parties and personalities of yesteryear is what I lament. These have been replaced today by tribal, religious, or ethnic entities sometimes led by parochial, not-yet-indicted leaders (though some were previously convicted or are presently charged with graft).

Nowadays, Israel’s main parties and players are barely distinguishable on issues of principle. Sometimes it is for the good that they mainly agree on the big picture – the Jewish ethos of the state, government intervention in the economy, welfare safety nets, and the intractability of our conflict with the Palestinian Arabs. Sometimes the consensus is unhelpful as when they mostly disregard Israel’s income disparity problem.

Instead, the main cleavages are tribal, religious, and cultural. 

These are important issues, don’t get me wrong. The demands by the ultra-Orthodox-leaning national religious (חרד״ל) and the non- or anti-Zionist ultra-Orthodox (חֲרֵדִים‎) to turn Israel into a demi-theocratic state could well tear the country asunder. 

However, the problems don’t lend themselves neatly to placement on the standard left-right political spectrum. Some theocrats are dovish on war and peace. Most are proponents of big government and favor a redistribution of income.

In the March 2020 elections, about 48 percent of the combined vote went to rabble-rousing Likud, ultra-Orthodox Shas and UTJ, and Yamina, which would like to see a Knesset majority empowered to overrule Supreme Court decisions. A terrible idea. 

The largely illiberal Arab parties (pro-PLO or Islamist) garnered nearly 13 percent. Roughly six percent went to the small-minded Russian-speakers’ Yisroel Beitenu (led by Netanyahu's former righthand man and now unwavering enemy Avigdor Leiberman), and the mostly secular, mindlessly dovish Labor-Meretz.

That left a mere 27 percent of the electorate to vote for the new (and now probably moribund) centrist Blue & White Party led by Benny Ganz.

Israel’s political system encourages bespoke parties. For example, Degel Hatorah, a component of the aforementioned UJC, claims to look after the interests of “Lithuanian” Ashkenazi Haredim. Aguda, another component of UJC, saves a seat for Hassidim who tuck their trousers into their socks. 

The electoral system offers citizens an incentive to cast ballots for custom-made parties with no mainstream appeal because they can “win.” Just 3.25 percent of the proportional vote can catapult a flash-in-the-pan or narrow interest party into the 120-seat Knesset. In a country where no party in history has won a Knesset majority, even flash-in-the-pan parties hold sway in forming a government.

Broad-based centrist parties that entice politicians to embrace moderation and pull voters from the margins toward a common purpose do indeed come and go. These “third-way” parties (melding left and right and a dose of reform-minded civic responsibility) invariably implode because the system provides little incentive in the long term for them to hold together.

The chances are slight for political reform that would move Israel away from pure proportional representation, disincentivize tribalism, and pump the breaks on our drift in the direction of tyranny-by-majority-rule.

Between that First Knesset in 1949 and our 2020 23^rd Knesset, principle and ideology faded like a masterpiece exposed to the sun. Prime Ministers and their families used to live in modest apartments and make their breakfasts. Golda Meir might guiltily ask friends to bring her a carton of Marlboro’s from abroad. 

Today, despite having a chef on staff, the Netanyahu’s ordered $96,000 worth of catered meals to impress foreign dignitaries. The taxpayers picked up the family’s $2,700-a-year tab for ice cream. The PM received more than $280,000 worth of cigars from Hollywood producer Arnon Milchan. And so on and so on.

The fading of principles happened as Ben-Gurion’s Mapai incarnated in today’s Labor Party, which is down to three seats. Mapai in its time was corrupt but in a political sense in order to maintain a monopoly of power.

Ehud Barak, one of modern Labor's former leaders who started off as a kibbutznik, is now worth over $30 million. Having capitulated and joined Netanyahu’s current government, polls suggest Labor, which played a pivotal role in founding the state, may disappear in the next election.

Mapam’s successor party is Meretz (dovish and now social democratic) with three seats. 

The Religious Bloc has morphed and expanded. Its workers’ factions, Hapo’el Hamizrahi and Po’alei Agudat Yisrael, have gone extinct (together with the idea that the really frum should work for a living and that only outstanding Talmudic scholars should be exempt from IDF service). 

Mizrahi, which once represented the knitted kipa politically moderate religious Zionists, is also extinct. 

Agudat Yisrael, though, has thrived as the party of the non-Zionist Hassidic Haredi camp. It runs on a ticket with the non-Zionist Lithuanians under the United Torah Judaism (UTJ) banner and has seven seats.

While the Sephardic and Yemenite parties have disappeared, their successor party is the non-Zionist, ultra-Orthodox Shas (most of its Talmudic students do no army service) with nine seats in the current Knesset.

Yemina, which wants to render ineffectual the independent liberal-leaning judiciary, has five seats in the current Knesset. It is an amalgamation of several Orthodox parties and reflects settler-hardel ideology. However, curiously as this may seem, its leaders Naftali Bennett and Ayelet Shaked, are malleable on religious issues and adept at rebranding. Their long-term goal is to replace Bennett’s former mentor, now arch-enemy Netanyahu as prime minister using whatever party vehicle is expedient.

Herut’s successor party is Likud; portraits of Jabotinsky and Menachem Begin still hang at party headquarters. However, Netanyahu-led Likud with 36 seats is purged of Jabotinsky/Begin liberals and anyone else who might have been considered an immediate political threat to the leader. 

Likud stands for whatever Netanyahu wants. As the longest-serving prime minister, he defines Likud; and he epitomizes brand Israel to the world for better or worse.

Under multiple indictments for corruption Lord Acton’s line, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” expresses what Bibi has become. 

Alongside his strategic brilliance, diplomatic ingenuity, and intellectual depth, he is duplicitous to the core, both for and against a Palestinian state. For and against caving-in to Hamas demands. For and against a complete COVID-19 lockdown. For and against extending Israeli sovereignty to Judea and Samaria. His foremost goal is to buy one day at a time for himself politically.

The metaphorical successors of the 1949 General Zionists and Progressive Party are Blue & White and Yesh Atid led by Benny Ganz and Yair Lapid, respectively.

In the last election, Yesh Atid ran with Blue & White. With 14 seats, Ganz broke his promise to the electorate and joined Netanyahu’s government, Lapid stayed out with his 17 seats. Lapid’s central tenet, beyond steadfastly seeking Netanyahu’s defeat, is opposition to theocracy. His voters tend to be middle class and middle of the road. Beyond that, the former TV talk show host is, like Ganz, politically pliable.

Blue & White serves as an example par excellence of a centrist party that emerged before an election only to disappoint and (if history is a guide) eventually to disappear.  

Like I said, I don’t miss the parties of yesteryear with their unbending allegiance to the Workers, or Greater Israel, or the Comintern. That said, whatever else they are, today’s ideologically promiscuous and principle-compromised parties can’t usefully be slotted into any left-right political continuum.

Left and right don’t mean much in the Israeli political setting.

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See too:

What does it even mean to be a ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative’?

(*)  See Dmitri Volhogonov's TROTSKY: THE ETERNAL REVOLUTIONARY:

"Trotsky's individuality lay primarily in his obsession with the Idea. For him the Idea was the equivalent of a philosophical temple, in which everything created within it belonged to eternity. For him the greatest spiritual luxury consisted in the ability to think and reflect freely..." (page 488)

To be fair, according to Volhogonov,  Stalin appropriated some of Trotsky's ideas making them his own. And Trotsky along with Lenin set up the system (including the bureaucracy) that Stalin exploited in his genocidal reign. Ideas aside, the men -- both profoundly arrogant -- hated each other.