Barak's Good Government
By Leonard Fein
The debate in Israel is whether, after all the backing and forthing, Ehud Barak has created an unworkable government or whether, instead, his unprecedentedly close-to-the-vest construction will result in an especially effective government. I vote for the latter.
Until 1977, Israel's religious parties were eager and relatively undemanding participants in its Labor governments, the only governments the nation had known from the time of the very first Knesset in 1949. They were content to till their own fields, and the prevailing assumption of the socialist establishment was that the religious parties would soon enough be gathered into history's dustbin. Give them the sop of authority over religious matters, and they in return will support the government's foreign and economic policies.
But in the wake of Israel's victory in the Six Day War, and its sudden acquisition of the West Bank - or, as the religious parties preferred, of Judea and Samaria - they developed a foreign policy that was at odds with Labour. Not for them "land for peace," especially not for the National Religious Party, the then-dominant party in the religious bloc.
In due course, one of the religious parties - Shas - became more, much more, than a "merely" religious party; it became the party that Sephardic Israel had been struggling towards unsuccessfully for some years, a party that could at last lay authentic claim to ethnic representation. This it did not through the alienating street-demonstrations manner of its earlier incomplete incarnations, but through the hard work of establishing a network of critical social services that the government was either unwilling or unable (or both) to provide.
Israel's most recent elections have fundamentally altered the nation's political map. This was the first time that the issue of religion's relationship to politics became a genuine election issue. One party, Shinui, was organized solely around its insistence that religion be divorced from politics. Another, the Center Party, was initiated by Tel Aviv's former mayor, Roni Milo, whose national reputation rested mainly on his readiness to assert Tel Aviv's secularity in the face of Orthodox efforts to encroach on that city's traditional openness. Shas, the NRP, and United Torah Judaism read both the campaign statements and the election results, and understood that continuing obduracy would leave them outside the comforts (read: subsidies, influence over policy) of government. Suddenly, therefore, they were rendered "available," no matter which of the major parties emerged victorious. (The availability of the NRP, once the favored home of hawkish religious militants, was enhanced when its most extreme leaders abandoned it in favor of a more overtly hawkish aggregation of right-wingers.)
To his credit, Ehud Barak understood this well. No doubt, in his meetings with the leaders of these parties, he made that understanding explicit. They could join the government if they so chose, but he did not absolutely need them - so that if they were to join, it would have to be on his terms, not theirs. His terms? The religious status quo, minus a revision in the rules governing the drafting of yeshiva students. No vilification of the Supreme Court, no new and disruptive legislation, no inflated subsidies.
Some people are disturbed at the peculiar spectacle of Shas and the National Religious parties sitting at the same table with Meretz. But Israel's profound conflict over the role of religion cannot properly or usefully be settled at the ballot box. The resolution of the conflict, if resolution there's to be, must not come via the defeat of the Orthodox but through their gradual adjustment to a more circumscribed role in affairs of state. And that is exactly the process that seems now to have been initiated.
Moreover, it would not do - this we know Barak understood - simply to exclude a party - Shas - that sees itself and is seen by most Israelis as offering a voice to a community that has for so long felt itself voiceless and discriminated against. As to Meretz, after swearing up and down that it would not sit with Shas, Barak made it an offer it could not (and therefore did not) refuse: Yossi Sarid as Minister of Education. That is a very major portfolio, not only because after defense, education has the largest share of the state budget, but also because it has very considerable influence over what gets taught in the schools.
We don't yet have Barak's measure. His refusal to include one or more of the Arab parties in his coalition, and his failure to distinguish among those parties, were mistakes, but mistakes of the second order. He over-reacted to President Clinton's offhand statement that the Palestinians should have the right to live wherever they choose, a wording that suddenly revived the fear of hordes of Palestinians claiming their ancestral homes in Israel proper - surely not the President's intent. But as against these minor omissions and commissions, we have his exquisite management of Ariel Sharon and the Likud, creating a situation in which Likud, now a shambles of a party, was forced to prefer to stay outside the government and keep its talons off the peace process.
So far, then, so good; much reason for new hope.
So, score two for Hillary, and the Clinton Fatigue be damned.
|
|