The Politics of Paralysis I: Netanyahu's Safety Belt

Ehud Sprinzak

From Foreign Affairs, July/August 1998

Article preview: first 500 of 3,363 words total.

Summary:  How does Binyamin Netanyahu do it? The continued popularity of Israel's Likud prime minister, despite his derailment of a popular peace process, is the great paradox of Israeli politics. The key is the rise of the soft right, an odd mix of ultra-Orthodox Jews and secular immigrants from the former Soviet Union whose newfound influence lets Netanyahu defy political gravity. He holds their support by pandering to their distaste for Arabs and Israel's secular left. But the soft right is not only right but also soft and thus less wedded to a hard line. If Netanyahu drags Israel into a bloody confrontation, they could desert him for a more dovish candidate.

Ehud Sprinzak, a Professor of Political Science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, is the author of The Ascendance of Israel's Radical Right. He is currently a Senior Fellow at the U.S. Institute of Peace.

THE RISE OF ISRAEL'S SOFT RIGHT

Foreign observers have always had trouble understanding Israel's complex politics and following the twists and turns of the Jewish state's foreign policy. But nothing in Israeli political history has raised eyebrows like the ascendancy of Binyamin Netanyahu, who unexpectedly edged past Shimon Peres of Labor in the 1996 elections. Despite Netanyahu's razor-thin margin of victory, repeated diplomatic blunders, and derailment of a peace process that is overwhelmingly supported by Israelis -- nearly 60 percent, according to polls by Tel Aviv University's Tami Steinmatz Institute of Peace, support the Oslo accords -- the young Likud prime minister is poised to win a second term. Netanyahu's continued popularity is the great paradox of Israeli politics today.

The key to the Netanyahu enigma is a new configuration of domestic forces that has allowed him to rule the country comfortably and commit foreign policy mistakes with electoral impunity. Netanyahu relies today on a conservative alliance comprising three major forces: Israel's nationalist right, its radical right, and its soft right. The first two groups have long been part of Israel's political landscape. What is new is the soft right, an odd melange of ultra-Orthodox Jews and secular immigrants from the former Soviet Union, whose newfound influence lets Netanyahu defy political gravity.

THE WAY WE WERE

Since 1977, when the Labor Party lost an election for the first time ever to the Likud, Israel's political map has been split into two large and roughly equal ideological camps polarized over the future of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. While Labor, under Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, advocated moderation and territorial compromise, the Likud of Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir pursued a hard-line agenda, urging the settlement and eventual annexation of the occupied territories. In the center has been a smaller ultra-Orthodox camp that cares less about the territories or the Palestinians than about government largesse. Conventional political wisdom has held that the party that comes out on top in the elections will automatically receive the support of the ultra-Orthodox, giving it the votes to form a coalition. While the Likud and its satellite parties on the far right have dominated national politics since 1977, Rabin's appeal as a security-minded pragmatist led Labor back to power in 1992. Labor's return made possible the Oslo accords with the Palestine Liberation Organization (plo) and a formal peace treaty with Jordan.

Israel's right was galvanized by the Six Day War of 1967, in which Israel took the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan, the Gaza Strip and the Sinai from Egypt, and the Golan Heights from Syria. Since then, the Israeli right has been composed of two major segments: the secular nationalist right, embodied in the Likud of Begin and Shamir, and the radical right, spearheaded by settlers of the occupied territories. The Likud has traditionally represented the pragmatic and parliamentary politics of Israel's territorial maximalists. Parties such as Moledet, Tsomet, and the National Religious Party (NRP), as well as Gush ...

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