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Does Kadima's Victory
Put the Peace Process in Reverse?
By NEVE GORDON
Tel Aviv, Israel.
Israelis went to the polls this week
with the hope of resolving the Israeli Palestinian conflict once
and for all. The new political party Kadima, which means ìforwardî
in Hebrew, promised as much and therefore won the day, while
the country's long-established ruling parties, Labor and Likud,
lost their traditional place at the helm.
Although the refreshing social justice discourse introduced by
Labor's new leader, the Moroccan born union advocate Amir Peretz,
did inject energy into the shattered party, he failed to reap
the support many had hoped for. His position regarding the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict has been rightly criticized as incoherent, and it also
appears that many of Labor's longtime Ashkenazi voters have deserted
the party ranks because they are unwilling to be led by a Mizrahi
Jew.
Likud's situation is much worse. Following the creation of Kadima
it lost almost 75 percent of its cohorts not least because it
has been increasingly characterized as an extremist party that
represents the settler's uncompromising ideology. Perhaps more
importantly, during his tenure as Minister of Finance, Binyamin
Netanyahu introduced unpopular Thatcherite policies that pushed
hundreds of thousands of Israelis under the poverty line. After
the election's humiliating results -- in which Likud won less
than 10% of the Knesset seats and has been relegated to the fifth
largest party -- many believe that Netanyahu should resign.
Even though the extreme right lost many seats, Avigdor Liberman's
party Israel Beiteinu (Israel is our Home), garnered 12 seats,
four times more than it won in the previous elections. This is
a worrisome development since Liberman is Israel's version of
France's Jean Marie Le Pen, a shrewd politician who captivates
right wing voters by appealing to atavistic sentiments of Jewish
blood and soil.
Whereas Liberman may have been the election's surprise, Kadima
was its victor, gaining 28 seats. Kadima's meteoric ascent in
the polls is due, in part, to a pervasive yearning for a centrist
party that will solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. While
the party has very little to say about the country's other social
ills, Ehud Olmert's bold declaration that Kadima will unilaterally
determine Israel's international borders is one of the secrets
behind its noteworthy achievement.
It was actually the party's founder, a man who is currently lying
in a coma, who managed to persuade the public that he will make
the Palestinian problem disappear. In the weeks leading up to
the elections Kadima simply exploited Ariel Sharon's promise,
and much of the support the party enjoys reflects the enormous
respect many Israelis developed for the former prime minister.
Kadima had a straightforward message and the Israeli public bought
it. The thrust of its claim is that there is a contradiction
between Israel's geographic and demographic aspirations: as the
settlement project deepened its hold on the Occupied Territories,
the very idea of Israel as a Jewish state, where Jews are the
majority, has been undermined. In other words, the fact that
the majority of people living between the Jordan Valley and the
Mediterranean Sea are not Jewish underscores the impossibility
of achieving the vision of a greater Israel while maintaining
a Jewish state.
The party's idea is to unilaterally redraw the borders between
Israel and the Palestinian territories, and thus to radically
alter the region's demographic and geographic reality. Last summer's
Gaza pull-out constituted the plan's first stage. This move was
regarded both in Israel and among the international community
as a positive step towards solving the conflict. Few seemed to
care that it was carried out unilaterally and that the new reality
limited Gazans even further in terms of resources, mobility and
decision-making.
In a recent interview for Ha'aretz, Olmert outlined the
plan's next stage, explaining that Sharon's so-called security
barrier will become Israel's political border. But he failed
to explain what exactly will the conversion of the security barrier
into a political border entail.
Demographically, the barrier will surround 48 Jewish settlements
from the east, so that 171,000 of the West Bank's settlers will
be incorporated into Israel's new borders. The wall being built
in East Jerusalem is meant to reinforce the 1967 annexation of
this part of the city, and to further consolidate the 183,800
settlers living there. In this way the government will not have
to evacuate 87 percent of the settlers now living in the West
Bank, and Jews will have a clear majority within Israel's unilaterally
determined borders. The price Israel will have to pay for such
a solution is the evacuation of 52,000 settlers.
Geographically, however, the barrier qua political border (including
Israel's plan to maintain control of the Jordan valley) does
not resemble either one of the two traditional visions for peace:
the two-state solution or the bi-national polity.
An examination of the barrier's route reveals that the future
Palestinian ìstateî will be divided into three if
not five areas (including Gaza). Each area will be closed off
almost entirely from the others, while Israel effectively continues
to control all of the borders so as to enforce a hermetic closure
whenever it wishes. What is new about Kadima's vision is not
the attempt to create isolated enclaves in the Occupied Territories,
but rather the effort to transform these into quasi-independent
entities that will ostensibly constitute a Palestinian state.
Examining the make up of the new Knesset, it appears that anywhere
between 65 and 85 members out of 120 will support Olmert's proposal.
The brilliancy of Kadima's political plan is that it solves Israel's
demographic problem and presents its solution as the two-state
option, regardless of the fact that this will be the first time
in history that a so-called ìindependent stateî
will not have power over any of its borders. Indeed, Kadima's
plan elides the fact that Israel will continue to control the
Palestinians, whose living conditions will be even further limited.
The methods of control, though, will have to be more remote and
technologically sophisticated, using biometrics, video cameras,
robots and surveillance aircraft.
The Palestinians, in turn, will no doubt employ all means at
their disposal to resist Israel's attempt to transform the West
Bank and Gaza into remotely controlled Bantustans. Consequently,
one should not be surprised if Olmert's plan were to be met by
Qasam missiles being launched from the West Bank towards Jerusalem
and Tel-Aviv.
The ultimate irony is that Kadima's political vision actually
puts the peace process into reverse. On the one hand, it is trying
to persuade the public that it can make the Palestinian problem
disappear by reintroducing the age-old Zionist trope of an iron
wall. On the other hand, it has abandoned all forms of dialogue
and negotiation, which Israeli leaders since the early 1990s
understood to be the only way to reach a solution with the Palestinians.
Kadima is accordingly an oxymoron. While the party's name means
forward its political program will effectively take Israelis
several steps backwards.
CounterPunch
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