Is there still a left wing in Israeli politics?

JORDAN MOSHE

So says Dahlia Scheindlin, a political consultant, who on 31 May explored the history of Israel’s Zionist left wing and labour parties in an attempt to explain why they fared so poorly in recent elections. Scheindlin was taking part in eLimmud, an online Zoom conference hosted by Limmud South Africa.

“In other countries, left and right refer to a liberal-conservative divide,” she said. “In Israel, like most things, it’s more complicated. It can mean socialist, agrarian, egalitarian, liberal, individualist, free market, and several other things.”

Scheindlin has applied her political savvy to Israeli campaigns, the last being in 1999 when the left won the election for the last time. This point marked a considerable decline, she said, but it wasn’t the beginning of the downturn.

“The total number of elections won by the left has been on the decline since the 1980s,” she said. “It didn’t start when Netanyahu won the election in 2009, it goes back about 27 years.”

In this year’s March elections, the Zionist left-wing party received only seven seats in the Knesset, a historic low. However, prior to 1977, Labour and its predecessors won all elections in Israel from the first election in 1949, though no one party achieved an outright majority. Still, Labour on its own had sufficient numbers to lead coalitions for some time.

The subsequent decline has, in part, to do with public opinion, Scheindlin said.

“After the disengagement from Gaza, the right wing climbed upwards. Considering the Israeli-Arab population as well, just less than half of the population considers itself right wing.” This while centre and left identification together account for 44%, of which only 12% is strictly leftist.

Scheindlin stressed, however, that the long-term reason for the decline lies in the deeper contradictions of what the Zionist left stood for over a course of decades.

“It has to do with the tension in Israeli society in defining the country as both Jewish and democratic,” she said. “That overlaps with questions regarding borders and population inclusion.

“During the early years, being Jewish and democratic was basic to the ruling labour ideology. But the problem was that Jews were only about 30% of the population.”

Under the leftist government, large numbers of Arabs were marginalised in order to promote Jewish sovereignty, contradicting the left’s inclusivity. Systems were created to supress those Arabs who remained and to forget their history in order to advance Jewish and democratic interests, Scheindlin said.

The same contradiction was true even amongst Jews.

“The social ethos adopted by the left went into the building of the Israeli economy. Arabs were already excluded [they were later integrated slowly], but early Zionist leaders treated Mizrachi Jews arriving from the East as underclass citizens, socially and economically.”

Although the socially and economically marginalised groups would eventually topple the left at the polls, the Labour government remained in power because of surrounding factors which no longer exist today. These included the control of the media by the left as well as the fact that the labour federation owned the health cooperatives.

Although it has shifted from socialist ethics to liberal ones, and embraced the idea of land for peace, the left must engage with those it marginalised previously if it’s to be revived, Scheindlin says.