What happened to the Israeli left?

The Israeli left lost much of its power in the recent elections (2022), leaving the right and far right in control of the country.

The left’s demise is partly due to the natural unfolding of events in Israel and partly the fault of the left-wing parties themselves, says Jerusalem Post Deputy Managing Editor Tovah Lazaroff.

She was answering a question posed by the SA Jewish Report in the Knesset during the international Jewish Media Summit in Jerusalem in December.

Part of the reason for its weakness is that in spite of many years of speaking about peace talks and two-state solutions, there’s still no Palestinian state.

To explain, Lazaroff went back in time to when Yitzhak Rabin was elected prime minister in 1992 because of his vision of peace talks and a two-state solution. He was expected to put a stop to the first intifada (Palestinian uprising) and work towards peace.

At the time Rabin was elected, Lazaroff said, “we were also dealing with the international threat of the notion of ‘Zionism equals racism’ on the United Nation stage”. So, Israel was fighting an international and local battle.

Israelis believed that Rabin would sort out these problems and, Lazaroff said, so strong was his support that he came into power with more than 40 seats in the Knesset, one-third of the 120 seats. “It just goes to show how far the pendulum has swung since then,” she said.

Lazaroff fondly recalled the day in September 1993 when Rabin and Palestinian Liberation Organisation leader Yasser Arafat shook hands on the White House lawn in the United States, sealing the first agreement between Jews and Palestinians to end their conflict.

In this left-wing heyday, Israel went to the Madrid Conference (1991) and then, in 1993, signed the Oslo Agreement, which marked the beginning of direct Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations. “Soon, ‘Zionism is racism’ was rescinded at the UN. Things really changed, and doors started opening for Israel. We were on a trajectory to peace,” said Lazaroff.

“But then it didn’t happen.”

Lazaroff said that when she made aliya in April 2000, she did so thinking that either “we’re going to see the creation of a Palestinian state, or we’ll go the way of violence”.

It went the way of violence in no uncertain terms, and Ariel Sharon came to power from the right. “He also had massive support, about 40 seats in the Knesset. There went the pendulum again.”

“And then, everyone was thinking, ‘Well, now we have a right winger who’s definitely not going to secure a Palestinian state’, but then what does he do? He withdraws Israel from Gaza.”

Sharon then split from the Likud (which he helped found 30 years earlier) in 2005 to form a more centrist party, hoping to win a re-election and offering Israel new hope for peace. He was debilitated by a massive stroke in 2006, and succeeded by Ehud Olmert, who Lazaroff said was one of the more left-wing Israeli leaders, even though he started on the right. Olmert promised to continue Sharon’s policies of disengagement from Israeli-occupied areas and set permanent borders between Israel and the Palestinians by 2010.

But Hamas then won the Palestinian elections in 2006 and took over the Gaza Strip, bringing uncertainty to the future of Palestinian and Israel relations. Negotiations were totally derailed when Olmert then faced corruption charges, significantly damaging his reputation in Israel.

Then, in 2008, Netanyahu’s power started to grow. He got the second highest number of seats to Tzipi Livni, a strong peace and two-state solution proponent, but she wasn’t able to form a government without “selling out her ideals”. So Israel went back to elections and in 2009 Netanyahu emerged as prime minister. The age of Netanyahu began.

“Now, in 2023, we’re still talking about Prime Minister Netanyahu,” she said, “and after all this time, there still isn’t a Palestinian state.

“Whether you like Bibi or not, he’s the longest serving prime minister of Israel and he’ll continue as such,” she said. “He keeps showing that he’s the most popular politician. Israelis love him enough to keep handing him power to form a government.

“But when he took power in 2009, there was still the possibility of a Palestinian state,” Lazaroff said.

But then Barak Obama became president of the US – the main broker of the peace process – and his and Israel’s vision of a two-state solution differed. “They were never able to bridge the differences between Israelis and Palestinians, and so the peace process broke down in 2014 and has never been revived,” she said. “So, not only don’t we have a Palestinian state, we don’t even have a peace process, and we don’t have a US president working towards a peace process.”

Even though President Joe Biden is supposedly the most knowledgeable US president on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, he has done nothing to further the peace process, Lazaroff said.

Lazaroff then shifted focus to the recent Israeli elections, making it clear that even the left didn’t include peace in its campaign.

The Labour Party held a huge event during the elections where the media believed a new diplomatic initiative was going to be unveiled there, Lazaroff said.

But that didn’t happen. In fact, instead of media fanfare, all it got was a fairly innocuous press release. “The moment your remaining major left-wing party closes off to the press the unveiling of its diplomatic initiative for a two-state resolution to conflict, you know it’s in trouble.”

This, she said, happened after the head of one of the major left-wing parties, Yair Lapid of Yesh Atid, proclaimed at the UN that he supported a two-state solution. “We were expecting something about peace in the election process of the left. But it seems that Lapid was just letting people know that in some far-off universe, he would support it.

“Is he going to hold talks with the Palestinians? No, he has no such plans. So, you have a left that put forward no plans in the run-up to the elections. And you have the US, which has also no peace plans afoot. Instead, you have a lot of right-wing politicians being very vocal about how there shouldn’t be a Palestinian state.”

Meanwhile, she said, the threat from Gaza – once irrelevant – is now a real concern, with sophisticated missiles that have the potential to hit the centre of the country and cause enormous damage and death. They aren’t doing this simply because of the Iron Dome protection system.

“So, if you don’t have a peace process, you have a growing war process. But who are you at war with? Who’s your enemy? This question is part of why Netanyahu was able to win so successfully.

“The past election included new elements that arose in 2021 – another war with Gaza and Israeli-Arab riots within sovereign Israel. When you begin talking about the Palestinians as the enemy and then move on to include talk of the Israeli-Arab threat potentially being aligned to the Palestinians, the enemy becomes blurred. It starts to run between who is a Jew and who is not,” Lazaroff said. “Now, Israel has a government with parties that actually want to narrow the question of who is a Jew.

“What does it mean to have a Jewish state, and who can be its citizens? This is now on the agenda precisely at a time when there is rising antisemitism in the world and when the question of who should be in Israel has never been more pertinent to the diaspora at large.”

And the Israeli left doesn’t really have the power to make its mark in this debate either.