It’s national-elections time in Israel. We’ll be going to the polls in late October, though there’s talk of pushing it up to September. Campaigns are already heating up.
A veteran immigrant from the U.S. going back 41 years, I can recall what seem now like distant eras in Israeli history.
I can recall election campaigns in which the central issue was always the West Bank (or Judea and Samaria) and Gaza. “Right-wing” meant you wanted us to retain them — for religious-historical or security reasons, or both. “Moderate left-wing” meant you wanted us to give up parts of them, while retaining what was needed for security. “Left-wing” meant you wanted us to give up almost of them, replacing our presence in them with a Palestinian state in a “two-state solution”
Over the years, the left-wing positions took a serious blow — and then an even more serious one.
The first was the Second Intifada (2000–2005), an onslaught of Palestinian terror, launched from the West Bank and Gaza, that involved suicide bombings of buses, cafés, a discotheque, a Passover Seder at a hotel, and other murderous attacks.
The onslaught was preceded by an earnest effort by Prime Minister Ehud Barak, at Camp David in July 2000 under President Bill Clinton’s auspices, to reach a final peace agreement with Yasser Arafat based on the two-state solution. With his back to the wall on the peace issue, Arafat responded with war.
The Israeli left emerged from the Second Intifada seriously weakened, and has never regained the strength it had in the 1990s.
But still, the two-state fixation continued. From 2006 to 2008, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and his foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, held intensive talks about it with Arafat’s successor, Mahmoud Abbas. Again, the effort met a solid wall of refusal —this time from Abbas, representing, even if not explicitly, the Palestinian view that Israel has no legitimate place at all between the river and sea.
And then, in 2020, the two-state solution made a comeback — though in a much-modified form — in President Trump’s Deal of the Century, broached to Israel by Jared Kushner.
Because the “Deal” shrank the Palestinian state to smaller proportions, allowed Israeli settlements to remain in place, and made serious provisions for Israel’s security, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was able to take the official stance of accepting it. This time Mahmoud Abbas — still (and still today) the head of the Palestinian Authority — refused to even discuss it.
Then, on October 7, 2023, came the second great — probably fatal — blow to the old left-wing stance, in the form of the slaughter of Israelis in the Gaza vicinity that occurred on that day.
Two and a half years later — amid an ongoing multifront war sparked by what happened on that day — talk of two states, or even territorial compromise, is nowhere to be found in the campaign rhetoric.
Indeed, while the Netanyahu-led coalition is considered right-wing, two of the leaders of the opposition bloc, Naftali Bennett and Avigdor Lieberman, also have — or have long been thought to have — distinctly right-wing profiles.
Not only that. Far from contemplating territorial retreats, Israeli forces are now deployed in considerable parts of Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria. And there are no significant left-wing calls to “stop occupying Arab land” and pull them out of there.
The forces are in those places to prevent further buildups of terror forces like the one that was allowed to develop in Gaza — up to the nightmare of October 7. And while Israelis keep bitterly arguing among ourselves, the need to keep our forces in those places, at least for the time being, enjoys a quiet consensus.
What, then, is the election campaign about?
The anti-Netanyahu bloc emphasizes: the fiasco of October 7 itself and what led up to it; the Netanyahu government’s refusal to allow a state commission of inquiry into the debacle; its refusal to pass meaningful legislation to draft ultra-Orthodox Jewish Israelis into the Israeli army, which has a serious manpower shortage; and what appear lately to be more equivocal results than the “victories” over Hamas, Hizballah, and Iran that the governing coalition was celebrating not long ago.
None of these criticisms of the current coalition would be called “left-wing” positions. Indeed, in today’s Israel it’s not easy to say what “right” and “left” even mean; it would be a subject for another article.
What is clear, though, is that we’re in a new era. Indeed, to contemplate creating another independent Palestinian entity anywhere in the space between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, or allowing another buildup of terror forces at or near any of our borders, you would have to be crazy.
Editor’s Note: Thanks to President Trump and his administration’s bold leadership, we are respected on the world stage, and our enemies are being put on notice.
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