Much column space has been given to the spectre of Avigdor Lieberman, leader of Yisrael Beitenu, obtaining an important government post and pushing the Israeli government to the far right.
The issue with a such a government is its perceived negative effect on any future peace negotiations with the Palestinian Authority and the ultimate goal of a negotiated peace settlement leading to a viable Palestinian state.
Some of Lieberman’s utterances have been pretty chilling. His call for all Israeli citizens to sign loyalty oaths or lose their right to vote has a certain whiff of bigotry. Can you imagine how something similar would go down in the UK. It would be the Tebbitt test taken to the extreme.
Lieberman has also had some ‘interesting’ views on transferring the sovereignity of willing Israeli Arabs and villages to the Palestinian Authority in return for the redrawing of Israel’s borders to contain most, if not all, of its West Bank settlements.
But Lieberman appears to have undergone somewhat of a Damascene conversion of late, He now says that he would agree to a two-sate solution and wold even be willing to see the settlement where he lives, Nokdim, evacuated if it were part of a viable peace settlement.
His most famous slogan, much seen during the recent Gaza offensive, is ‘no loyalty – no citiizenship’. The clear discriminatory threat that the slogan embraces is deplored within and without Israel. But maybe Lieerman’s sloganising also carries the bravado of demagoguery and the need to make an impact, rather than a substantive threat. He explained that this slogan was in response to the calls of Israeli Arab leaders, citizens all, who, during Operation Cast Lead, used their democratic right to free speech in order to call on their fellow Israeli Arabs to support Hamas and suicide bombings and hasten the destruction of the State of Israel.
You can begin to see where he is coming from but there is always a worrying underlying doubt with Lieberman that he uses the tactics of a politician to gain power which he can then use to push the country into a political and moral morass which would delight Israel’s enemies who would then see their own attempts at deligitimisation as vindicated; those who are so quick to call Israel racist and an Apartheid state would have an absolute field-day. This is the danger of an extreme right-wing Israel: whatever its political and polemical logic it would completely undermine all attempts to show Israel as a democratic, enlightened, free and legitimate country.
It is a sad indictment of world opinion that the EU in the form of Xavier Solana feels it has a right to ‘warn’ Israel about the dangers to the Middle East of a right wing government whilst it keeps ‘shtum’ abount the numerous right wing governments that surround Israel.
Lieberman’s views, however, can also be insightful:
The peace process is based on three false basic assumptions; that Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the main cause of instability in the Middle East, that the conflict is territorial and not ideological, and that the establishment of a Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders will end the conflict.
This is what he said to YnetNews in 2006. No-one who really understand the forces within Palestine and the wider Muslim world could disagree with any of that statement. In fact, it reveals the basic error on which the current Obama administration, the EU and Tony Blair have all based their peace initiatives. Israel has somehow to pretend that these three false assumptions and their resolution will bring about the desired solution. Lieberman is bold enough to state that this is a lie at worst and misguided at best.
However, any Israeli politician whose supporters call out ‘Death to the Arabs’ is surely representing an unwelcome change in the nature of Israeli politics and the psyche of a large section of its citizens, many of whom are from the former Soviet Union.
In answer to the question ‘is Israel moving too far to the right?’ there is a clear and present danger that this is he case. Lieberman is the second only to Netanyahu in popularity. The longer the conflict with Hamas and Hizbullah lasts, the greater the threat from Iran grows, the more likely it is that Israeli politics will become polarised between an aggressively nationalist right and an increasingly marginalised left.
This is not the face of Israel I want to see. It is dangerous and divisive. It is Putin politics in the Knesset and it could fatally weaken Israel.