Lebanon War caused shift to right
Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir were adamant in their ideological opposition to territorial compromise in the West Bank and even the Labour Party opposed Palestinian statehood. Yet Likud leader Ariel Sharon withdrew from Gaza in 2005, while Benjamin Netanyahu endorsed the two-state solution in 2009 and agreed to negotiate on the basis of the 1967 borders during talks in 2012-13.
Why, then, have Israelis increasingly come to identify themselves with the right over the last decade? The usual answer given is the collapse of the peace process in 2000. But while that decimated support for the left, it also led to a rise in identification with the centre. This backed the unilateral disengagement from Gaza and the security barrier in the West Bank as a means to preserve Israel’s Jewish and democratic character while preventing suicide bombers entering Israel. When Ehud Olmert proposed a further unilateral withdrawal from large parts of the West Bank in late 2005, it gained significant support and the centrist Kadima won the elections.
What reversed this trend was the Second Lebanon War. Israel withdrew unilaterally from Lebanon in 2000 but, in 2006, thousands of rockets rained down on Israel. Rockets from Gaza have followed.
Before Lebanon, territorial withdrawal was associated with more security; since Lebanon, it has become associated with less. If before, Israelis worried about their children in the army combating terrorists in built-up Palestinian areas, after Lebanon they worry more that a rocket might hit their kid’s bedroom. As a consequence, Israeli opinion has turned right. The public have not been transformed into maximalist ideologues; they just do not believe there is a better alternative.
A significant factor reinforcing this shift rightward has been the perception that large swathes of the public, media and Human Rights groups in Western democracies have betrayed Israel. Many Israelis identified with, or at least understood, criticism of settlements and support for Palestinian self-determination. But in the Second Lebanon War (and since then over Gaza), they could not understand why people professing democratic values would assert a moral equivalence between a democratic Israel seeking to avoid civilian casualties and the openly antisemitic organisations that seek its destruction, while targeting Israeli civilians.
Just because the “status quo” is the Israeli zeitgeist, does not mean it represents the pinnacle of strategic wisdom. Every day it is maintained, the number of settlers increases, making it harder for Israel to withdraw in future –— which ultimately, I believe, we will need to, in order to preserve our core identity and values. The minimum required to at least preserve this option would be to freeze settlement activity outside the main blocs close to the Green Line.
I am often asked what outsiders can do to help shift Israeli opinion in this direction. One thing that might help would be if Israelis felt that they had the firm backing of democracies in the struggle against Hamas and Hizbollah. Yet while the Arab League has designated Hizbollah a terrorist organization, the EU continues to distinguish between its military and “political” wings. “Food for thought”, as one might say in the land of understatement.
What can outsiders do to shift Israeli opinion?
Jonathan Rynhold is a Professor of Political Studies at Bar-Ilan University