Shutting itself in, hoping for the best

THIS is not just any election. It is, in effect, a referendum on the most significant territorial withdrawal in Israel's history; on the future shape of its borders; and on how the country should respond to the rise to power in the Palestinian Authority (PA) of a radical Islamist party that, at least on paper, still calls for its destruction. It is an election that comes on the heels of six months of upheavals—Israel's “disengagement” from Gaza, Ariel Sharon's bolt from the Likud to form his Kadima party, his abrupt removal from political life by a massive stroke, and Hamas's election victory—that have made fools of the wisest soothsayers. Yet everyone agrees on one thing: it is one of the most boring elections they can remember.

The campaigning is simplistic and predictable. The polls are predictable and stable. The scandals, more fruitily scandalous than ever, have sunk in the public consciousness with barely a ripple. The only real uncertainty is how many people will rouse themselves from their electoral stupor and stagger out to vote.

The explanation for this paradoxical apathy is the same as for the calm after an earthquake. The internal pressures that led to the upheavals have done their work. Both the Israeli and Palestinian political systems have adjusted. All that remains is for Israel's voters to sign off on the result.

What the past half-year has done is to give form to an Israeli mainstream that had been inchoate for over five years. During the Oslo peace process of the 1990s, the mainstream could be divided into those who believed in giving up occupied land for peace (Labour) and those who didn't believe in giving it up at all (the Likud).

Then, in 2000, the Camp David peace talks between Ehud Barak and Yasser Arafat collapsed. The Israeli belief that Arafat had rejected Mr Barak's “generous offer” out of hand, though the reality was far more complex, made the violent outburst of the second intifada that autumn so shocking that even left-wing Israelis started losing faith in peace talks. “It generated an almost axiomatic belief that in the foreseeable future Israel will have to live as if the Arabs are not around,” says Ephraim Yaar, a co-author of Tel Aviv University's monthly Peace Index poll, which has measured Israelis' attitudes for the past decade.

It was Amram Mitzna, the Labour candidate in the 2001 election, who first seriously proposed giving up land without peace talks. Mr Sharon (who had ignited the powderkeg of the intifada by entering the Haram al-Sharif, Jerusalem's holiest Muslim site) roundly defeated him by promising to do no such thing. Yet less than three years later, with hundreds of Israeli and thousands of Palestinian lives lost, he announced the Gaza withdrawal. Despite dire predictions and loud protests by the settlers and their supporters, it passed off with virtually no injuries.

This showed that the settlers could be overcome. Gaza's subsequent deterioration, as Palestinian clans, armed gangs and political factions slugged it out, convinced Israelis that the PA under Arafat's successor, Mahmoud Abbas, would never be able to impose the order required to uphold its end of a peace deal. Mr Sharon had mapped out a third way between peace and war: unilateral withdrawal.

It is true that he himself always said that there would not be another retreat after Gaza. Many wonder how he would have reacted to Hamas's victory. But by then Mr Sharon was in a coma and his fledgling party had an untested leader and no platform—and Israelis had bought into what they believed was Mr Sharon's vision. Kadima had been slipping in the polls, but jumped earlier this month when Mr Sharon's heir apparent, Ehud Olmert (whose face is shown on the billboard above) announced a plan of unilateral withdrawal from large parts of the West Bank, loosely outlining the Israeli borders he foresees. The “centre” may have begun as a group of people united only in their trust in Mr Sharon. Now it is real.

Yet even as the Israeli mainstream has coalesced, several large fringe groups are becoming more detached. The simultaneous merging and fragmentation of Israeli society are visible in the way people say they plan to vote.

Introverts anonymous

Mr Olmert now calls it not hitnatkut, “disengagement”, but hitkansut, or going-into-oneself, often rendered as “convergence”. A better word, if it existed in English, would be “introvergence”. It is a fitting description. Israel plans to tuck itself in behind the barrier it began building four years ago in the West Bank, withdraw from the land on the other side, pull the settlers living there back over, and hunker down.

As well it might. The plan, though still vague, involves keeping three large settlement blocks that jut out into the West Bank, hindering Palestinian movement. The current gap between Maale Adumim, the largest settlement, and Jerusalem will be filled in with houses, slicing the Palestinian area into two. Almost all of Jerusalem, which is a core Palestinian as well as Israeli city, will be inaccessible to Palestinians. Israel will keep control of the border with Jordan and possibly also the sparsely populated Jordan Valley, as a security buffer. Otniel Shneller, a Kadima candidate who used to head the Yesha Council, the association of settlement mayors, says Israel could also keep its settlements in and near Hebron, arranging shared access to the tombs that are sacred to both Jews and Muslims.

A Palestinian state under such constraints would not prosper. So long as Israel controls its borders, it would not even count as sovereign. It would be much like Gaza since the disengagement. Citing intelligence reports of planned terrorist attacks, Israel has kept Gaza's main border-crossing for goods closed more often than open since the start of the year, causing serious food shortages and leaving Gazan fruit and vegetable exports worth millions of dollars to rot. Such friction between security and economics would keep the West Bank poor and angry, encouraging attacks across the border.

But if the polls are to be believed, Israelis see no other choice. Kadima will get 35-40 seats of the 120 in the parliament (see table). Labour's Amir Peretz, a former union boss, was full of talk of peace when he was elected party leader last autumn, but Labour has since come across increasingly as a hopeful coalition sidekick to Kadima, campaigning mainly on socio-economic rather than security issues. In effect, it has joined the centre. The “left” that still pushes actively for peace talks is almost non-existent. The anti-withdrawal right in its various forms makes up most of the rest. But on current polls, it cannot scrape together a majority.

Which is why this election is boring. It may also be why a string of political scandals—an eyebrow-raising property deal by Mr Olmert, the conviction of Mr Sharon's son Omri for illegal campaign fund-raising, and a string of corruption cases—has made no impact on the polls. Mr Olmert's stated goal of completing “introvergence” within four years looks wildly unrealistic when it took nearly two to make a hasty job of abandoning Gaza, but even that has raised hardly a mutter of public debate. The mainstream seems resigned to whatever may be about to happen.

Or almost. There is just one anomaly: undecided voters are still some 20% of the total. Everyone tells anecdotes about lying to pollsters. It may be because, according to the Peace Index surveys, over a third of Israelis still want to leave the door open for peace talks with Hamas, though no mainstream party is seriously offering to hold such talks. That could mean surprises on election day—or a low turnout.

But if the mainstream has sunk into apathy, other groups are girding up for post-election battles. With security issues wrapped up by Kadima, the main campaign issue for most of the other parties has been poverty. When Binyamin Netanyahu, the Likud leader, was Mr Sharon's finance minister, his reforms to clear up vestiges of statism in Israel's economy included many welfare cuts. That has sparked a backlash.

Labour hopes this will help it win a strong showing as the coalition government's social conscience. But the bigger beneficiaries seem to be smaller parties representing traditionally poor Israelis—such as Shas, the party of Orthodox Sephardi Jews (those of Middle Eastern descent), and Yisrael Beiteinu (“Israel is Our Home”), a party for former Soviet immigrants. Ultra-Orthodox Ashkenazi (European) Jews will also have a heavier hitter in the form of Torah and Sabbath Judaism, a union of two of their parties which have often played pivotal roles in coalitions.

But Shas and Yisrael Beiteinu are also hawkish in the extreme. Avigdor Lieberman, the latter's leader, advocates transferring Arab-Israeli towns near the West Bank, such as Umm al-Fahm, to the PA so as to increase Israel's Jewish majority. He would strip their residents of Israeli citizenship, and apply a “loyalty test” to those Arab-Israelis who remain. Two other small parties hold similar views. Such ideas, once the preserve of the Kach party that was banned from running in 1988 for inciting racism, are now “at the heart of the elections,” says Issam Makhoul, an MP for Hadash, one of the three small parties that represent Arab-Israelis.

That is just one of many trends that worry the Palestinian citizens of Israel, who make up nearly a fifth of the population. Always equal citizens on paper more than in practice, since the intifada they have become more and more marginalised. A police shooting of 13 people in the Christian-Arab city of Nazareth, just after the intifada began, left deep scars. The failure to bring anyone to book, and a series of similar incidents since, has left simmering anger. On top of this, there is the West Bank barrier that separates many people from relatives and friends; chronic inequality in government funding for Jewish and Arab towns; widespread discrimination in hiring for jobs in the government and utility companies; and government plans to develop the northern Galilee and southern Negev regions, which have large Palestinian and Bedouin populations, by enticing more Jews to move there.

Unheard voices

But the community is divided about how to vote. Some say that since governing coalitions never include Arab parties' MPs and usually ignore the bills they propose, the vote should go to mainstream parties instead, who might then start to listen to their Arab voters. The question is particularly acute because the threshold for getting into parliament has gone up to 2% of the national vote. The three parties are so ideologically different that they cannot unite, but if Arab turnout is low, one or another might not make the 2%.

The Arab-Israelis' basic concern is whether Israel will always be a country that overtly privileges Jewishness. Another chunk of Israeli society, nearly the same size, has the same concern—for the opposite reason. These are the religious Zionists: observant but not ultra-Orthodox Jews who believe (for a mixture of historical and religious reasons) in holding on to the occupied territories. They were the pioneers of the settlements, but these days they feel as besieged and unwanted by the Israeli mainstream as the Arabs do.

Though the evacuated Gaza settlers got a lot of compensation money, a combination of hasty planning and their own refusal to take part in it meant that their communities have been thrown to the four winds. Last month, according to official figures, some 30% of the 8,000-odd Gaza evacuees were still living in hotels. Others will be in temporary housing for years. Their sympathisers were outraged by a report by the state comptroller earlier this month, which threw the book at the authorities for failing to plan and carry out the relocations properly.

Those furious teenagers

At the beginning of February, the demolition of nine illegally built houses at Amona, an outpost of the Ofra settlement in the West Bank, saw worse violence between the police and young protesters than during the whole of the Gaza evacuation. Settlers say that the police used force indiscriminately against peaceful protesters, a claim now under parliamentary investigation. But the teenagers may have been emboldened by their resistance to last summer's evacuations—and disenchanted with the Yesha Council, which they see as appeasing the authorities.

Kadima has its bridge-builders to the settlers. Mr Shneller, the former Yesha Council head, and Rabbi Yoel Bin-Nun, a spiritual leading light of early settlers, have joined its ranks. Mr Shneller says the trouble at Amona was the work of a tiny minority within the complicated settler taxonomy: an extremist fringe (those seeking trouble) of a hardline group (those living in unauthorised outposts down the middle of the West Bank) of the ideological settler minority (fewer than 70,000 people) who live in those parts of the West Bank that Kadima wants to give up. Most settlers, he thinks, can be persuaded to swim with the tide of “introvergence” if given proper care and lots of compensation.

But the wider religious-Zionist public is still in shock. “Even moderates [among the religious Zionists] have been scared by the brutality at Amona,” says Yisrael Harel, a former Yesha Council leader, “and they are taking it as an attack on them.” The comments being voiced sound, in fact, much like the ones one hears from Arab-Israelis. “They treat us as one big block. We all look the same to them,” says Yifat Ehrlich, who owned one of the demolished houses at Amona but had moved out months before. She notes that the talk used to be about whether Israel should negotiate with the Palestinians, but now is about whether to negotiate with the settlers.

Religious Zionism was already undergoing fragmentation, exacerbated by its internal debates over how to react to the Gaza pull-out. Ironically, had the government accepted a rather hare-brained proposal by the Yesha Council to delay the demolitions and move the houses somewhere else, says Mrs Ehrlich, “we would probably have eaten each other up. But the conflict united the community.”

Like Arab-Israelis, the settlers and their sympathisers are concerned about many other things that the Israeli mainstream wants to do to their role within Israel. They warily eye proposals to cut budgets for religious education and benefits for large families, or reduce the influence of the rabbis in national affairs (for instance, by creating the institution of civil marriage).

And like Arab-Israelis, they are divided about how to vote. There is talk of abstention. There is also talk of going with the hard-right National Union and National Religious Party, which like the ultra-Orthodox parties have made themselves more attractive by merging into a single force.

Not a happy family

As it enters its era of “introvergence”, Israel looks like a parent entering middle age: more solid of body and firm of mind, but surrounded by a brood of bickering and rebellious children. Its relations with the neighbour seem beyond repair, but the house is sturdy. The path looks clear.

But less clear is how far down the path it can go. The immediate costs of what it wants to do will be enormous. The settlers' resistance may be too fierce. Even if quashed, it could do more damage to the unity of Israeli society than the Palestinian resistance to occupation ever did. And Israel's desire to shut out the Palestinians will rebound on those Palestinians who are also Israelis, causing further tensions.

Nor will it begin to solve the conflict with non-Israeli Palestinians, whose plight after Israel's partial withdrawal from the West Bank will continue to stoke hostility in the rest of the region. But there is not much the Palestinians can do about it at this time. Though there are already dire warnings of a third intifada in the making, more such attacks will only strengthen Israel's resolve to shut itself in, close its eyes, and hope for the best.