Israel lurches further right

THE OUTCOME of Israel's February 10 elections represents a further move to the right, with the next government almost certain to be headed by the Likud Party's Benjamin Netanyahu, who distinguished himself in the week before the election by criticizing the current government for not going far enough in its 22-day massacre of Palestinians in Gaza.

Even more alarming, it appears that Netanyahu's ability to form a government will depend on the inclusion of proto-fascist Avigdor Lieberman and his Yisrael Beitenu party.

Lieberman has called for the 1.5 million Palestinians living in Israel to take an oath of loyalty to the Jewish state or be stripped of their citizenship. And in the wake of Israel's 2006 war on Lebanon, Lieberman called for the execution of Arab members of Israel's Knesset (parliament) who had met with "enemies of Israel," such as Hezbollah in Lebanon or the Palestinian Hamas organization.

Under Israel's parliamentary system, the party most able to bring together a coalition of parties that commands a majority of the Knesset's 120 seats is asked by the president to form a government. Kadima, the party of current Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and now headed by Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, won 28 seats, versus Netanyahu's Likud, which won 27 seats.

Lieberman's Yisrael Beitenu made history by placing third with 15 seats, and Israel's Labor Party dropped to fourth with 13 seats. By drawing on a coalition of Yisrael Beitenu and smaller ultra-right religious and nationalist parties, Netanyahu should be able to cobble together a 65-seat majority.

BUT THE outcome is only one example of a larger trend in Israeli politics. Before the election, Gideon Levy, a commentator for Israel's Ha'aretz newspaper, noted that the open anti-Arab racism during the campaign harkened back to the politics of Meir Kahane (who was assassinated in 1990) and his Kach Party, which was outlawed in the late 1980s by Israeli election laws that banned political parties that incited racism. In a February 8 article titled "Kahane won," Levy wrote:

The prohibited has become permitted, the ostracized is now accepted, the detestable has become the talented--that's the slippery slope down which Israeli society has skidded over the past two decades.

There's no need to refer to Ha'aretz's startling revelation that Yisrael Beiteinu chairman Avigdor Lieberman was a member of Kahane's Kach party in his youth: This campaign's dark horse was and is a Kahanist. The differences between Kach and Yisrael Beiteinu are minuscule, not fundamental and certainly not a matter of morality.

The differences are in tactical nuances: Lieberman calls for a fascist "test of loyalty" as a condition for granting citizenship to Israel's Arabs, while Kahane called for the unconditional annulment of their citizenship. One racist (Lieberman) calls for their transfer to the Palestinian state, the other (Kahane) called for their deportation...

Lieberman and his soldiers are borne on the tides of hatred for Arabs, hatred of democracy and the rule of law, and the stink of nationalism, racism and bloodthirstiness. These have turned, horrifically, into the hottest electoral assets on the market.

Like all others of his political ilk, he cynically fans these base urges, particularly among the weaker classes, the rejected, the poor and the immigrants. But not just there. Many young people, among them brainwashed soldiers, will give him their vote, and no one ostracizes them. He chose an easy, relatively weak target, Israel's Arabs, and sets his supporters on them. But his doctrine has seeped in much deeper than that.

Lieberman is the voice of the mob, and the mob craves hatred, vengeance and bloodshed. A useless war in which hundreds of children were killed was received here sympathetically, if not happily. The parties from the right and center have tried to disqualify the Arab parties; these lists are also excluded ahead of time in every political calculation.

The spectrum in Israeli politics is so narrow that the choices for those who support "peace" were limited to Kadima, the architect of the Gaza massacre; Labor, which oversaw a massive expansion of settlements during the 1990s, and whose leader Ehud Barak served as Israel's defense minister during the Gaza offensive; and Meretz, which has existed for years as a loyal opposition, offering polite criticisms even as it supported the essence of Israel's colonial project.

WITH A coalition of right-wing parties poised to form Israel's new government, many are hailing this election as the end of the "peace process." But in reality, the "peace process" died long ago. It was made impossible by Israel's colonial policy of Jewish-only settlements and bypass roads that sliced up the West Bank; the systematic incorporation of the region's scarce water supplies and all the best arable land; and the strangulation of the Palestinian economy. As Levy wrote:

Labor and Kadima made two wars and continued to build Jewish settlements in the West Bank; Meretz supported both wars. Peace has been left an orphan. The Israeli voters, who have been misled into thinking that there is no one to talk to and that the only answer to this is force--wars, targeted killings and settlements--have had their say clearly in the election: a closing sale for Labor and Meretz. It was only the force of inertia that gave these parties the few votes they won.

There was no reason for it to be otherwise. After many long years when hardly any protest came from the left, and the city square, the same square that raged after [the 1981 massacre in the refugee camps of] Sabra and Shatila, was silent, this lack of protest has been reflected at the ballot box as well. Lebanon, Gaza, the killed children, cluster bombs, white phosphorus and all the atrocities of occupation--none of this drove the indifferent, cowardly left onto the street.

Perhaps the only thing more alarming than the rise of Lieberman's fascist party is the indifference on display in the U.S. and Europe. "When Jörg Haider was taken into the Austrian cabinet [in 2000], Israel recalled its ambassador from Vienna in protest," writes Israeli political commentator Uri Avnery. "But compared to Lieberman, Haider was a raving liberal, and so is Jean-Marie le Pen."

But as Palestinian activist and author Ali Abunimah observes, the U.S. has already signaled it has no qualms about working with whichever parties make up Israel's new government--another example of unflinching support from the U.S. political establishment that for decades has been crucial to Israel's ability to carry out the Gaza massacre and other war crimes with impunity. As Abunimah wrote:

Despite U.S. President Barack Obama's sweet talk about a new relationship with the Arab world, few will fail to notice the double standard. In 2006, Hamas won a democratic election in the occupied territories, observed numerous unilateral or agreed truces that were violated by Israel, offered Israel a generation-long truce to set the stage for peace, and yet it is still boycotted by the U.S. and European Union.

Worse, the U.S. sponsored a failed coup against Hamas and continues to arm and train the anti-Hamas militias of Mahmoud Abbas, whose term as Palestinian Authority president expired on January 9. As soon as he took office, Obama reaffirmed this boycott of Palestinian democracy.