Israeli elections: peace is possible with Netanyahu

Benjamin Netanyahu is the great survivor of Israeli politics. Whereas David Ben-Gurion, the founder of the Jewish state, served eight years as prime minister, Netanyahu has served consecutively for the last six years and for nine years in total. Against expectations, he has just defeated a formidable electoral challenge from the centre-left Zionist Union. It’s an open question whether Netanyahu can form a stable coalition but he and his Likud party have emerged strengthened.

How did it happen and what does it entail? His rhetoric late in the campaign rejecting the principle of a Palestinian state was deeply dismaying—and appears to have won him a late shift in support. Israeli voters want peace with a sovereign Palestine but see the prerequisite of that as security. They do not believe that Western governments and commentators quite understand Israel’s security dilemmas.

I talked to Netanyahu in Jerusalem in 2006 shortly after Israel, under Ariel Sharon, had unilaterally withdrawn from Gaza. The case for disengagement was compelling, to advance an eventual political settlement and relieve the strain of Israeli forces defending a small number of settlers. Yet Netanyahu emphasised that Gaza would become a base for Hamas to continually fire missiles into Israel. And he was right; that’s just what happened. If you visit the Israeli town of Sderot just over the border from Gaza, you find rows and rows of spent rockets piled up at the local police station. They’ve been fired from Gaza. Local children play in a vast reinforced warehouse rather than outside in the street where they are in constant danger.

That is a powerful reason why Israel has stuck with Netanyahu. It is a tragedy and an injustice that there is no Palestinian state, and Netanyahu’s conviction that the facts of demography can be overturned is hard to credit. Israel’s future health depends on divesting itself of an occupation that has lasted now for 48 years. More widely, the security threat that Netanyahu rightly warns against—Iran’s nuclear programme, which is plainly not intended purely to generate electricity—would be easier to neutralise in concert with Arab states. That is going to be more difficult now.

Yet there are two reasons for not succumbing to wholesale pessimism for the prospects for peace. First, it’s not sufficiently recalled that, as Prime Minister in the late 1990s, Netanyahu did sign an agreement with the Palestinians (the Wye River memorandum) founded on the principle of trading land for peace. He is a politician of flexible principles. Second, Netanyahu’s electoral surge late in the campaign came mainly at the expense of parties to his right: Jewish Home, led by Naftali Bennett, and the far-right Yahad party, which appears to have failed to clear the electoral threshold for representation.

Israel has many failings and some ominous trends. It’s an unequal society riven with class and ethnic divisions. Religious obscurantism is making incursions on Israel’s secular culture. Yet Israel is a democracy in a region where democratic values are scarce. That’s why it merits critical solidarity and cautious optimism about its choices.