The coalition of right-wing and ultra-Orthodox parties about to take power in Israel is not the government most Israelis want. Even many people who voted for right-wing parties — and prime minister-designate Benjamin Netanyahu himself — were hoping for a national unity government including the centrist Kadima and left-wing Labour. Facing unprecedented security threats, Israelis need a government that will unite rather than divide them, and that will command respect rather than ostracism abroad.
Instead, the new government will likely divide Israelis over increased subsidies to ultra-Orthodox institutions and antagonize the international community over West Bank settlement expansion — to say nothing of appointing the demagogic Avigdor Lieberman as foreign minister.
Still, this hawkish government will accurately reflect the mood of Israel in 2009: fearful for its survival, ready to do whatever is necessary for its basic security, and outraged at much of the world's judgment against its attempts to defend itself.
For decades, Israeli governments of both left and right maintained a strategic doctrine aimed at thwarting the emergence of terror enclaves on its borders as an existential threat. But with the creation of a Hezbollah mini-state in southern Lebanon and a Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, that doctrine has collapsed. Not since May, 1967, when Arab armies massed on Israel's borders and Arab leaders boasted about the imminent destruction of the Jewish state, have Israelis been so anxious about the very survival of the country.
The unthinkable has already happened: missiles falling on Haifa and Ashkelon, exploding buses in Jerusalem, hundreds of thousands of Israelis transformed into temporary refugees. During the first Gulf War in 1991, when Tel Aviv was hit with Scud missiles, residents fled to the Galilee. During the Second Lebanon War in 2006, when the Galilee was hit with Katyushas, residents fled to Tel Aviv. In the next war, there will be nowhere to flee: The entire country is now within missile range of Iran and its terrorist proxies. The curse of Jewish history — the inability to take mere existence for granted — has returned to the country whose founding was intended to resolve that problem.
NO SECURITY SOLUTIONS
Increasingly, Israelis sense that there are no solutions to the country's security crisis. Peace efforts have failed: Israel offered a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital in 2000 and received in return five years of suicide bombings, the worst wave of terror in the country's history. And the outgoing Kadima-Labour government, the most dovish in the country's history, failed for the last three years to reach a peace agreement with Palestinian leaders, even though it was prepared to redivide Jerusalem and dismantle West Bank settlements.
But military solutions are also elusive. The Israeli army recently fought a three-week war against Hamas to stop the missiles falling on Israeli towns, but missiles continue to fall. Foreign observers who minimize Hamas rockets as largely ineffectual miss the devastating psychological impact on Israelis of eight years of shelling. The rockets expose Israel's helplessness, emboldening jihadists around the Middle East and eroding the confidence of Israelis in their government's ability to protect them. And with Iran about to acquire nuclear capability, Israel faces its ultimate nightmare: a jihadist regime able to impose apocalyptic blackmail on the region. According to the latest American and Israeli assessments, Iran now has the technical knowledge to develop a nuclear bomb. Israelis wonder whether even a military strike can thwart Iranian intentions.
But the sense of siege among Israelis isn't only a result of tangible threats. A growing movement, in the Muslim world and also in the West, is seeking to turn Israel into a pariah — the Jew of the states, as some Israelis bitterly put it. Holocaust commemorations were recently cancelled in Spain and Sweden to protest the "holocaust" in Gaza; in England and even in the United States, there are calls among academics to boycott Israeli universities. Palestinian claims of Israeli atrocities are reported in the foreign media at face value, even though those claims are often deliberately exaggerated — like the assertion, later refuted by The Globe and Mail, that Israel had shelled a UN school in Gaza, killing dozens of civilians seeking shelter inside. Though the UN humanitarian co-ordinator eventually issued a clarification, the symbol of Israel's conduct of the war remains that school. Not surprisingly, the very legitimacy of Israel is being called into question. Alone among nations, criticism directed against Israel isn't restricted to what it does, but to what it is. Increasingly, among parts of world opinion, the right of the Jewish people to sovereignty is being rescinded.
