This Passover week, supposed to be a time of celebration of
freedom in the Land of Israel, it’s hard to be cheerful in light of
Israel’s grim security situation.
Hamas, from its Gaza enclave created by Israel’s boorish
“disengagement” in 2005, mounts daily brazen attacks while the
Olmert government still restrains the Israeli army from reacting
effectively. Hizballah, in the aftermath of that same government’s
botched war against it in Lebanon in 2006, has rearmed to levels
far beyond what it had before the war. Syria keeps rattling its
saber and in the background is Iran, its accelerating march to
nuclearization a dire testimony to Western fecklessness and
inability to cope with threats until it could well be too late.
Nevertheless, we’re commanded this week to take heart and be
merry, and within Israeli society itself there are indeed
developments that sow optimism.
1. The Left is shrinking. Though the
hard Left in Israel has never been that large, during the 1990s it
infiltrated and meshed with certain longings of the mainstream and
became dominant for a time. It left a legacy of blood and increased
danger that most Israelis — after the Oslo terror and the
Lebanon-withdrawal and Gaza-disengagement debacles — now see for
what it is.
Meretz, the political party associated with extreme dovishness,
now has all of 5 seats in the 120-seat Knesset and is expected to
fare even worse — possibly disappearing — in the next elections.
Peace Now, the extraparliamentary movement that did much to
energize the Oslo appeasement fever and in the 1990s could draw as
many a hundred thousand to its demonstrations, has declined
drastically in membership and its recent thirtieth-anniversary
rally in Tel Aviv drew only hundreds.
It’s true that the idea once associated only with the far Left
in Israel — a fully sovereign Palestinian state breathing down
Israel’s neck — is still touted by some leading members of the
supposedly centrist Olmert government, including Olmert himself.
All recent polls, though, show a majority of Israelis ready to vote
instead for a conservative Likud-led coalition.
2. The settlements are growing.
Controversial though they may be, the Israeli settlements in Judea
and Samaria (the West Bank) are the best guarantee that present or
future Israeli governments will not make further disastrous
concessions that would bring the peril to the outskirts of
Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Though recent governments have yielded to
U.S. pressure and sedulously avoided building new communities,
growth in the existing settlements continues and the total settler
population is now approaching 300,000, including towns that number
over 30,000 in themselves. The presence of Israelis in Judea and
Samaria does not ruin the chances of eventually resolving the
political status of the Palestinian Arabs who live there; it
increases the chances of eventually finding a fair solution that
would not negate either Israel’s security needs or the special
Jewish connection to these lands.
3. Economic freedom is growing. On the
Heritage Foundation’s “Index of Economic Freedom” for 2008 Israel
comes in a lackluster 46th, a little ahead of France, behind Oman,
Georgia, and Botswana. Yet while Israel still has a long way to go
in freeing itself from the bondage of its socialist past, in recent
years particularly it has made impressive progress. Even much of
the left-wing establishment now acknowledges the pivotal
achievements of Likud leader Binyamin Netanyahu’s 2003-2005 stint
as finance minister; they included tax cuts, privatizing
industries, high growth, fiscal discipline, the beginnings of bank
reform, and getting many people from the welfare rolls into the job
market.
Although the Olmert government has added nothing to Netanyahu’s
reforms in terms of innovation or energy, it at least hasn’t
substantially detracted from them and is basically coasting on
their momentum, with growth remaining high and inflation, low. Even
more important is that on the cognitive level, thanks largely to
Netanyahu’s influence, “privatization” and “capitalism” are no
longer dirty words in Israel as more and more people come to
understand what makes successful economies tick.
4. Israelis still understand the security
reality. A couple of recent, widely quoted opinion
surveys indicate that, as already alluded to, the bulk of the
Israeli population has withstood the onslaught of left-wing media
bias and still takes realistic positions on security issues. A poll
this month by Tel Aviv University found 55% of Israeli Jews
defining Judea and Samaria as “liberated territory” and only 32%
calling them “occupied territory,” with 75% saying negotiations
with the Palestinians will not produce an agreement and the exact
same proportion saying that, even if they do, the Palestinians will
not see it as the end of the conflict. This is the more impressive
as the Israeli mainstream media only reports meagerly on the severe
demonization of Israel in Palestinian society.
And a poll, also this month, by Bar-Ilan University found 61% of
Israelis rejecting the idea of negotiating a division of Jerusalem
with the Palestinians and 69% saying that even after such a deal
the Palestinian terror attacks would continue.
So a shrinking Left, growing settlements, a growing economy, and
a tenacious realism that is welded to basic Jewish values — all
these augur well for Israel this Passover. HISH
(Hizballah-Iran-Syria-Hamas) has different plans and until they’re
dealt with effectively the basic issue remains survival.
