ON THE WORLD SCENE

ISRAEL'S ELECTION — BEHIND THE DEADLOCK, AN ALARMING TURN TO THE RADICAL RIGHT

On Monday, July 23, Israelis went to the polls. The country, wracked by 400% inflation and the continued morale sapping occupation of southern Lebanon, desperately needed a strong government. Furthermore, it looked as though the dominant Likud bloc in the ruling coalition, after seven years in power, would not be able to surmount the country's crises. Even former Prime Minister Menachem Begin, in virtual seclusion, could or would not lend active support to his party's cause.

The results of the election proved to be a mild surprise to Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir — and a grave disappointment to Labor Party leader Shimon Peres. The Labor Party, which had hoped to win as many as 55 of the needed 61 seats (in the 120-seat Knesset) ended up with only 44, actually down three seats from the outgoing parliament. Likud lost seven seats, dropping to 41 seats. The Labor Party and the Likud bloc are thus stalemated, but since the Likud is closer ideologically to most of the 13 splinter parties, it stands a better chance of once again forming a government.

There are reports that Labor and Likud might combine to form a "grand coalition," with Shamir and Peres somehow alternating as prime minister. But such a post would likely not last long, as the two parties are 180 degrees apart on the fundamental question of what to do with the West Bank. Labor is willing to trade more land for peace and a hoped-for agreement with Jordan's King Hussein. Likud, viewing the area as part of "eretz Israel," pushes for greater Jewish settlement, eventually leading (though this is not said officially) to annexation.

Most significantly, the Israeli election confirmed the nation's continued shift to a more ultra-nationalist position, especially with respect toward dealing with the Arab world. This was reflected dramatically when Meir Kahane, an American-born militant rabbi, was elected to office for the first time. The extremist Kahane wants all Arabs — even long-time Israeli­ Arab citizens — sent packing from both Israel proper and the West Bank (and the Gaza Strip too), and he has also said, with regard to the Arab­ controlled Temple Mount: "I want the Arabs off that mountain."

Here, first, is an analysis of Israel's election as received over our ASSOCIATED PRESS news wire, July 28:

The results of Israel's election point to a clear victory for rightist nationalism over the old political order.... Labor supporters see the July 23 election as climaxing a seven-year shift to the right, which is expected to continue for simple demographic reasons: The Likud constituency is mainly Sephardic, or Middle Eastern Jewish, and the Sephardim, who have a higher birthrate, make up 55 percent of Israel's 3.5 million Jews.

For the moderately leftist, college-educated Israelis who are Labor's main constituency, the election was a catastrophe, in which an unabashed Arab-baiter like Rabbi Meir Kahane got over 23,000 votes and was elected to Parliament.

The 1984 election was Likud's acid test. Begin, its revered leader, had retired into seclusion, broken, dispirited and reluctant to give his successor, Shamir, more than tepid election endorsement. The economy was out of control with 400 percent annual inflation. Israel's occupation of southern Lebanon had become a debacle. The Middle East peace process was frozen. The stage seemed set for a convincing Labor victory....

To Sephardic voters who feel discriminated against by the Labor Party's Ashkenazim elite from European countries, Likud is more than a party. It is a home and a political identity. It offers them a sense of belonging. The rising tide of nationalism was another factor, based on decades of Arab hostility that have created a "Fortress Israel" attitude and stamped out the old consensus that sooner or later, in some way, peace would come. Many Likud supporters today have no such belief in peace moves. To them, it's Israel against a world that put this people in gas chambers and would do so again, given a chance. Beside such existential issues, practical matters like Likud's handling of the economy pale.

Moderate Israelis brought up on the doctrines of the country's socialist founders are especially alarmed at the rise of the militant right in this election. No fewer than eight of the new Parliament's 120 members are in what political scientist Dan Horowitz calls "the tribal stream" — the mystic Israel-firsters who find justification for their every deed in the Bible.

"Every election makes the previous election's extremists look moderate," said Avi Ravitzky, a member of a dovish religious group, on Israel television. The Likud used to look extreme until the West Bank settler movement brought the Tehiya Party to prominence. Then came a Jewish vigilante underground waging vengeance attacks on West Bank Arabs, Ravitzky said. "Now comes Kahane and the underground disavows him. And within his own movement Kahane is a moderate compared with some of his colleagues," he said.

In the August 6 issue of NEWSWEEK, Shlomo Avineri, professor of political science at Hebrew University, analyzed the shifting outlook of today's Israeli people, as reflected in the elections. The upshot of it all: Menachem Begin was no fluke.

In the past, many foreign observers tried to explain Likud's ascendancy in terms of the powerful personal appeal of Menachem Begin. But this never went to the heart of the issue. Begin did not create a constituency — he articulated it. It is this constituency which Likud has been able to keep almost intact despite its recent vicissitudes....

The Six Day War of 1967 was a major watershed. It changed not only the strategic balance in the Middle East: it also transformed the political agenda in Israel. Before 1967, political debate in Israel was almost exclusively focused on internal issues: problems of nation building, massive immigration and its absorption, the extension of a nascent welfare state, the ingathering of the exiles, the opening up of new frontiers — like the Negev — for settlement and development. For these issues, the political ideas — and the powerful machine — of the Labor Party appeared to be relevant. The right-wing Herut Party — later to become the main component of Likud — seemed out of touch with the realities of life in Israel. When it talked about historical Jewish rights to Judea and Samaria, it did not get much response from people who had just escaped the Nazi Holocaust or persecution in Arab countries.

But after 1967, with Israel in control of the ancestral lands on the West Bank and Gaza, the political debate shifted to issues of nationalism and confrontation with Palestinian nationalism. Likud, with its simple message — "This is our land" — had a clear advantage over Labor, which tried to square its commitment to Israel's security with its liberal, humanistic ideas.

The second change has been the transformation of Israeli society itself. When the state was established in 1948, 85 percent of Israel's Jewish population was made up of immigrants from Europe and their descendants (Ashkenazim) and 15 percent hailed from Middle Eastern countries (Sephardim). Today, the ratio is 50-50 with the Sephardim on the increase.

It would be wrong to suggest that all Sephardic voters prefer Likud; in the 1981 elections around 35 percent of the Labor voters were Sephardim. But on balance, many Sephardim tend to feel more at home with the more tradition-oriented and ethnocentric outlook of Likud than with the universalist ideas of Labor, which are, after all, an outgrowth of the European Enlightenment.

Since many of the Middle Eastern immigrants brought with them memories of persecution and hatred at the hands of Arab Muslims, it is not surprising if they are more hawkish than Israelis of European origin, who are not burdened with such memories....

Will Israel then become ungovernable? Not necessarily.... Yet it is a different Israel that emerges out of all this — perhaps not at peace with itself or with its neighbors. Paradoxically, it is a much more Middle Eastern, less European country. Many observers have hoped that Israel would one day shed its European characteristics and become more like the countries surrounding it. It may be a cruel irony of history that Likud's staying in power is an expression of this integration of Israel into the Middle East — into the real, not always pleasant Middle East, not into some sort of utopian, nonexistent Middle East which appears only in the dreams of European romantics. But this is the real Israel, and for better or worse, the friends of Israel — and Jews all over the world — will have to learn to come to terms with it.

Thomas L. Friedman, writing in the July 26 NEW YORK TIMES, put it simply:

The country seems split in half between Labor and Likud supporters and then split again among the rainbow of small religious, leftist and rightist ideological parties. Each party not only has its own social and economic programs now, but also its own map and conception of the identity of Israel.... These elections seem to reaffirm that a new Israel is in the making and whatever shape it ultimately takes seems certain to be quite different in temperament and outlook from the mythic old socialist Israel of pioneers and dreamers, where Labor the dominant party.

Election Rules Open Way For Radical Rabbi

Israel's election laws have a very low mandatory vote threshold — only one percent — for representation in Parliament. Hence the proliferation of small parties, which are threatening to undermine the very basis of the country's democracy — much in the same way as the German Weimar Republic collapsed under the weight of over-representation in the 1930s (West Germany today requires a five percent representation).

The most dramatic single result of the election was the victory by Brooklyn-born firebrand Rabbi Meir Kahane. His Kach Party was able to clear the one percent hurdle — representing about 20,000 votes — by 3000 votes.

The son of an Orthodox rabbi, the 51-year-old Kahane first embraced militant Zionism when he was 15 years old. He became a constant thorn in the side of the New York City police department, eventually founding in 1968 the militant Jewish Defense League, a private army of youths organized to protect Jewish residents. The JDL also planted bombs in Soviet offices to protest treatment of Russian Jews.

In 1972 Kahane moved to Israel (he holds dual U.S. and Israeli citizenship). In Israel, he has been arrested numerous times and imprisoned twice for a total of 13 months. Here is a profile of Kahane which appeared in the July 30, 1984 issue of PEOPLE magazine (just before the election):

Behind Kahane's zealotry is his conviction that Israel as an exclusively Jewish state is justified by the Old Testament. "I'm trying to explain to the people of Israel that if we don't want Jewish blood to flow, we must throw the Arabs out," he says. "I am not ashamed of it. It was written in the Talmud: 'If one comes to slay you, slay him first.'"...

After two unsuccessful campaigns in 1977 and 1981...drift to the right among Israeli youth and increasing support for permanent settlement of the West Bank have broadened Kahane's ballot-box appeal. "This time it's different," he says. "The people of Israel see where the wind is blowing. They will vote for me."...

Last March four of his Kach youths — all U.S. citizens — were arrested for machine-gunning a bus on the West Bank, wounding six Arabs. Of the car bombing that gravely wounded...two West Bank mayors [in 1980], Kahane says with a grin, "I was in prison when I heard. I blessed God and thanked Him. I was delighted when it happened. But do you think I would tell you if I had anything to do with it?" He professed astonishment when the Israeli government arrested 25 citizens last spring for terrorist acts against Arabs. "Those arrested — the Jewish underground — are wonderful boys," he says. "They fulfilled a holy task."

The Kach movement, under pressure from several Israeli organizations and prominent individuals, was at first banned by the General Elections Committee on the grounds that it was racist. Israel's Supreme Court, however, overturned the disqualification, putting Kahane's party on the ballot.

During the election campaign, Jerusalem Mayor Teddy Kollek, among others, complained about Kahane's political campaign approach on television. Kahane's television clip featured headlines of Jews he alleged were murdered by Arabs, drops of blood dripping onto a tiled floor, and a cross armed Meir Kahane, speaking against the backdrop of the Temple Mount, saying "just let me deal with them" (the Arabs).

Kahane's youthful supporters, incidentally, like to wear their "uniforms" in his presence — yellow T-shirts adorned with a fist on a black Star of David.

Vows to Drive Israel "Crazy"

After his election triumph, Kahane was carried through the Arab-populated section of Old Jerusalem by his jubilant followers. His followers taunted Arabs by shouting at them: "Arabs out of the country. What is better, a dead dog or an Arab?" Of his supporters' intimidating tactics, Kahane said, "The Arabs were frightened. That was the purpose."

The next day Kahane told a news conference that he planned to act in defiance of the laws of the state. "I want to do things that today are opposed to the law as the police see it. That is, if there is a law from the Torah and it is opposed to the laws of the state, then I say the law of the Torah is above and beyond the law of the state."

Significantly, from now on, Kahane will be protected from prosecution by parliamentary immunity once he takes his seat in Parliament.

At the revered Western (Wailing) Wall, Kahane also declared that "in my first speech [in Parliament] I am going to raise the issue of throwing out the Arabs so that it will become on the next day a national debate." Every newspaper in the world, he said, "will have to report that a melee broke out in the Knesset when I presented a bill to move the Arabs out of here."

The super-confident Kahane further predicted: "After the next election, we will have 10 seats and will drive this country crazy. We will make this country Jewish again."

In the July 29 issue of the LOS ANGELES TIMES, Norman Kempster, TIMES staff writer in Jerusalem, revealed more about the Kahane phenomenon and what it could portend for Israel:

Firebrand Rabbi Meir Kahane said Saturday that as soon as he obtains parliamentary immunity from arrest, he will go to Jerusalem's Temple Mount to restore a Jewish religious presence there and evict the Muslim shrines that have stood for more than 1000 years.

"I want the Arabs off that mountain — let them find someplace else,” Kahane told several hundred people, most of them enthusiastic supporters, at a Jerusalem rally. “As soon as I get immunity, I will go up there."... [Israeli state security officials have vowed to prevent this from occurring.]

Many Israeli political leaders have denounced Kahane as a racist. In response, he said: "We believe we are a special people — we believe we are a chosen people. The real tragedy is the cowardly rabbis and the cowardly Orthodox Jews who are afraid to get up and say, 'He (Kahane) is right.' If they ever attempt to pass a law against racism in the Knesset, I will make an hour-long speech quoting only from Jewish (religious) sources. The bill will never pass."

The crowd applauded enthusiastically when Kahane demanded the expulsion of Arabs from Israel and the occupied territories. He said they could go to any of 22 Arab countries. "They have 22 countries," he said. "I have only one country."...

In more than two hours of oratory, punctuated by finger-pointing gestures, Kahane ran through his political philosophy — expulsion of all Arabs from Israel and the occupied West Bank of the Jordan River and Gaza Strip, substitution of Jewish religious law for Israeli democracy and plenty of scorn for Israeli and American Jewish leaders who disagree with him.

His comments about the Temple Mount may have been the most significant.... Under a ruling by Israel's chief rabbis, Jews are prohibited from setting foot on the mount to prevent them from inadvertently stepping on the spot that before AD 70 held the Holy of Holies, the most venerated site in Judaism. The exact location of the site is unknown. Israeli secular law protects the Muslim shrines from attack by Jewish zealots.

Pollster Hanoch Smith, writing in the JERUSALEM POST, said Kahane received most of his vote in blue-collar development towns, religious-oriented farming communities and the poor neighborhoods of Jerusalem, Haifa and Tel Aviv. All those areas are largely populated by Sephardic Jews.... He received almost no votes in affluent city neighborhoods or on the kibbutzim, the collective farms of Israel.

Kahane acknowledged that much of his support came from the Sephardic community. He said: "When I speak to Sephardic Jews, they understand what Arabs are. They lived under them, and they never intend to live under them again."

Most Israeli newspapers decried Kahane's election, although the mass-circulation daily YEDIOT AHARONOT termed it a reaction to Arab hostility toward Israel. "Much of what Rabbi Meir Kahane says now is frightening madness, but this must also be known. If 23,000 Israeli voters behind him, it's not only madness of an individual, but the beginning of general Jewish madness," the newspaper said. "And there must be a reason for such madness. And that reason, in our opinion, is the end of the store of Jewish patience in the face of continued Arab madness."

More to come about the explosive combination of "Torah and Terror."

— Gene H. Hogberg, News Bureau