Slouching Toward a No-Win Vote

JERUSALEM —  Before almost every national election, Israelis like to say that “this is the most fateful vote in our history.” That tendency to overstatement is a measure of the intensity with which we live. Still, the May 29 elections for the Knesset and, for the first time, directly for prime minister, probably will be our most decisive, for now we finally may resolve the debate over the West Bank that has riveted Israeli politics for nearly three decades.

Yet however significant, the campaign is the dullest in memory, noisy with slogans but empty of drama and substantive debate. Candidates’ appearances rarely draw large enthusiastic crowds; hardly anyone watches the nightly half-hour TV segments offering commercials from the parties exposing each other’s weaknesses far more effectively than promoting the strengths of their own positions.

In fact, the incongruous public apathy toward this fateful election is appropriate: Neither the right-wing Likud nor the left-wing Labor Party offers a truly hopeful solution to the West Bank dilemma.

The Likud has no viable peace plan. Having come so close to statehood, Palestinians will hardly settle for a variation of the Likud’s old offer of West Bank “autonomy.” If a Likud government tries to block Palestinian statehood, it will face a renewed intifada--no longer just teenagers throwing stones but more likely terrorist attacks orchestrated by Yasser Arafat’s police. The West Bank will become the Middle East’s Bosnia. Israel, and not the Palestinians, will be blamed by the world community for the collapse of the peace process, leading to the renewed ostracism of the Jewish state.

The Labor Party’s alternative is equally bleak. If Labor is reelected, an independent Palestinian state will almost certainly emerge. Yet the peace process as conceived by the late Yitzhak Rabin wasn’t intended as a guarantee for a Palestinian state but as a testing period of Arafat’s ability to control fundamentalist Hamas terror. That test has failed. Under Arafat’s rule, Hamas has thrived, launching the most devastating terrorist attacks in Israel’s history.

Prime Minister Shimon Peres promises campaign audiences that “peace will defeat terror,” but it is the peace process itself that has allowed a sophisticated terrorist infrastructure to emerge in Gaza, beyond the reach of the Israeli army and intelligence. A Palestinian state almost certainly will be a source of ongoing terrorism against the Jewish state and of instability for the entire Middle East.

Labor and Likud each mock the other’s campaign promise to bring peace with security, and the mutual skepticism is entirely justified. It is hard to say which option is more frightening: letting the peace process reach its inevitable conclusion in a Palestinian state, or freezing the process and almost certainly destroying it.

For the true believers of left and right, an electoral victory by their opponents will mean historic disaster, leading the country to suicidal ruin. Whoever wins, then, is likely to face not just opposition but a vehement campaign of delegitimization.

Left-wing Israelis will view a Likud government as “antipeace,” destroying the country’s only hope for long-term survival in the Arab world. The probable result of that anger and despair will be the emergence of Israel’s first real draft resistance movement, undermining the source of the nation’s strength: the fragile trust keeping its fractious people together.

A Labor government trying to reach a final agreement with Arafat, which will require the dismantling of a united Jerusalem and West Bank Jewish communities, will provoke the kind of frenzied right-wing street campaign that preceded Rabin’s assassination.

A central focus of that campaign will be the country’s first Arab Cabinet minister, whom Peres has promised to appoint if he is returned to office. (Almost 20% of Israel’s population of 5.5 million are Arab citizens.) Right-wingers deeply mistrust the loyalty of Israeli Arabs to the Jewish state. One right-wing bumper sticker proclaims that the true choice of this election is “Bibi or Tibi”--that is, Likud’s Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu or Dr. Ahmad Tibi, an Arab candidate for the Knesset who also advises Arafat on Israeli affairs. An Arab Cabinet minister, participating in fateful strategic decisions, will become the right’s symbol for the government’s loss of “Jewish” legitimacy--and justification, perhaps, for anti-government violence.

Since the 1981 elections, the country has been almost evenly divided between left and right, virtually stalemating itself, as though fearful of actually realizing either camp’s solution. Now that uncertainty seems about to end. The true drama of this so-far tepid campaign will begin after the election, when one half of the population tries to implement a West Bank solution that the other half considers a threat to the nation’s existence. In that apocalyptically charged atmosphere, anything can happen.

Whatever the result May 29, Israel will enter a period of unprecedented domestic bitterness and instability, which neither prime ministerial candidate has the moral stature or political will to contain.