One Way Street

By Moshe Feiglin

During the previous primaries, one of my donors -- an American Jew aware of Israel's political culture -- offered to donate ten thousand dollars to publicize a major ad inviting Netanyahu to a public debate. I very much wanted to debate Netanyahu. In countries with a true democratic culture, there is no such thing as elections without a debate. It doesn't matter what the polls say and which of the candidates seems like a shoe-in; the two sides are committed to putting their ideology to the public test. But despite my confidence in my ideology, I decided not to take my donor up on his generous offer. In Israel's current political climate -- particularly in the post-Sharon era -- an invitation to a debate is not perceived as an assertion of confidence in one's ideas. Just the opposite; it is perceived as weakness. Because if you are strong, why do you need to explain anything? If you attempt to explain yourself, it is a sure sign of weakness.

A violent political culture in which substance is meaningless has grown in Israel. Everything hinges on power, manipulation of public opinion and toeing the line of the State Attorney's office, the media and academia. Netanyahu knows where the power is concentrated and announces that when he wins the elections he will invite Labor party Ehud Barak to be his Defense Minister. What is he actually saying? He is saying that the Right has capitulated to the antagonistic political culture introduced to Israel by Ben Gurion; a culture that found its extreme expression in the legacies of Rabin and Sharon.

In Israel, the voter is completely irrelevant. The hapless right wing candidate surrenders in advance to the masters of the land and promises that despite the majority that supports him, he will leave the control in the hands of the land's leftist rulers. Sharon understood this, and brought the Labor party into his government for no apparent political reason. Laborite Barak, on the other hand, did all he could to divide Jerusalem even though he headed a minority government. The fact that he did not enjoy the support of a majority of the Israeli public for such far-reaching measures did not bother him, at all. And he was right. Barak had the full support of Israel's media-cultural-judicial elite, and that was all that he needed.

The unity government that Netanyahu is already promising today is actually a euphemism for a political cartel. When companies form a cartel to neutralize the customers and control the economic markets, they have broken the law. But when political parties unite to neutralize the voters and to control the ideological "market," they commit a much more serious crime: they effectively purge democracy of its significance. In Israeli 'newspeak,' this is called 'unity.'

Rabin's assassination was a reaction to this violent political culture. The murder occurred after a government elected on the basis of a clear policy not to negotiate with the PLO, made a complete turnabout. Rabin dismissed the wave of protest that broke out throughout the country with tried and true deligitimization methods; he called the protesters 'propellers,' 'Hamas,' and more. The assassination was the best gift Israel's Left could have dreamed of. It provided a tremendous power surge to the deligitimization process. The last remnants of Israel's political freedom rapidly turned to dust. Since Rabin's assassination, there is only one legitimate opinion in Israel. In Israeli 'democracy,' when you vote Left you get Left. But when you vote Right, you get double Left.

The freedom to think and to offer an alternative is not a simple democratic game. In a country in which the citizens feel that they are living on borrowed time and whose young people stand in a shameful line to merit foreign citizenship from the countries that slaughtered their grandparents (so that they will have a place to escape to when the Titanic sinks) there is only one legitimate path to solve our existential problems. The path that keeps exploding in our faces.