Where has the center gone?
By Hannah Kim
Haaretz, January 6, 2004
The idea that Ehud Olmert and Dan Meridor join Yosef Lapid and Shinui to form a new "center party" came up in the media a little after Olmert declared his support for a unilateral withdrawal from some of the territories.
It was one of the ideas that has been kicked around in the "political system" lately. If Limor Livnat can openly speak this week about the break-up of the Likud, worried she can't find her place between Moshe Feiglin, Reuven Gavrieli and Moussa Alperon, she could also join the new party. Something, after all, has to change. The Likud is no longer the same Likud, Israeli society is no longer the same society and the next elections won't be at all like the previous ones.
The growth in inequality between citizens in the country has created a class division never before seen in Israel. Logic says such a split between classes would yield a new political formation. In the last three years, Benjamin Netanyahu, with the help of that disciple of the-state-above-all, Ariel Sharon, not only managed to dismantle the Likud as the party that sought to be populist and represent everyone to inherit the kind of hegemony enjoyed by Mapai in its glamour days, but also to change Israel's very social structure, making it much less split into sectors and far more class-oriented.
If in the not-so-distant past it was possible to identify voters as "Haredim," "religious" or "secular," and by implication to know their socioeconomic views and their positions on matters of security and foreign policy, the division now is different: "the poor and broken public," as opposed to "the well-off and the extremely well-off." According to Haifa University historian Prof. Danny Gutwein, the "poor" now includes not only the Arabs and Haredim, but also those who define themselves as secular, people who voted Shinui in the last elections.
"The poor and broken" are the majority in Israel, and no longer feel part of the center. Therefore, the center, meaning the bloc the politicians court before elections, will be replaced by the unemployed, the people laid off from public sector jobs because of privatization or those who will be laid off - Vicki Knafo and her friends. That is a growing class in Israel and it does not yet have a political address.
The ambition to create a centrist party to represent a dominant segment of Israeli society - a "soft" Likud with a hawkish Labor on both sides of Shinui - has been around for 30 years. It comes up in one form or another every once in a while, but has never appeared to be as anachronistic as it does now. In a class-oriented society like contemporary Israel, there is no room for a party that claims to try to represent all Israelis. In the lives of most Likud voters and quite a few Labor voters, let alone the voters for the other parties, no such generality exists any longer.
For years, the Likud represented the anti-establishment opposition to Mapai and the Alignment. Now the Likud represents the establishment against Labor, which lost its strength when it lost the professional unions that served as its foundation. The question is which forces will replace those two parties, or which of the two will change its face. A party with Meridor, Olmert, Lapid and Livnat could only be viewed as "Establishment Party 2" and not a center party.
The Likud Central Committee is not convening this week because of the political crisis but because of an internal crisis inside the party. The Likud during the three years of Netanyahu and Sharon does not represent most of its voters. The result of the internal crisis in the ruling party could be a neo-fascist party that attracts voters who seek "warmth" and a shelter for haters of the "other," and a social democratic party that tries to present a political and economic alternative.
The result could also be a "capitalist party," mostly because of the need of a group of businessmen and industrialists to influence politics out of the desire to make sure the establishment looks after their interests, and doesn't try to completely cancel the role of the state in the economy.
What is certain is that there is no more center in Israel. When Haim Ramon said after the failure of the "dirty trick" of 1990 that he dreams of sleeping in the same political bed with Dan Meridor and Aryeh Deri, he was expressing the illusion that after a peace agreement with the Palestinians, it would turn out that the differences between the parties - even between the secular and religious parties - were only a matter of nuance.
Now it has become clear that it is impossible to make such a political bed. Not only because the conflict between religious and secular is not over but because such a class-oriented society has no room for a center. The parties that succeed in the coming elections will do so because they appeal to a class. The big question is which party will win most of the "poor" voters, which will succeed with the "broken," and which will capture the votes of the "upper class."
