Although the Israeli Left gets a lot of media and political attention in the U.S., its position within Israeli politics is not as pronounced as one would suppose. In the following opinion piece, Carlo Strenger empathetically takes on the topic, Why Israel's left has disappeared.
Following Strenger's piece is a retort penned by an Israeli, "Amichai." Amichai's explanation for why the Israeli Left is at present a non-factor is " because it has failed to understand that the conflict is based squarely on the Palestinian and Arab "[refusal] to accept Israel`s right to be, to exist as the nation-state of the Jewish people."
[In accord with the premise identified by Amichai, Why recognition of Israel as a Jewish state is a prime requirement for Israel-Palestinian peace is explained by Barry Rubin.] //Mark Finkelstein
Why Israel's left has disappeared
Ha'aretz August 17, 2009
By Carlo Strenger The writer teaches at the psychology department of Tel Aviv University and is a member of the Permanent Monitoring Panel on Terrorism of the World Federation of Scientists.
Israel's left has disappeared; it has nearly no parliamentary representation and remarkably little public presence. At first glance, this is a paradox, because the left's program has, in many ways, won, as Yossi Sarid said when he left the Knesset for good. The idea of a Palestinian state, anathema in Israeli society a few decades ago, is now accepted by the mainstream.
The left has dissipated because it has failed to provide a realistic picture of the conflict with the Palestinians. Its ideological foundation was based on a simple prediction: If we offer the Palestinians a state in the territories occupied in 1967, there will be "peace now."
Then things started to go wrong. After the Oslo process began, the newly formed Palestinian Authority educated its children with violently anti-Israeli and often straightforwardly anti-Semitic textbooks. The suicide bombings of 1996 were not prevented by Arafat (some say they were supported). What brought the left down completely were the failures of Camp David in 2000 and Taba in 2001, as well as the onset of the second intifada.
On the face of it, Israel's left should have said "we were wrong in our predictions. We underestimated the complexity of the situation. We didn't see that the Palestinians were not ready to renounce the right of return and we underestimated how much murderous rage there was against Israel. We still believe that we need to end the occupation as quickly as possible, but we need to face reality."
Instead of admitting that it had been partially wrong, the left tried to explain away all the facts that didn't square with its theory by putting the onus of responsibility for Palestinian actions exclusively on Israel's policies. The left argued that the bombings in 1996 happened because the Oslo process was too slow and the Palestinians wanted to avenge the targeted killing of Yihye Ayash; Camp David failed because prime minister Ehud Barak's offers were insufficient. The second intifada started because of Ariel Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount in September 2000. Hamas came to power because we turned Fatah into collaborators with the Zionists, and so on.
The Israeli left's thinking is governed by what I call SLES (Standard Left Explanatory System). This intellectual construct gained popularity in Europe and the United States in the 1960s after the demise of European colonialism. The basic principle of SLES is simple: Always support the underdog, particularly when non-Western, and always accuse Western powers, preferably the United States and its allies, for what the underdog does. Anything aggressive or destructive a non-Western group says or does must be explained by Western dominance or oppression. This ranges from the emergence of Al-Qaida, which is blamed on the United States' dropping of its support for the Mujahideen in Afghanistan after the Soviets were expelled, to corruption and violence in Africa, which is blamed on the aftereffects of European colonialism.
SLES is built on very questionable psychology: It assumes that if you are nice to people, all conflicts will disappear. It simply disregards the human desire for dominance, power and a belief system that gives them self-respect. As a result, SLES, under the guise of humanitarianism, assumes that non-Western groups don't have a will of their own; that all they do, feel or want is purely reactive to the West. It is also devoid of respect for non-Western groups: It assumes that they are not responsible for their deeds, and that all they do must be explained by victimization by the West.
If you listen to the left's explanations of Palestinian behavior, you might easily conclude that Israel is omnipotent and that Palestinians have no self will. In conversations with Palestinians I have heard more than once that they feel that the right wing respects them more than the left because the left always presumes to know what the Palestinians really want. [end of citation]
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Comment from Amihai City: Jerusalem State: Israel
The Left is gone because it has failed to understand that the conflict is not an Israeli-Palestinian one but rather an Israeli-Arab conflict, one between Israel and the entire Muslim-Arab world and civilization that has refused to accept Israel`s right to be, to exist as the nation-state of the Jewish people.
In its attempt to resolve the conflict whose nature the left has misunderstood it has come to blame Israel and even Zionism for standing firm and demanding recognition of right of the Arab side.
And when that demand has not been met, indeed when Barak offered peace for such recognition and the end of conflict and received a war-of-attrition-through-terror that lasted for years, the Left, instead of siding with Barak`s loyalty to his people and his state, left him and became closer to Arafat and Bargouti.
It has now paid the price.
