Whither the Israeli left?

It is impossible to advise the left on how to revitalize itself when an entire generation of pre-Oct. 7 politicians are likely to be swept from office.

An excellent piece at Future of Jewish proposes a possible way forward for the moribund Israeli left. In a nutshell, it posits that the majority of Israeli Jews continue to support a wide variety of left-wing positions on social and political issues. The failure of the left, it asserts, lies in its decision in recent years to ignore the security issue.

Citing Israel’s first prime minister David Ben-Gurion, the article asserts: “‘Security First’ is the original framework of the Israeli Left. For too long the Right has used the Second Intifada and rockets from Gaza as a bludgeon against leftists, hypocritically refusing to take responsibility for the near-constant violence we have seen in the last 20 years, near constantly under Right-wing leadership.”

In particular, the authors state that the left’s consistent advocacy of a two-state solution remains the mainstream position of the majority of Israelis:

According to the 2017-2018 National Security Index, 55 percent of Israeli Jews support the two-state solution (as do 96 percent of Arab Israelis). This is not empty support for a slogan but true acknowledgement of what this would demand: 63 percent of Israelis support evacuation of settlements as part of a permanent agreement with the Palestinians, while only 27 percent are opposed. In other words, the public is still consistent in supporting this solution.

The authors don’t engage in “Oslo nostalgia,” however. They advocate demanding immediate concrete concessions from the Palestinians on such issues as the refugees and their descendants. So long as such concessions are not forthcoming, they say, Israel should maintain security control of Judea and Samaria, as well as bring strong international pressure to bear on the Palestinians.

The article concludes: “If the Left fails to seize this moment, it will find itself in the dustbin of history. After our current war with Hamas and Hezbollah, there will be no legitimate political movement in Israel that does not centralize personal and national security. None will be able to rely on domestic disputes alone.”

On the one hand, this essay is a brave attempt to put forward some much-needed and concrete suggestions for revitalizing the Israeli left. On the other hand, those suggestions strike me as a) unlikely to garner much public support and b) very premature.

Regarding the former, the article’s assertions on Israeli views of the security issue are very “Oct. 6.” Survey data from 2017-2018 on this issue is simply irrelevant. Up until Oct. 7, most Israelis presumed that a full-scale, ISIS-style assault on the Jewish state was more or less impossible. The Palestinians would know such an attack would be suicidal and Israel was more than capable of preventing it militarily.

Oct. 7 reminded us that, while Israel is indeed immensely strong militarily, it remains a very vulnerable country for geographic reasons. There is little concrete data on the subject, but I think it is very likely that, as a result, the two-state solution is more or less dead. Israelis will never again consent to the creation of a terrorist entity on their borders.

This is particularly true regarding Judea and Samaria, which overlook Israel’s heartland and capital city. Had an independent Palestinian state participated in Oct. 7 with Hamas—as it almost certainly would have—the results might have been worse by orders of magnitude. Israelis know this. They also know that a “state of Palestine” would be or would quickly become a terrorist state, causing enormous if not mortal damage to Israel’s security.

For decades, the Israeli left’s entire view of the conflict with the Palestinians has been predicated on the two-state solution. If only to differentiate the left from the right, it must inevitably remain so. Thus, it seems unlikely that the left can revitalize itself on the security issue.

Even if the left could do so, moreover, it is simply impossible to know whether it would serve as a path back to power. The reason is that we simply have no idea what Israeli politics will look like after the next election.

The questions are legion: Will Israelis view the right as discredited and turn left in response? Will they instead go even more right, abandoning Benjamin Netanyahu and the Likud party for more extreme parties? Will the public balance the disaster of Netanyahu’s Gaza policies with his thus-far successful conduct of the war and keep him in office? Will the center represented by Benny Gantz and Yair Lapid fend off both left and right and establish itself as a pragmatic new consensus force? Will the entire political establishment be swept out of office and replaced by forces currently unknown?

Not one of those questions can be answered at the moment. After the disaster of the 1973 Yom Kippur War—the closest Israel came in the past to an Oct. 7-style cataclysm—the fallout took some time to take shape. Indeed, it was four years before the Labor party paid the price for its failures, but it did so in spectacular fashion when Menachem Begin’s Likud rose to power in 1977, ending the dominance of the Israeli left forever.

Given this, it may take some time for Israel’s post-war political alignment to become clear. But I think it will likely come sooner rather than later. The next election will probably be a decisive one. I don’t like to make predictions, as I’m usually wrong, but I suspect that the most probable scenario is the near-total replacement of the current political establishment. Israelis already know that the failures of Oct. 7 were across the board. The blame is almost universal. Everybody in charge had a hand in the disaster. Given this, while loyal partisan voters will remain, everybody who was in charge is likely to pay a very heavy political price.

The problem is that, at the moment, we have absolutely no idea who will benefit from this inevitable reckoning. There has been talk of former prime minister Naftali Bennett returning to office, but he too had a hand in the policies that led, all unknowing, to Oct. 7. So did former prime minister Lapid and former defense minister Gantz. Given this, a new bloc of unknowns may consolidate itself and open a new era in Israeli politics.

Who these people will be and where they will stand on the ideological spectrum is impossible to know. Since it is impossible to know, it is also impossible to advise them. Israelis are an impatient people, but for the moment, we must do something we are very bad at: Wait. The Israeli left will have to wait too.