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Intelligent opinions since 1945.
Israelis are going to the polls tomorrow for the first time since the October 7, 2023 attacks. So while all Israeli elections these days are closely watched abroad, this one is getting dissected like a frog.
Yet, ironically, as far as the international community is concerned, the election has already delivered its verdict. The world hyper-focuses on the Palestinian dimension of the Arab-Israeli conflict to the exclusion not only of domestic Israeli issues but of all the other facets of the Arab-Israeli conflict. And when it comes to the topic of the two-state solution, the outcome of the vote won’t tell us much more than we already know based on who is running and what they are running on.
Like a bride left at the altar, Israel has finally taken “no” for an answer.
There were only going to be so many times the Palestinians could reject a two-state solution before the offers stopped coming. And while those offers may yet return one day, the attacks of October 7 and their support among Palestinians (and celebration among Palestinians’ supporters all over the world) made clear to Israelis that peace negotiations were not a necessary precondition to attaining security.
Israelis, that is, have found themselves once again back at Jabotinsky’s “iron wall,” the theory that only the acceptance of Israel’s indestructability by its neighbors will lead to long-term Arab-Israeli peace.
Benjamin Netanyahu’s main challenger is a good illustration of this. Gadi Eizenkot, a former IDF chief of staff, is running to Bibi’s “left” institutionally but not security-wise. He will partner with those to his own left to build a coalition, but he is not running to institute policies that are ideologically left-wing.
Meanwhile, as the expert on Mizrahi Jews (descendants of Jews from Arab lands) Mijal Bitton writes in the Wall Street Journal, Eizenkot’s own Moroccan heritage probably means there’s a limit on how much he can even institutionally shift the next government, should he become prime minister: The Mizrahim have less trust in Israel’s liberal establishment institutions. When they immigrated, they “stayed in the transit camps longer than Ashkenazim and were sent disproportionately to economically depressed development towns, remote settlements far from the center.” And so, even as they moved into Israel’s middle class, “Mizrahim remain overrepresented in Israel’s social periphery and underrepresented in academia and other elite institutions.”
In a general sense, Bitton explains, when compared to Ashkenazim, the Mizrahim “are more religiously traditional, patriotic and bound to family and community.” They have been the Likud Party’s base of support for decades, ever since Menachem Begin’s victory in 1977 marked the first time the secular Ashkenazi elite weren’t in total control of the country’s government.
Eizenkot, however, refuses to run as “the Moroccan.” But that’s not really why he may not be able to capture Likud’s Mizrahi voters. A bigger obstacle for him with fellow Mizrahim, Bitton writes, is that “many Mizrahim mistrust the left on institutions, religion and security, and they associate Eisenkot with the left.”
Given the nature of Israel’s multiethnic democracy, how much of this is “being Mizrahi” and how much is “being right-wing ideologically?” All signs point to ideology being the strongest factor, which is probably the real reason why appealing to ethnic affinity is unlikely to work.
Take this 2022 Tel Aviv University poll as an example. One poll can’t tell us everything, obviously, but the pollsters asked respondents for their ethnicity, religiosity, ideology, and support for a two-state solution. Mizrahim are far warier of the creation of a Palestinian state than Ashkenazim are. Dig into the poll’s data and you find that religiosity doesn’t matter all that much: Secular Mizrahim still lag well behind secular Ashkenazim on the two-state question.
Filter the results by ideology, however, and you find that support for a two-state solution is flatly an ideological question now. Fewer Mizrahim are on the left, so fewer Mizrahim support leftist positions, and the two-state solution is one such position.
The lesson here is that Israel’s rightward shift on security questions isn’t due to the Russians (as Bill Clinton once tried to argue) or the Moroccans. It’s due simply to reality.
Israelis tend to be security-minded, and those seeking security know that they cannot get it by letting Palestinian negotiators endlessly drag them along a process with no end point. It might be possible for the Palestinians to change this dynamic but not anytime soon. Israelis have accepted the Palestinians’ rejection of a two-state solution. That part of this election is no mystery.