From a small hill in southern Israel, about an hour and a half south of Tel Aviv on the edge of the Negev desert, the political geography of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is apparent in one sweeping vista. Immediately ahead is the Mediterranean Sea, sometimes described as ‘Israel’s only good border”. To the left are the dense towers of Gaza City. In the centre is a sandy gap, where, until last August, three northern Israeli settlements stood, now demolished. To the right of them is a power station, which serves the city of Ashkelon. Far behind is the private farm of Ariel Sharon. Immediately to the rear is the small town of Sderot, the nearest town in Israel to the Gaza Strip.
In front of the municipality, lounging before a row of run-down shops, a crowd of unemployed men hangs about with nothing to do. The place smells of the monotony of poverty and despair. The people of Sderot may be richer than their Palestinian neighbours, but it is hard to feel wealthy when you cannot get to the end of the week without running out of food. Like Gaza, Sderot is propped up by welfare, but instead of the United Nations or NGOs, it comes from private donations from the Jewish community of Italy.
On Tuesday, Israel goes to the polls, voting in a political landscape almost unrecognisable from last August, when the last Israeli settler was forcibly removed from Gaza. In November, the country awoke to learn that the centre-left Labour party had ousted as its leader Shimon Peres and replaced him with the Moroccan-born head of the Histadruth, the Israeli trade union organisation. Modelling himself on the Brazilian President, Lula da Silva, Amir Peretz said he wanted to place welfare, unemployment and health at the top of his agenda. ‘Within two years of taking office I will have eradicated child poverty in Israel,” he told the media. This was earth-shattering enough, in a country where national security has been the number one issue in every election since the founding of the state in 1948. But his surprise victory signalled an even greater revolution: it was the first time that a Sephardi (non-European) Jew had been elected head of what most Israelis regard as the party of the middle-class Ashkenazi elite.
Peretz’s win was quickly overshadowed by Sharon’s response to it: the formation of the centrist Kadima party a couple of weeks later, which stole leading politicians, including Peres, from both Labour and the right-wing Likud party. A month after that, Sharon had the massive stroke from which he has not recovered. The pundits pronounced the death of Kadima by the end of the week, but it survived, under the new leadership of Ehud Olmert. Three weeks later, the Palestinian elections were won by Hamas. The once mighty Likud, meanwhile, has been reduced to a right-wing rump.
Nowhere represents this election in microcosm better than Sderot. This is the town where the Peretz family was placed when they arrived in Israel in 1956 from Morocco and where the Labour leader still lives. It was here that he laid the foundations of his political career, as mayor in the 1980s. Founded in 1951 as a tent city for new immigrants, Sderot has achieved the dubious status of ‘development town” — a depressing, run-down place of high unemployment. Roughly half the 16 500 population is Moroccan, just less than half are Russian immigrants, and the remainder come from Ethiopia. As the town’s Likud mayor, Eli Moyal, says, ‘We have here the whole catastrophe.”
Election banners are all over town, but the little shops with their cheap goods are plastered with Peretz posters. Eliyahu Biton, prematurely aged, his face sunken, his jaw toothless, is voting for the town’s most famous son. ‘When Peretz was mayor of Sderot, he helped me a great deal. When my daughter graduated from high school, Amir told me to bring her school records and he found her a job at the Ministry of Defence. If he gets elected, he’ll help the little man.”
When Peretz won the Labour leadership, the question everyone asked was whether he could deliver to the party the one-million-strong working-class Moroccan vote, which has traditionally cast its ballots for Likud or the Sephardi religious party, Shas. Biton insists that is not the reason the former mayor is getting his vote. ‘I’m Moroccan, but I’m not voting for him because of that, but because he’s a decent human being.”
A few minutes earlier I had spoken to another unemployed Moroccan, Claude. His brother had lost his job and had gone to Peretz for help. ‘I don’t believe Peretz,” he said. ‘He’s a liar. He said he’d help my brother and he didn’t. How can I trust him?” Claude was thinking of voting for the far-right racist party Yisrael Beytenu. ‘We can’t make peace with the Arabs,” he said. ‘I don’t believe in peace any more. Bombing is their mentality.”
One problem for Peretz will be if his votes really do rely on what he did for people in the past, whether as mayor or later head of the Histadruth. The other question is whether Israelis can be persuaded by Peretz to consider the economy more important than what, in Israel, passes for security. Biton thinks Peretz might be bluffing: ‘There’s no question that the economy is important, but if he becomes prime minister, he’ll be even more hard-line on defence than [Menachem] Begin was,” he says, referring to the former prime minister who is considered to be the visionary of the Greater Israel movement. ‘People need to remember that he’s a Moroccan, and when you slap a Moroccan he won’t wait for the Americans’ green light to go in. The Palestinians know what a Moroccan is.”
These are the standard views of the poor of Sderot. ‘Arabs are animals, all of them,” says 26-year-old Yossi, half Moroccan, half Egyptian, who runs a café. ‘Business here sucks, but Peretz only says he’ll help the poor so he can get elected; once people like him get in, they do nothing. Peretz is a populist who isn’t respected on the international stage.” Instead, he says he is going to vote for Binjamin Netanyahu, the leader of Likud. ‘We need a prime minister who will start a war to put an end to the Palestinians’ violence.”
Israelis originating in Arab countries have not historically shown a greater affinity with the Palestinians. The anger of the Moroccans at their treatment by the Ashkenazim when they arrived in Israel in the 1950s, the racism they experienced, the menial jobs they were obliged to do, has festered for decades. In the early 1970s, radical Moroccans formed a Black Panther party, fighting for civil rights and class struggle against the Ashkenazi elites. Seen from outside, the Moroccans ought to be heavily represented in any left-wing opposition party, and some Palestinians have seen in the Sephardim a natural constituency that would join with Palestinians to press for a single state. What has happened is the exact opposite.
Although ethnically Ashkenazi, many of the million-strong Jewish immigrants who came from the former Soviet Union in the early 1990s share their opinions and prejudices with the Sephardim. Nor do Peretz’s economic policies appeal to them. For those who lived for nearly 70 years under Soviet communism, a socialist as prime minister is not an attractive proposition. Even his large moustache is said to be a factor in the Russians’ alienation. As Moyal jokes: ‘If he looks like Stalin, and he walks like Stalin, and he talks like Stalin, then he must be Stalin.”
Some say Ashkenazi voters are leaving Labour for Kadima because they can’t bear the idea of a Moroccan prime minister. Older Labour voters bear a grudge against him for snatching the leadership from Peres. His meagre army experience is held up by some as evidence of his weakness in defence.
On a Saturday afternoon at the park on the Hayakon river, outside Tel Aviv, families are picnicking in the spring sunshine. Labour activists have said there would be a tent, with food, and I am expecting that it will become a political meeting point, where Israelis will argue the issues of the campaign. But there is no tent — the campaign can’t afford it. The activists approach the picnickers to hand out mock $1 000 bills which Labour has printed, in an attempt to illustrate Peretz’s key campaign promise: to increase the minimum wage from $600 to $1 000 a month. First, though, they discuss how to deal with questions about an interview in Ha’aretz in which Peretz conceded that he did not expect to become prime minister, but would form part of a centre-left coalition with Kadima. They are stuck with a leader who does not even believe his own propaganda.
Later that night I go to a Kadima rally in Nes Tziona, south of Tel Aviv. The rally is held in a banqueting hall. About 1 200 people have squeezed in to hear Peres and the new rising star in Israeli politics, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni. Kadima has inherited the opaque vision of Sharon; no one knows what his plans were before his stroke.
Kadima, Moyal had told me, will self-destruct within three years. It has no core ideology, no vision; it was an opportunistic construct, he says. But it is self-evident that Kadima is merely a mirror that reflects what is called in Israel the national consensus, expressed succinctly by a friend who has previously voted Labour. ‘Peretz is a thug,” he says. ‘He doesn’t know about politeness, what to say or how to behave. As far as I’m concerned, the only issue in this election is the final borders, and when I think about who is going to make up the coalition it will be Kadima and Labour, and that’s my choice.”
I say I don’t think that Kadima’s vision of a final settlement, which would mean retaining settlement blocks around Jerusalem, would ever be acceptable to the Palestinians. My friend’s response is forthright. ‘I don’t give a shit what the Palestinians don’t want. I don’t think anything will ever be acceptable to them and I received that message with the results of the last Palestinian elections [in which Hamas was elected].”
Inside the hall, the activists are well dressed and of a large spread of ages. I notice there is a disproportionately large number of Ethiopians. Peres delivers a speech in English to new immigrants from what he calls the Anglo-Saxon world. Then Livni appears, to huge applause. She has the oratorical force of Margaret Thatcher and the looks of Hillary Clinton. It is clear that the toothless unemployed man on the poverty-stricken streets of Sderot is being pushed aside by the Kadima juggernaut. And yet the voices on the stage are anxious. They fear that the polls are telling the voters that the election is won already, and that people will stay at home. When Kadima was formed last November, it said it would sign up 100 000 new members; it has got only a tenth of that.
What will happen on Tuesday? Pollsters are predicting a record low turnout. Forty-five per cent of voters between 18 and 32 say they will not vote; this figure rises to two-thirds among the secular young. The Green Leaf party, which campaigns on the single issue of legalising marijuana, might even get a seat in the Knesset. And this is the real story of this election: that in the most contested vote, in the most controversial, most closely scrutinised and most argued-about country in the world, in the place that declares itself ‘the only democracy in the Middle East”, many have given up altogether on democracy.
‘We are at the end of ideology,” says Moyal. ‘My dream is the dream of Greater Israel, from the Jordan to the sea, but I don’t think many will join me. If you’re looking for justice, you’re talking about ideology, and justice can only be achieved with blood, and we’re tired of blood. It’s now definite that the Israelis will stay here and the Palestinians will stay here. The old slogans brought us seven wars.”
But there used to be other slogans, ones that Moyal’s vision of a Greater Israel have obscured and gradually destroyed. The election should be about a question: why a society that enshrined Jewish values in its declaration of independence, and which promised ‘complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex”, should have abandoned the poor, the old and the sick, and left its Arab citizens feeling much as the Moyals and the Peretzes did when they were a minority in Morocco.
Last Monday, Peretz’s battle bus visited what should be his natural constituency, a kibbutz — once the heartlands of Israeli socialism. They showed him its industry — not agriculture, but the largest printing press in the Middle East. It was spewing out cheque books for every bank in Israel. —