There will be a general election in Israel the week after next. The issues have been clarified by the recent incursion into Gaza against Hamas, which proved extremely popular (in Israel). The prime minister, Ehud Olmert, will finally be gone to his reward: some fairly serious corruption charges. He mis-micromanaged the incursion into Lebanon against Hezbollah in 2006, and pretty much everything else he touched, and his legacy now consists of his ingenuity in clinging to power. Israel cannot afford another prime minister like him.
The new Kadima leader, Tzipi Livni, would be that person: “Olmert in a skirt,” as many have described her. The secret of catastrophic leadership is to have no clear idea what one wants to achieve. Self-consciously “centrist” parties are generally able to provide this. Ms. Livni’s approval rating, like that of her coalition partner Ehud Barak (the defence minister, and leader of Labour), rose as a result of the Gaza incursion, in which several of the mistakes of Lebanon were not repeated. But it was really a success of the Israel Defence Forces, who enjoyed greater freedom from the politicians in both the planning and execution of the Gaza mission, in the shadow of Lebanon. And the Israeli public knows that.
Many abroad favour Ms. Livni because she is a woman, and in this moment of Obamania, they think she has style. She is no Golda Meir—more manly than the men but with a woman’s empathetic understanding and manipulative abilities.
Ms. Livni had not the strength of personality to stand up successfully even to Mr. Olmert, when his popularity had plunged close to zero. She has already demonstrated an inability to manage the minor coalition partners with which every Israeli government is saddled. Her best argument is that Israel needs the sort of prime minister that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton can get along with. That is not a winning argument.
The Labour Party cannot win the election, so Ehud Barak needn’t be considered.
Readers with long memories will recall my unflattering views on Benjamin Netanyahu, prime minister in the late 1990s, and memorably unable to get along with the Clinton administration. I was filing from Israel and Egypt at the time. I was convinced that Mr. Netanyahu stood in the way of genuine diplomatic possibilities, and that he had earned the special detestation that was expressed by every Arab I interviewed, and quite a few Israelis. Wonderfully articulate, and clear in outlook, he had nevertheless a self-destructive tendency to play political games behind so many backs, as to be trusted by no one.
In retrospect, I was naïve. There were no more diplomatic opportunities then, than now. The experience of the Bush administration has convinced me that there is no future in playing the particular game of “roadmap to peace.” Negotiations are a dead loss, and now that the U.S. is employing George Mitchell as “special envoy,” we may safely project more of the shuttle diplomacy that has accomplished nothing over the last three decades, beyond empowering Palestinian terrorists from the PLO to Hamas. An Israeli government willing to play to the Obama administration’s rules is going to be shafted.
Israelis understand this. One lesson emerged from Gaza: that negotiations don’t make the rockets stop. They are stopped for the moment only because the IDF succeeded in making the price of launching them so high, that Hamas is suing for a one-year “hudna,” or temporary truce.
From this distance, it appears the old Israeli notion—that peace happens only while her neighbours are afraid to attack—has revived. It is a notion that corresponds well to the country’s hard experience since independence. Strong and immediate retaliation for any breach of the peace is necessary: “You do this, we do that.” It goes without saying, this is not the way to court the affection of liberals throughout the West, but Israel has nothing to lose on that front, for she has never been rewarded for heroic restraint.
The West Bank stayed quiet throughout the Gaza campaign, and except a couple of errant rockets on the northern frontier—mere jeux d’esprit from Hezbollah—the thoroughness of the operation was noted. Moreover, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the other so-called “moderate” regional powers have become sufficiently alarmed by the threat from Iran—for which both Hamas and Hezbollah serve as proxies—that they will not even “run interference” on the terrorists’ behalf. This does not mean they will sign new peace agreements with Israel, however.
Mr. Netanyahu’s likely victory in the upcoming election will be explained, correctly for a change, by Israel’s “shift to the right,” after a decade of setbacks. Not only Netanyahu’s Likud, but all parties have shifted, in the same direction. Netanyahu simply represents the most plausible way to hang tough, given an Obama administration that will itself be merely responding to events.
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