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Fundamentally Freund: Today’s Election – A Prediction
Excerpts;
Every once in a while, a newspaper headline succeeds in capturing the true significance of an historical moment.
“Future borders at stake as Israel votes” reads the front page of today’s Jerusalem Post, summing up the importance of this election.
So, here’s my prediction for the results of the election:
Mr. Olmert and his Kadima party will win 25 to 30 seats, but the right-wing and religious parties will have a much stronger showing than the polls anticipate. Olmert will be unable to form a stable ruling coalition without reaching across the political spectrum to the right. His desire to rush headlong into extensive unilateral retreats will prove politically impossible to carry out.
But that, of course, depends on whether each and every one of us who loves the Land of Israel gets out there and votes. So please make sure that you do so.
Our World: Of Ideology and Incompetence, by Caroline Glick
Excerpts;
Sunday evening Kadima Education Minister Meir Sheetrit proudly extolled Kadima’s “uniqueness” as the one Israeli party which “has disengaged from all ideology.”
Sheetrit proudly proclaimed: “We don’t have the baggage of the heritage of Ze’ev Jabotinsky or Berl Katzenelson [the ideological founding fathers of Likud and Labor] on our back. We are looking only to the future.”
When the polls close this evening, the most non-deliberative election campaign in Israeli history will be brought to an end. If the opinion polls bear out, Sheetrit’s party will emerge as the uncontested ruling party of Israel. How is it that Israelis are expected to embrace a party that stands for nothing?
Israeli society became alienated from ideology with the collapse of the Oslo peace process and the start of the Palestinian terror war in 2000. The bombings, calls for jihad and indoctrination of child suicide bombers all served to convince the Israeli public that the leftist utopian ideology of peace through appeasement was a lie. The messianic ideology of the religious Right was never considered.
This non-ideological atmosphere was eminently suited for Ariel Sharon. Sharon promised the Israeli public neither peace nor victory. He promised the public quiet. He told the public, “Follow me, and everything will be alright. Trust me.”
As his political consultants told Yediot Aharonot on Friday, if Sharon were running today instead of Ehud Olmert, he would not have announced any plan to conduct massive expulsions of Israelis and withdrawals of IDF forces from Judea and Samaria, as Olmert has. “He would have said: ‘I’m the message. I’m the plan.'”
Without Sharon, his new party, Kadima, is led by undistinguished machine politicians and by Shimon Peres, the failed ideologue of the Left. They have retained Sharon’s public support base first and foremost by presenting themselves as non-ideological policy wonks capable of leading the country on the basis of daily cost-benefit analyses. They tell the Israeli public that its charismatic leader has been seamlessly replaced by a bureaucratic leadership no less competent and non-ideological.
THE PROBLEM is that however wonkish Kadima’s leaders may be, they are not, in fact competent.
Policies built around cost-benefit analyses based on polling data and daily State Department press briefings – while perhaps necessary for a party based on nothing – are incapable of contending with the threats Israel faces and the responsibilities the government holds toward its citizenry and its allies.
Tragically, the public is not able to see this because, with the help of the elections law and the media, Kadima has been able to obfuscate the shortcomings of its central policy and the incompetence of its leaders. Indeed Kadima has been able to make hating Likud leader Binyamin Netanyahu the central issue of the elections.
SO IF THE polls are correct and the Israeli electorate today elects Kadima to form the next government, what can one reasonably expect will happen?
First, Kadima will eventually collapse because it stands for nothing. Ideology is defined as a systematic way of interpreting the world. Kadima’s members – who come from the messianic Left and the moderate Right – do not see the world in the same way. As a result, their merger is inherently unstable. In the absence of their charismatic leader, Sharon, around whom they coalesced, Kadima has no rationale for existing except its leaders’ shared desire to rule. When its members’ contradictory interests and interpretations of reality inevitably bring them into conflict with one another, Kadima will break apart.
Second, because Kadima’s leaders have rallied around a policy that will endanger Israel, and because they are incapable of shielding the country from the consequences of their policy. As was the case with the leftist peace ideologues, eventually the public will be unable to deny their incompetence.