ISRAELI Kadima Coalition
From AICbackground
OVERVIEW
The Israeli political center currently controls the government of Israel through a ruling coalition of the Kadima and Labor parties. The term “Center” here refers to this government’s policies towards handling the Palestinian situation. As compared with the Israeli left, as represented by Yossi Beilin and the Peace Now movement, the Kadima-Labor government has proven willing to use force to thwart Arab opponents, fact that was underlined dramatically during the 2009 Gaza incursion. As opposed to the Right, meaning Benjamin Netanyahu and Likud, Kadima-Labor is more willing to explore constructive possibilities to ending the current crisis, especially by unilaterally withdrawing from portions of the Occupied Territories. This position in the political center allowed Kadima leader Ehud Olmert to build a wide governing coalition, but this flexibility is also Kadima’s biggest weakness—it is vulnerable to attack from both sides, and by being flexible it can also appear less morally consistent than its more fervent rivals.
KADIMA
Kadima was the brainchild of former Likud Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who came to office as Likud PM in 2001, and served throughout the current Intifada. Sharon had a strong conservative reputation, especially on security and military issues; he had long claimed that defensive territory was preferable to peace, and was willing to take extreme measures to hunt down and kill suspected Palestinian terrorists. He thus stunned the world when he suggested unilaterally withdrawing from the Gaza Strip in 2004. Although this looked like a shocking about-face from the outside, this was really a very conservative gesture: by 2004 no one in Likud (or most of the Israeli government) trusted the Palestinian leadership whatsoever, and at the same time Sharon the ex-general felt it was a misuse of Israeli military resources to maintain an unproductive occupation of the Gaza Strip. Regardless of this cold strategic calculus, his own party rebelled against him. When he eventually mustered enough votes to approve this withdrawal in the Knesset, they came from the Labor Party, not Likud. In August 2005 this withdrawal was carried out, despite the public spectacle that came from forcibly uprooting several thousand Israeli settlers in the region. At this point the most conservative wings of his government openly rebelled against him, and Sharon barely retained party leadership. In response to this attempted coup, Sharon withdrew from Likud, and in November 2005 announced the formation of his own party, Kadima, which was dedicated to peace via unilateral withdrawal from the Occupied Territories. Although this sounded good on paper, those who knew Sharon, and had been watching him construct a massive concrete “Security Wall” around the West Bank concluded that this was something more akin to a preemptive strike: Sharon would force the peace by completing the wall, withdrawing Israeli troops from unwanted territory, and retaining whatever remained as “facts on the ground,” whether or not this was technically territory earmarked for a Palestinian state: in this way, Israel would be able to not only foster the creation of a Palestinian state that would not be a resource drain on Israel, but also establish advantageous final borders without the need for drawn out debate with untrustworthy Palestinian interlocutors.
This new party quickly achieved strong public support, and by the end of 2005 had attracted most of Sharon’s former Likud protégés as well as several prominent members of Labor. The situation complicated tremendously when Sharon suffered a massive stroke in January 2006, totally removing his powerful presence from the fledgling party. Leadership passed to Sharon’s ally Ehud Olmert, former mayor of Jerusalem and Likud member. He vowed to carry on Sharon’s legacy by completing the Security Wall, negotiating a peace with the Palestinians on the basis of the Road Map, and if necessary withdrawing unilaterally from territory to achieve final secure borders for Israel. This platform proved very popular, and Kadima emerged triumphant from the March 2006 parliamentary elections. Olmert formed a coalition with the Labor Party, and together this strong coalition has steered Israel through the past turbulent year, though as of mid-2007 this coalition’s future seems doubtful.
LABOR
Labor is the junior partner in the current government, headed by former Prime MinisterEhud Barak, who became Defense Minister in the Kadima-Labor government. Labor is the oldest institution in Israeli politics, founded in the 1940s as a member of the Socialist International by the fathers of modern Israel. It has weathered six decades of crises and has produced more prime ministers than any other party in Israeli history. It was a Labor PM, Yitzhak Rabin, who signed the Oslo Accords and seriously committed Israel to a peaceful future with the Palestinians. This vision has since fallen on hard times, but Labor has retained a general inclination toward a negotiated peace with the Palestinians, and remains the more liberal faction within the current government, especially considering that most of the upper ranks of Kadima are ex-Likud members, whose outlook on virtually all social issues are farther right than those of Labor.
SCANDALS
Despite the numerical strength of this ruling coalition, it is a remarkably shaky enterprise for a number of reasons. On one level, it has simply been difficult to create a coalition which satisfies the desires of leftist and rightist coalition members. The more serious challenges to this coalition, however, come from a number of scandals which have rocked the coalition since it took power:
OLMERT AND CORRUPTION
As former mayor of Jerusalem, Ehud Olmert allegedly took bribes on a number of building projects. These charges were settled out of court in 1992, but ever since Olmert has been seen as a slightly dodgy political character: remember that he was never intended to be the front man for this new party, and only became PM after the incapacitation of Ariel Sharon. Olmert’s enemies, especially Benjamin Netanyahu of Likud, are quick to pick up on this alleged corruption, and as a result the ethics of the entire coalition has been sullied in the eyes of voters.
HAMAS TRIUMPHANT
After the unilateral Israeli withdrawal of Gaza in August 2005, the Palestinians held general parliamentary elections in early 2006, which shocked the world by bringing the Islamist movement Hamas to power. For the Israeli right, Sharon’s withdrawal from Gaza had been a green light for terrorists to seize power in the Occupied Territories, and they have damned Kadima for creating a situation which allowed Israel’s direst enemies to prosper from Kadima’s supposed peace plan. Since Olmert and the government refuse to have any contact with a designated terrorist organization like Hamas, this places the Kadima-Labor coalition in a terrible bind: they cannot negotiate with the enemy, which means that they also cannot produce any tangible results to the Israeli public to prove that withdrawal has in any way been a good thing for the State of Israel.
LEBANON
The much bigger problem for this government is the fallout from the July-August 2006 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Hezbollah penetrated Israeli territory in July and kidnapped several Israeli soldiers before slipping back into Lebanon. In response, Olmert declared war against the country of Lebanon, and began a punishing air campaign against the majority of the country, not just those portions inhabited by Hezbollah, with the stated purpose of either destroying Hezbollah in its entirety or forcing the Lebanese government to do so: at either rate, Olmert vowed to free Israel’s kidnapped soldier. During the course of this war, it quickly became apparent that the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) had been lured into Lebanon by Hezbollah and progressively torn apart by a number of extremely well-executed guerilla assaults. The IDF took casualties far beyond what everyone had expected, especially at the hands of what everyone had previously believed was a rag tag militia. When Israel withdrew in August, they had not recovered their soldiers, Lebanon had been torn to shreds, and Hezbollah survived, more popular than ever. The Israeli public believed they had lost the war, and were furious at the government. Netanyahu and his allies in the opposition seized on these checkered results to accuse Olmert and then-Labor Party leader Amir Peretz (who served as Defense Minister during the Israel-Hezbollah War) of gross incompetence in defending Israel: in a military-minded society like Israel, this was a very serious accusation.
An independent inquiry was carried out into these charges, and findings released in April 2007 came down squarely against Olmert and Peretz. Olmert was accused of entering into a war without any strategic consideration for either its execution or its outcome, and as a result of basically committing sending Israeli troops into blind combat. Peretz was accused of making strategic decisions without consulting more experienced military officials, and generally failing in the task of defense minister. No formal charges or recommendations were made against either individual, but Kadima’s own foreign minister Tzipi Livni called for Olmert’s resignation, a call which Olmert heeded in 2008. Opinion polls indicate that Likud is likely to win the upcoming election, but Livni and Defense Minister/Labor leader Ehud Barak both aquitted themselves well during the Gaza incursion of 2009-09, and that has made the election outcome more difficult to predict.
References:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kadima
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel%27s_unilateral_disengagement_plan
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_%28Israel%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amir_Peretz
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Histadrut
