They have been talking about it and trying it for some 50
years but now it seems that Prime Minister Sharon may pull it
off: the formation of a political party that is located at
the center of the Israeli political spectrum.
Every few years a few prominent politicians break off and try
to claim "the center." For example, the wishfully named
Centrist Party in the elections of 5759 (1999) drew in
politicians from both Likud and Labor. However it won only
six seats and quickly disappeared.
In the last election, Shinui claimed to represent the
political center and won 15 seats. However they did not fool
anyone and it was clear that their real platform was just
being anti-religious. According to the polls they are due for
a sharp drop this time around. Several other parties that
offered themselves as representatives of the Israeli center
at various times shared the same history and it is hard to
even find anyone today who remembers their names.
Now, according to the polls, Sharon will pull it off. His
party will be the largest one, and he will form the next
government, for better or for worse.
Still, there are almost four months to the elections, and
what counts are the ballots cast on election day and not the
answers given to pollsters. This was dramatically illustrated
in the polls before the Labor Party leadership elections
which gave Peres an easy win — though he lost narrowly
in the actual ballot.
Yet this time it seems that Sharon is leading the pack in a
direction that all are moving. They are all shedding —
or at least hiding — their ideological baggage of the
past.
Labor leader Amir Peretz started out by emphasizing his
enthusiastic support for the Oslo agreements, but soon
stopped talking about that subject and now just speaks about
the oppressed workers.
The move to draft President Moshe Katzav as the leader of
Likud was an attempt to bring in someone more bland than the
current leaders. Uzi Landau, the most ideologically "pure" of
the Likud leadership candidates, has already dropped out of
the race.
On the Right, the National Religious Party has dropped its
requirement that its leaders and members be religious and is
trying to form a united front of the Right with the secular
National Union.
Most observers call this a move to the Center of Israeli
politics, but it seems to us to be something else
entirely.
Israel is a state that was founded on ideological grounds.
Everyone involved in setting it up approached the subject on
the basis of his or her ideology. Some felt the state was a
fulfillment of Leftist ideals. Some felt it was a fulfillment
of cultural or national Jewish ideals. Some felt that its
founding was a fulfillment of religious ideals.
The real controversy was over the proper ideology, and the
policies that were advocated, and ultimately the political
choices made were an outcome of the ideological way the
person or group viewed the world. If Israel was a fulfillment
of "universal" human goals then concern for Arabs rated high
on the scale of values. If Israel was a realization of
specifically Jewish aspirations, then things were ordered
differently.
Those who did not participate in the ideological debate
altogether, like the chareidim, were accused of being
galuti. In the Diaspora, it was said, we could not
realize our true selves and had to make do with the best that
could be attained under the circumstances. Here, in Our Land,
it was claimed, we can — and therefore must —
strive to achieve our ideals and not just to get by.
Now there is a rush to pragmatism from all directions. Sharon
is clearly a pragmatist and has been one during his whole
career. His leadership is not based on any ideology. He has
never even articulated an ideology. Labor's appeal is to
people's pockets and not their hearts or minds. It is hard to
see NRP's move as anything but a move away from ideology: we
presume that they are not more in favor of secularism than
before, just less insistent on their religion. From our
perspective this is not necessarily better or worse than
before. But it does make them less competitive with us.
Torah Judaism has not changed its approach. We remain with
our underlying — but overriding — deep idealistic
commitment to Hashem and his Torah, but that leads us to make
pragmatic political choices. To be a chareidi Jew means to go
in the way of Torah as interpreted by gedolei Yisroel
shlita — and not to tilt to either the Right or the
Left.
