israel’s “first-ever Human Rights March”

;Several thousand Israelis took part in what was billed as Israel’s “first-ever Human Rights March” in Tel Aviv on December 11. Many of those who attended the gathering were affiliated with the several dozen Israeli NGOs that took part in organizing the event. There were gay rights supporters, protesters against the deportation of immigrants and refugees, a large contingent of Arab Israelis and even a group representing fans of a Tel Aviv soccer club.

The march’s call-to-action warned that “over this past year, the very foundations of our democracy have been shaken.” It demanded, among other things, “equal citizenship for all.”

Altogether, the event may not have seemed like much to passersby. There weren’t traffic jams, even though the march took place during the busy hours of Friday morning. Yet these thousands of marchers represent the future and the åhope of the Israeli left.

There is no escaping the truth: The old Zionist left is gone. Labor is disintegrating; grassroots movements such as Peace Now are being increasingly de-legitimized, and Meretz was reduced in the most recent elections to an insignificant three Knesset seats. The controversy over the diplomatic process is heating up, and the tension between the government and the Arab minority is building, but the voice of the Israeli left is almost completely absent.

Meanwhile, it is the Likud that has become Israel’s dominant ideological and political power, in ways that Menachem Begin never could have dreamed. The personal rivalry between opposition leader Tzipi Livni and Premier Benjamin Netanyahu hides the fact that Likud people are actually in control of Israel’s three largest political parties: Livni and Shaul Mofaz in Kadima; Avigdor Lieberman and Uzi Landau in Yisrael Beiteinu, and Netanyahu at the Likud’s helm. The Likud and the two parties that split from it currently hold 70 out of 120 Knesset seats, something even Mapai in the glory days of David Ben-Gurion didn’t achieve.

What enabled the right’s current success was the ideological turn it took. The last decade has seen all the right’s leaders – from Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert to, finally, Netanyahu – accept the left’s idea of a Palestinian state. They did so not because they suddenly abandoned the desire to hold on to the entirety of the Greater Land of Israel, nor because they realized how unjust the occupation is. The only reason leaders from the right are today willing to consider withdrawal from Hebron and even from East Jerusalem is that one argument made by the Zionist left did strike a chord with them: that a Palestinian state is the only way to keep a clear Jewish majority in Israel.

By raising the flag of “the demographic battle,” the Jewish left was able to win the debate over the West Bank and Gaza. But it did so in a way that betrayed the same values the left has always claimed to represent – humanism, equal rights and brotherhood. That’s also where the left’s political fate was sealed. When the left abandoned the hope for true partnership with the Palestinians – on both sides of the Green Line – and became almost solely defined by its focus on demography and ethnic separation, it opened the door for Lieberman and his vision of an exclusionary Jewish 'state'. More

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