The Ugly Stalemate: the Gaza Flotilla and Israel’s Conservative Adventurism

Daniel J. Levine, Colgate University

Daniel Bertrand Monk, Colgate University

Israel’sraid on the relief flotilla bound for Gaza has generated a media firestorm, butone familiar in its broad outlines.  TheEnglish-language press has engaged wise elder statesmen to discuss the future of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations; the finerpoints of international law are parsed in accordance with this narrative orthat (here and here); videos ofpreparations to repel Israeli commandos by ‘terrorists’ on the Mavi Marmara are juxtaposedagainst images of despoiled relief supplies at the Israeliport of Ashdod.  

Aperfect storm is also brewing in diplomatic circles.  Turkeyhas recalled its ambassador to Israeland PM Erdogan has strongly condemned Israel’sactions; the Arab League, the UN Security Council and Human Rights Commissionare calling for enquiries; Israeli diplomats in Egypt,Jordan, Sweden, Denmark,Belgium, Ireland, Norway,Spain and Greece weresummoned for clarifications or protests. US reactions have been muted, but the additional burden to an alreadystrained relationship is apparent. This latest imbroglio seems to suggest thatIsraeli tone-deafness now spans the full spectrum of force: from botched covertoperations like the recent assassination of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai, to high-tempocatastrophes like Operation ‘Cast Lead’ (the 2008/9 Gaza war), to thesettlement expansions in East Jerusalem announced during the visit of VicePresident Joseph Biden.  

 Indeed,Israel’s apparent and severe indifference tointernational opinion is now itself arecurring theme: policymakers, pundits and the blogosphere seem not to knowwhat to make of it.   Looking atthe extent to which the Netanyahu government is prepared to go to enforce theGaza blockade – despite the risk of alienating allies on whom Israel has anenormous strategic dependence – observers struggle to make sense of a statethat seems intent on meeting allies and enemies alike with a mix of intransigenceand incoherence. 

Yetdebates over the ‘rationality’ of policymakers turn naturally to the competinginterests against which questions of state policy are hashed out.  In earlier essays, we suggested that bothsympathetic observers of Israel, andprofessional policymakers, viewed domesticIsraeli political developments through an outdated conceptual framework.  The Israeli state, we argued, was infull-blown retreat.  With itsdissolution, the familiar dichotomy of a dovish ‘left’ and a hawkish ‘right’had dissolved as well.  The largerconsensus that had tempered Israel’s fractious politics in the 1980s and early1990s – one in which both ‘doves’ and ‘hawks’ were united in their largervision of Israel as a secular-national state, and divided primarily over thosecompromises that should be made to the Palestinian national movement – nolonger exists.  To be sure, those oldvoices still exist, and many in the Israeli political establishment continue totreat them as the defining fault lines of domestic politics.  Yet they no longer combine to represent acritical mass of political views.

Rather,we suggested, one needed to think of Israeli politics in terms of ‘statists’and ‘radicals’: between those who see the Israeli state as a political solutionto the ‘Jewish Question’ in its nineteenth-century variant (the problem ofJewish statelessness and vulnerability in an era of nationalism), and those whosee that state in broader, transcendental terms: as a stepping-stone towardsome variation of a "Third Kingdom of Israel,” whether parsed throughexplicitly Messianic terms, or ostensibly secular ones.  The latter routinely threaten the use forceto introduce an alternative form of governance if parliamentary democracy failsto serve their agenda:  by way ofexample, consider recent Rabbinical rulings calling onreligious soldiers to disobey orders that involve the ‘uprooting’ of West Banksettlements.

Inthe midst of that challenge, statists from both the old ‘left’ and ‘right’ havehad to band together. Labor and Likud seem to have converged to keep theessential institutions of the Israeli state – the Defense and FinanceMinistries, the military, the courts and the central bank – out of the hands ofthe radicals.  The statists continue togovern, but they pay for the privilege. First, by outright political bribery: rewarding junior ministries to theradicals, and showering their educational, social and political institutionswith state resources even as public libraries and schools must take up theirbegging-bowls.  Second, and moreimportantly, by their inaction: by conceding the power to make substantivepolitical decisions on foreign and security policy.  To remain in power, they temporize: showingintransigence to the Palestinians and the Syrians; by deferring difficultconstitutive questions about Israel’s identity as ademocratic society and the role of minorities within it; by staving off US andregional peace initiatives, without rejecting them outright.  An ugly, delicate stalemate between statistsand radicals is thus – just barely – preserved. 

Israel’sactions on the Mavi Marmara need tobe understood In light of this ‘ugly stalemate,’ which has its own politicallogic and pays its own kinds of political rewards. The statists need topreserve their coalition, lest another election depress their representation inKnesset and the government still further. Increasingly, the state and thecoalition have been thus conflated with one another out of brute necessity.Unable to make a deal on Palestine – and under some pressure externally to doso – the statists can only govern by resort to what appears, from the outside,to be rank adventurism.   Yet it isadventurism of a peculiar kind, for it is not revisionist, but conservative:it represents the only possible path for maintaining some façade of statistpredominance (and perhaps someday restoring its substance), in the face ofchallenges that would otherwise force statist into open and perhaps violentconfrontation for hegemony with radicals.

Considerhere debates within the Israeli cabinet immediately following the assault onthe Turkish flotilla.  Israel’s ChannelOne reported a disagreement within the government: between Justice MinisterYa’akov Ne’eman and the Prime Minister, Defense Minister Ehud Barak and ForeignMinister Yvette Liberman.  What should bedone with those 50 or so of the detained Turks who were suspected of links toterrorist organizations?  Should they betried in Israel or deported?  Ne’emancalled for trials, the others for immediate deportation.  One interpretation of this debate suggests aprincipled defense of the rule of law in Ne’eman’sposition and political expediency in that of the PM and his allies.  Yet the Minister of Justice was not seeking to defend the rule of law;he was acting in the name of those sectors of Israeli society which reject rapprochement with the Arab and Muslimworlds.  To try the 50 detainees wouldperpetuate a crisis which – while detrimental to the interests ofIsraeli-statist notions of realpolitik,plays directly into the Manichean worldview of its radicals.  Ne’eman, for his part, has been on recordadvocating for the incorporation of Jewish religious law into the state legalsystem: the Jewish equivalent of a Shariastate that would transcend the limits of statist realpolitik.  Netanyahu,Barak and Liberman – who in this instance, has shown a Putin-like ability tomove between statesmanlike resolve and political thuggery – rushed in to assuredeportation.  Only by reserving forthemselves the right to abrogate the rule of law could they preserve thestatist-radical stalemate – even if doing so ultimately undermined the very‘statist’ values they were ostensibly defending. 

Israel’sallies misunderstand the starkness of this “ugly stalemate.”  Reading it as simply a moment in Israelipolitics where the political ‘right’s’ star is in the ascent, they have chosento moderate their criticism of the Netanyahu government: why bring down whatthe Israeli electorate will simply vote back into office?  This is why, in the midst of theircondemnation, US leaders are tempering their displeasure with reaffirmations of“Israel’s right to defend itself.” But in fact theproblem runs deeper: the left and the right have dissolved into one another,and survive only by eating their political seed corn.  In failing to understand and address thisreality, Israel’s allies and well-wishers abroad actually perpetuate it. So dothose concerned with the Palestinian cause who understand Israeli adventurismas born of late imperial hubris, rather than weakness.

Inthe meantime, the statists keep up their end of the “ugly stalemate” only byactions which endanger their long-term political viability.  In the short term, the ‘conservativeadventurism’ of the Mavi Marmara raid– like earlier Israeli adventures in Gaza and Lebanon – has garneredconsiderable domestic support (See poll data here and here.  But viewed over the longer term, there seemslittle doubt that it isunsustainable.  Considera comparable imbroglio from Netanyahu’s first term as Prime Minister: in 1997,the Mossad attempted the poisoning of Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal, then inAmman.  The operation went awry:Meshaal’s bodyguards wrested him away from his would-be assassins, who werelater captured by Jordanian officials. Meshaal clung to life in hospital. The late King Hussein demanded that Israeli deliver the antidote to thepoison administered to him; failing that, the Mossad agents would be hanged andIsrael-Jordan relations cut.  Netanyahutemporized, but ultimately handed over the antidote.  To smooth over official relations, he thenreleases some twenty Hamas prisoners (including the movement’s then-leader,Sheikh Ahmad Yassin) held in Israeli jails. 

Then asnow, Israeli journalists decried the government’s ad hoc approach to major foreign policy decisions and its maladroithandling of the international press. Then as now, humanists decried the state’s misuse of power.  Then as now, Netanyahu (“Israel’s serialbungler,” as the Economist would call him) was pilloriedin the world media.  Then as now, therewere calls for a State Commission of Inquiry. 

Yetthen as now, too, Bibi’s ‘bungling’ did not fundamentally endanger himpolitically.  His parliamentary coalition– composed of statist right-wingers and religious and nationalist radicals –remained sound.  Calls for an independentCommission of Inquiry were staved off. The Prime Minister instead appointed a ‘clarifications committee’lacking formal judicial powers or independence, which duly cleared him ofwrongdoing.

Whatultimately did bring an end toNetanyahu’s government was instructive: not executive ‘bungling,’ but abetrayal of the burgeoning radical-statist status quo.  In October 1998, Netanyahu signed the Wye River Agreement, which promised to transfersome 13% of the territory of the West Bank to the full or partial control ofthe Palestinian National Authority.  Hiscoalition swiftly abandoned him.  Then as now: Israel’s radicals can abideincompetence.  What they cannot acceptare violations of the territorial and political status quo.

Between theattempted assassination of Meshaal in 1997 and the present Marmara crisis, thecosts of the ugly embrace between the former left and right wings of Israelipolitics have increased in direct proportion to its perceived necessity. In 1999, ‘new Labour’ leader Ehud Barak was elected; his government wouldalready be in crisis by 2000, and a new era of ‘zigzags’ among Likud, Labor andKadima – itself a symptom of statist collapse – was inaugurated.   It was here that the old right and leftbegan to dissolve into one another, in response to new political formationsarising out of rapidly ‘nationalizing’ ultra-orthodox constituencies, elementswithin the traditional ‘right’ and immigrant and settler blocs. (This is thepolitical soup out of which the radical camp would emerge).  The old political orders and movements had,by that point, long realized that they were caught in a new kind of politicalstruggle: Shimon Peres, a paragon of old-school statism, explained his failedelectoral bid for Prime Minister in 1996 as the “Jews” defeating the“Israelis.”  Moshe Feiglin – founder ofthe radical settler movement Zo Arzteinu [‘thisis our land’] – agreed.  Both understoodthat what was at stake was not Israel and Palestine,but Israel and a new Judaea. 

The only questionwas what shape the new political structures and alliances would take: thestatist-radical ‘ugly compromise’ was at that point only one of a number ofemergent possibilities.  In the late1990s, it still seemed to statists that a single magnificent burst of politicalresolve and parliamentary skill could save them, and defeat the radicals.  They are no longer under any such illusions;their weakness is – for now, at least – beyond dispute.  Indeed, in their own scramble to remainpolitically relevant, the statists have helped perpetuate it.  Today, the resort to ‘conservativeadventurism’ represents, however paradoxical this may seem, a desperate efforton the part of the statists to maintain the institutions of liberaldemocracy.  For the idea of Israel upon which their actions rest – one in which thestate is its own end – now only resonates clearly through military action. 

Wethank Sara Lipton, Jonathan Rose and Alexander Barder for many of the sourcescited in this essay.