More unified than meets the eye

A highly influential minority is trying to break the spirit of the people in Israel.

By ISRAEL HAREL
Elections in Israel (photo credit: REUTERS/BAZ RATNER)
Elections in Israel
(photo credit: REUTERS/BAZ RATNER)
THE ISRAELI election campaign has been characterized by a paucity of discussion on substance – like how to achieve peace or narrow the gap between rich and poor. Instead the media focus is on the elected leaders, especially the ostentatious lifestyle, partly at the public's expense, of the prime ministerial couple Sara and Benjamin Netanyahu.
The once heated argument between Right and Left over what to do with the territories has been relegated to the margins. And even when it surfaces, it isn’t very interesting because no one has anything new or creative to say. Nor has the socioeconomic discontent, which erupted in the stormy lower-middle-class demonstrations of the summer of 2011, become a decisive issue.
Three weeks before the ballot the State Comptroller published a scathing report on the Netanyahu government’s failures to deal with soaring housing prices. Yet despite the fact that most Netanyahu voters come from the social strata most affected by the housing crisis, the Comptroller’s report, at least according to the polls, did not alter voting patterns and left his Likud party virtually unscathed.
Polls, which appear almost every day, show the two main parties, Likud and the Zionist Union, consistently running neck and neck. In other words, campaign propaganda, the embarrassing scandals pertaining to the Netanyahu family’s conduct, and the outgoing government’s many shortcomings, including the criticism most Likud members have over its feeble conduct of Operation Protective Edge against Hamas in Gaza last summer, are hardly moving voters from one bloc to the other.
All this does not bear out conventional wisdom that Israel is an internally conflicted, torn and polarized society. This erroneous notion stems mainly from the way the Israeli media, and in its wake, the international media and Jewish press, cover what goes on in the country.
Since the Israeli media is clearly dominated by the Left, and to a large extent the radical Left, every ideological argument turns into a cosmic rift threatening to rip the country apart and every government slip becomes a diplomatic catastrophe with potentially existential ramifications. The most recent example: Netanyahu’s speech to the US Congress.
I say categorically: A highly influential minority is trying to break the spirit of the people in Israel and in the Diaspora through the communications media over which it has almost absolute control.
It depicts Israel as an apartheid state, an occupying power, rotten to the core.
But the average Israeli has learned to shun this relentless propaganda portraying him and his country only in the very worst light.
This is one of the main reasons for the lack of genuine interest – even on the eve of elections – in issues the media has been harping on for years – “the occupation” (can a people be occupiers in their own homeland? the average Israeli asks himself), “persecution” of the Arabs, and the settlements.
Nevertheless, Israel is still a long way off the internal unity of purpose it needs to meet the security and socioeconomic challenges it faces. The main reason for this is that Israeli society is divided into a wide range of interest groups, each determined to get a greater share of the national pie. That explains why there is such a plethora of political parties in the country. In return for joining a governing coalition – and there are those that would join any coalition – these special interest parties demand and receive exclusive funding, which corrupts the political system and also leads to personal corruption, especially among the politicians themselves.
When every party, even the most esoteric, has to justify its raison d’être on the political map (over and above the siphoning off of large budgetary chunks for its special interest group), all kinds of specious ideologies which don’t hold water are invented.
In other words, differences between the parties are more often than not manufactured rather than genuine.
This is particularly apparent during really testing times, like wars or military campaigns, during which we see a staunch and fundamental national unity. 
Israel Harel, the founder and former director of the Judea, Samaria and Gaza Settlers’ Council, is founding chairman of the Jerusalem-based Institute for Zionist Strategies and a columnist for Haaretz.