Vision from the past

Few remember now, but the third largest party to emerge from Israel's first election was the Liberal Party/General Zionist Party.

By JPOST EDITORIAL
Trajtenberg Committee 'Rothschild Team' 311 (photo credit: Moshe Milner/GPO)
Trajtenberg Committee 'Rothschild Team' 311
(photo credit: Moshe Milner/GPO)
Fifty years ago, on August 15, 1961, Israel held elections for its fifth Knesset. Few remember now, but the third largest party to emerge from that election was the Liberal Party/General Zionist Party headed by Peretz Bernstein.
Bernstein was a German-born Jew who had come to Palestine in 1936. A former businessman in the grain trade, he was also a signatory of Israel’s Declaration of Independence.
An influential minister of trade and industry in the early years of the state, he engineered the merger of his party with Menachem Begin’s Herut to form Gahal. Bernstein and his General Zionist Party have been the great losers of Israeli historiography that tends to focus on the triumphs and hardships of the political Left and Right.
However, the General Zionist Party, which was founded in 1922, offered a clear vision for an Israel whose economy would be modeled on free-market capitalism, the sanctity of private property and a robust respect for the middle class.
For years this party, whose power base was in the industrializing urban environment, struggled to make its voice heard in a country where populist politics reigned.
What is extraordinary in retrospect was that the vision of Bernstein and his fellow travelers caught on in the first decades of the state. In the face of the current mass protests engendered by high housing prices, but which encapsulate a much greater anger among the middle class, there needs to be a new articulate message for a future that incorporates such a vision.
Many of the people sitting in tents on Tel Aviv’s Rothschild Boulevard and elsewhere are forsaking those values in favor of simplistic calls for “social justice” and a “welfare state.”
They are drawn into this morass by a movement that pulls them along to the sound of iconic singers such as Shlomo Artzi and Mosh Ben-Ari.
So far, the government has not come up with a well-formulated response, nor has it come out strongly on the side of fighting a necessary struggle for the middle class.
The government has created a committee headed by Prof. Manuel Trajtenberg, the head of the National Economic Council in the Prime Minister’s Office. This is a step in the right direction. As President Shimon Peres said, “The protest movement must effect a real change in priorities in Israel and cannot fail. This protest must create new hope.”
Trajtenberg has added that “we need social sensitivity not as a slogan but as a characteristic of the panel members.”
However, the central feature of what is being done demonstrates neither hope nor social sensitivity, but making an intelligent argument heard over the voices of the popular performers and shouting that are the mainstay of the protest movement. The protest movement desires a return to a 1950s style of politics, with banners and slogans about social justice and welfare states, as a band-aid solution to widespread problems that are not actually economic but are rooted in the overall weakness of the earning potential of average Israelis as compared to their Western counterparts. The General Zionists, 50 years ago, during the heyday of Israeli socialism, managed to articulate a future for the state that appealed to masses of voters.
The governing coalition needs to return to that model of permeating the public discourse with solutions to fight back against the dark hole of populism that seeks to derail the Israeli miracle. There are real solutions to Israel’s problems. They can be found in opening up state lands for development, fast- tracking the permits necessary for such development, slashing the taxes that are levied on people purchasing homes and encouraging the issuance of municipal bonds to increase local investment in incentives to build more affordable housing.
The Trajtenberg committee should have, as one of its main tasks, examining why almost every single commodity in Israel, from tuna fish to automobiles, is more expensive than in almost every one of our OECD sister countries, and providing clear solutions as to how the economy can be efficient in this respect.
Without such a response, the government faces the prospect of appearing out of touch. This will be an added problem come September with the prospect of disturbances associated with the Palestinians seeking statehood. Israel must not be left with an internal social struggle at the very time when the country needs to be united in the face of an international campaign for Palestinian statehood that could wreak further havoc on the economy.