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David Horovitz: Who Won the Elections?
David Horovitz

Nineteen seats for Labor. Double that number for the Likud. The architects of the Oslo process repudiated and the left in tatters. The right, along with a centrist party, Shinui, headed by a recent ex-rightist, firmly in the ascendant. The results of the January 28 elections couldn�t have been more definitive. Or could they?

There�s no mistaking the losers, and no shortage of reasons for their decimation. Labor was punished for its leader Amram Mitzna�s incomprehensible insistence on offering to rehabilitate the recidivist terrorist Yasser Arafat, even though the last man to try and turn the PLO chief into a head of state, Ehud Barak, was assuring Mitzna that the effort would be hopeless and counterproductive.

Labor lost further ground because of the exaggerated focus on the far from charismatic and nationally unfamiliar Mitzna, at the expense of other personalities who might have been more appealing to some.

And it paid the price of public resentment at the very fact that we were being summoned prematurely to the polling booths yet again. Dismayed by the relatively low turnout (just below 70 percent), the Supreme Court justice who oversaw the elections, Mishael Cheshin, has suggested we might ape Australia in future and fine voters who don�t exercise their democratic right and responsibility. Cheshin has misidentified the culprits. If he wants to avert further public alienation from the political process, he ought to recommend fining the politicians. The first choice of the electorate would be Benjamin Ben-Eliezer, the man who, having pulled Labor out of government for transparently selfish reasons, had the breathtaking gall, less than 24 hours after polling day, to raise the first voice in his party in tentative favor of rejoining a Sharon-led coalition.

So much for the losers on the left, who will remain unelectable so long as Arafat is, literally, calling the shots, and whose challenge now is to hold their ranks together, so as to be able to offer the public an alternative when the post-Arafat era finally dawns.

But what of the soar-away winners, Ariel Sharon and the Likud, who added a staggering 19 seats to their Knesset representation despite a campaign beset by financial scandal and in the absence of any concrete achievement over the two preceding years in power?

Given such phenomenal success, one might reasonably have expected the celebrations to have lasted long into the night of January 28, and to have sent Sharon into his current coalition-building negotiations with a spring in his step and the undivided support of his reempowered Likud leadership colleagues. Nothing could be further from the truth.

"Victory" night was political theater at its most telling -- the "triumphant" Sharon, the first prime minister in 15 years to win reelection, actually heckled by his own party activists after quoting from the late Yitzhak Rabin on the need for national unity. Standing at the podium, with that massively enlarged compliment of incoming Knesset members to his side, at the successful culmination of a campaign in which he was the personal centerpiece -- "The People Want Sharon" was the Likud�s main slogan -- the prime minister looked like a man alone, an outsider in the place where he should have been most at home.

At the root of that publicly evident divide is the fact that Sharon

believes he won the election for entirely opposite reasons than those cited by most of the Likud�s senior leaders. Sharon is certain that the 925,279 voters who put a Likud slip into the ballot box did so because they believe in him: in the degree of military force he has chosen to use to confront the intifada bombers and gunmen and their dispatchers; in his grudging endorsement of a limited Palestinian state that could constitute no security threat to Israel; in the alliance he has so savvily forged with the Bush White House; in his emphasis on domestic unity.

Not so almost all of the party�s other prominent figures. They interpret the Likud�s success as a public clamor for the immediate physical ouster of Arafat and a "firmer" use of force in the territories; as endorsement for the resolution the party approved last year, in defiance of Sharon, outlawing Palestinian statehood anywhere between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea; and as a demand for a "nationalist" government in which Shinui would barely be tolerated and Labor would be far beyond the fence.

Sharon would argue that the electorate, in rejecting the extremist Herut -- resolutely shutting the Knesset door in the face of the transparently racist Baruch Marzel even after the Supreme Court had chosen to leave it open for him -- and ensuring a lackluster performance by Avigdor Lieberman�s pro-"transfer" National Union, has demonstrated its essentially pragmatic moderation. Benjamin Netanyahu, Tzachi Hanegbi, Limor Livnat and the other members of the Likud�s hard-line top 10 would counter that, given their own party�s hard-right platform, there was no need for voters to support parties further to the right, and that the prime minister�s devotion to a partnership with Labor is tantamount to betrayal.

For the moment Netanyahu, the prime minister�s primary rival, is choosing not to contest the issue of why people voted Likud and how the party should act as a consequence. As the hecklers chanted "We Don�t Want Unity" and "Go, Bibi," it was he who shushed them from the platform with an admonishing shake of the head. But given the deep dissonance between the prime minister and his party over what the people who elected them were actually voting for, it seems likely that the battles over policy and direction between the factions who eventually come to constitute the second Sharon government will be eclipsed by those that will rage between the victorious consensual prime minister and his victorious hawkish party.