Sharon's Unity Government: A Prediction
(Part III)
by Robert J. Loewenberg, IASPS President
The aim of these Opeds, this
being number 3, is to explain how Israel’s present prime minister, Mr.
Sharon, appears likely to establish Israel’s first substantially stable
government in the period that began with official institutionalization of
the peace process in the fall of 1993. The context of this explanation
intended as a prediction has included several points and adds another, I
think effectual one, touching the strategic capacities of Mr. Sharon
himself. First, however, a quick review of what has been previously said.
A
Review of what was said in Opeds 1 and 2:
The first point of this
assessment is the overall environment of the peace process, by now
well-known to readers of this site. As aid and other free money is its
focus, this point is of course not a “talking point” in any public
debate. However, its claim to be regarded as true rests upon this
Institute’s research, much of it available on this site, and, not less
important, upon the “proof-texts” provided by a series of correct
predictions verifying this research to the policy community. A word about
these predictions is integral to the substance of this and prior numbers on
this site. Among the more immediately relevant predictions is the
“intersection” as I called it in the prior comment, number
2, of free money and the loss of Israeli deterrence as the source of
Israel’s contradiction and of Mr. Sharon’s dilemma.
This intersection
of two oppositely running lines is itself transparent for the prior
intersection at the outset of the peace process. Then the outward sign of
economic stagnation (non-growth) was the failure of Israel’s statist
regime to hold territory. This is the line running toward national
decomposition (not excluding the extraordinary deceits Israel tells the
world and its people about a booming economy, a second silicon valley and
the like). This line is Israel’s demographic destiny brought on by Jewish
socialism and statism.
Running oppositely
is the line of national life to set down roots in hostile and disputed
ground on the bases of freedom. This option, like the present form of it
facing Sharon, is framed by the other line; it is Israel’s human choice to
reject free money. As everyone knows, the option has never been considered
in Israel or among the Jews, Left or Right. The option, to promote growth by
means of markets and, beyond this, by resort to those non-statist and
non-politicized institutions that promote wealth, population and national
self-confidence have long been anathema to Jews as representative of them at
the highest level of human life which is national political order.
In other words,
the Israelis failure to consider the option of freedom is wrapped into the
ancient Jewish failure to establish national order itself or, to put it
still more starkly, the peace process has arisen in the hope that national
existence is itself an “option,” not a condition of civilized existence.
(I have made no attempt to explain this aspect of the discussion nor can it
be explained in this place. However, the inquiring reader might consider the
suggestion that the “option [was]…never considered” because it was
unknown to Jewish representation over centuries. One might ask: What resides
in the fact that Jews evinced at once a penchant for the politicization of
non-political institutions and life, the Jews “fierce collectivism” as
some called it, while they also seek at the higher level of the political
proper, first for themselves [in religion] and then for others [in
communism] a non-state “sanctuary for peace” [the words of former
Justice Minister Beilin]? This is a likely starting point for the source of
the Jewish political anomaly or what underlines Israel’s present dilemma
and contradiction.)
As for Israel’s
present intersection affecting peace, aid and terror on one side and
deterrence on the other, it is the result of the prior intersection in which
Jewish statist socialism overwhelmed an option to permit a bone fide
national presence in the territories. The proximate cause of this was the
State’s under-representation, actually tyranny of men (the political
effects of aid) in destroying all possible institutions separate from the
state and capable of limiting it. The market and property are only the most
easily dashed of such limiting institutions. But the result diminished
Israel in every way. The result is what became Israel’s “demographic
destiny.” It brought about the peace process. What was resisted in this
earlier period, namely the apparent need to face what was actually in
prospect or Arab strategy as pro-peace process terrorism down the road, was
camouflaged by the peace process itself. What Sharon’s election and of
course the now much greater clarity of the opposite running lines make clear
is that the camouflage, still at work in masking the failure of Zionism or
Jewish socialism as a whole, no longer hides the result apparent in Arab
strategy in terror –the strategy, as I put it in number
2, is now palpable in Gilo, Ramot, Ramallah. These are not more than
suburbs of Jerusalem. The situation in Tel Aviv and Haifa is similar where
the long-standing deceit about the “Israeli Arabs” as “different”
has been likewise exposed.
In sum it is
apparent that the Noh Theatre of Israel’s political differences, Right and
Left or what is itself a Marxist camouflage, has hidden the agreement of the
political class on the matter of free money and Jewish socialism. But
because this, the place of free money in the political realm is still
hidden, the far graver failures of the Jewish state in the failures of
national representation have not entered public life. They are about to do
so. It was the intersecting of aid and free money
with deterrence that brought this to light. This point of
intersection between two lines running in opposite directions –Sharon
running for American money at the same time he is committed to
re-establishing Israel’s status as a legitimate government that protects
is own citizens --will very soon expose the contradiction at the root of
Israel’s peace policy. The contradiction, essentially between the
political economy resting upon Jewish aid-based socialism and, on the other
side, national existence as such will be exposed. This is to say that what
will be exposed is that Israel, indeed its most famously “rightwing
extremist” cannot deter the Arabs and cannot stop the peace process so
that they will persist and in due course reach their conclusion. In this
context arises an additional factor; and Sharon himself.
The additional
factor is the failure of national representation:
The failures of national
representation are about to enter Israel’s political life because of the
peace process. There are two political expressions of this failure; one is
familiar: to continue the peace process and money; the other is to stop it
in effect but without stopping the money (which is the attempt to continue
the peace process as a gimmick for aid, the original intent of the peace
process in fact although, as everyone can see the “gimmick” was the
sacrifice of national limits for the reason that aid and free money had
already made this sacrifice as Israel’s demographic destiny.)
First, Professor
Ben Ami has correctly but incompletely identified this failure in the “two
sides” or the cutting of the Israeli people in half, for and against the
peace process. This division is not political because the peace process,
politicizing all of life and diminishing it, has debased and ruined
politics. It has rent the limits of national existence; of nationalism as we
call it now. For or Against the peace process has been revealed as
“nationalism” versus “peace.” This means one of these sides (and
there are really many sides as will appear in installment number 4) has
exceeded the limit of national existence. Undoubtedly this is the nodal
point.
For example, Ben
Ami has protested publicly his being resisted in waving off the police and
the army from protecting citizens from Arabs. His justification, a logical
one in context, was in effect that Arabs were earlier given weapons at the
same time the Jewish state requested the now armed Arabs (at this earlier
point in “joint patrols” with Jews) either to refrain from terrorist
actions during elections or to act in the place of Jewish police to arrest
Arab terrorists, members in these patrols.
What Ben Ami
points to here is the transformation of Israel’s political order by the
peace process. Whether the peace process was the effectual cause or itself
cast up by some prior thing is beyond cyberspace Opeds. But the
transformation is unmistakable. It is also the basis of Mr. Sharon’s
strategy to establish Israeli political stability, however incongruous this
may sound or prove to be. Before turning to Sharon who is the subject of
this Oped, let’s be clear about this unmistakable transformation.
Anecdotal evidence
is plentiful enough. Here is a suggested listing: The late Mrs. Rabin’s
richly laden refusal to meet with Mr. Netanyahu as prime minister,
preferring instead to meet with Mr. Arafat; the turning over police duties
to the PA; negotiations in the midst of terrorist actions; Professor
Sternhill’s public encouragement of late PM Rabin to “destroy the world
and the souls” of the voters who lost the election; the mistaking of
Barak’s widely discussed usurpations of power after losing his government
in context of “democracy” rather than simply Israel’s surpassing of
the limits of national order; the taking of outside money itself wherein
Jewish citizens are in fact deprived of representative status on the modern,
and itself impoverished principle of taxation and representation; the
constitutional effect of elections in taking homes and protection from the
losers of elections; the action of Israel’s Basic Law by which law as such
establishes the power of a single man to make it, for example the chief
justice of Israel has powers, in his words, “to set values for the
people.”
Such a list might
be extended to great length to show that Israel has forfeited its national
existence –meaning the government has assumed discretion or an option
vested in a particular policy whether to provide protection to citizens,
effectively making the PA existential ruler of Jewish citizens of Israel.
The focus is
governance in the context of the “intersection.” Can an Israeli
government provide protection against Arab strategic warfare or terrorism
without giving up aid or what is tantamount to cutting off the political
economy of socialism and therein the peace process?
The cause of
Jewish inability to hold land was the policy question in 1993. At that time,
however, the theatrics of Right and Left served a political purpose to avoid
this policy question for the sake of assuring consensus about socialism, aid
and the preference of Jewish representatives to seek out “a sanctuary for
peace.” As
between Left and Right what was at stake was who was to win control of the
outside, free money. The meaning is the price of national existence might
really be a number; the price of war is always too high.
If so Israel’s
political class had impelled the iron law of a socialist will to oligarchy
into an even more dangerous lust to trade national existence for this same
socialist order upon which men placed, knowingly and not knowingly, a hope
or vision of sanctuary. Today one of those few who I think acted knowingly,
Professor Ben Ami, is pressing for “’an imposed, agreed arrangement’
around the Clinton proposal….The international envelope in which it came
would also pay for ‘the price of peace.’” This language, some would
call it Orwellian, is meant to overcome reality or the contradiction of the
two oppositely running lines of peace and war or terror, of aid-based
socialism and national existence. This is the essence of the thing: an
“imposed” but still “agreed arrangement” that will bring peace. That
is, it will bring the money to pay for it.
There is deep
hatred in this of reality itself; of what is sometimes called the
“ontological reality of man.” The reason is men are the beings who live
in finite political orders. There is no option in this. What then are these
objects in existence you are talking about?
And so what is the Price of Peace? This is the answer.
Former Prime
Minister Barak on the occasion of his own first trip to Washington to get
money from Americans (Mr. Sharon is due to make this trip today) thus to
“represent” Israelis, said: “The price of even the most successful war
is immeasurably more expensive than the price of peace, no matter how
heavy.” Barak’s comment was the “Quotation of the Day” in the New
York Times 1/3/00. My impression is the editors considered this an
unexceptionable utterance although the meaning of it is “representation”
and peace are equivalent or national existence meaning human representation
is no more than taxation. This sentiment, to begin, is an endorsement of the
universal and homogeneous single global authority.
With these points
in mind we may now review Israel’s transformed political system as an
introduction to Sharon’s use of this system to produce stability. In this
system as it operates today the peace process has divided the political
class to reflect the representatives or rulers as understood to be
representing those who support or oppose the protection of citizens.
There are many examples of this beginning with former PM Rabin who
threatened citizens with non-protection if they did not accept the peace
process. However the definition of Israel’s order as “two camps” for
which Ben Ami as foreign minister understands himself to have authority to
prevent the police and army from defending Jewish citizens from Arab
terrorists for the sake of the peace process might properly be described as
a world-historical proposition. It perfectly actualizes Aristotle’s
description of legitimate political rule as reversed.
Israel’s
representation is formed on the basis of institutionally derived negotiating
positions that convey power to an Arab authority by Jewish politicians. This
effectual right to protect Jewish citizens, that is to represent them in the
ultimate expression of “representation” or to not permit others to kill
them as given to the PA erases the limit to representative order; it
reverses what is meant by representation and by human. In the context of
political order or the relationship Aristotle denominates friendship, the
opposite or a political order permitting another people to kill one’s
citizens, would be named hatred. Transferring this primary representative
authority to the PA or negotiating or voting the loss of representation to
another existential ruler constitutes the perfect case of the absence of
representation by the negation of representation. Literally, the negation of
representation is the supreme in hatred as the political bond; negation as
such or murder. Where Aristotle describes the political order as friendship,
this description applied to Israel makes the mark of its political order
hatred.
In view of these
points it is surprising but not illogical that Israel’s representative of
opposition to the peace process, but also a socialist seeking aid and free
money, might attempt to govern on the principle of hatred; on the principle
that the action of the peace process effectually conveys representative
status to the PA and takes it from the Jews represented by such
representatives. Although these Jewish representatives may or may not be
clear minded about what is in truth obvious, meaning the obvious result of
policy and words as these result in action, what is clear to every member of
the political class in Israel is that representation is now radically
compromised in the fact that the people with whom Israelis are negotiating
(for example, Mr. Ben Ami with Mr. Marwan Barghouti) are also the people who
are, literally, murdering Jews in a strategy of terrorism. At the same time
Israel bases its response to these acts on an understanding of
representation that participates in this strategy. (Regarding the
participation of the wider Western political classes for whom this is a
“cycle of ‘violence’” meaning the side with the highest dead is
morally superior, this reflects not the Arab position but the Israeli one.
It is plain that limits to national order have been widely breached,
certainly in words and sentiment in the bureaucracies of the EU and those of
the US State Department, if not --among some individuals in these
bureaucracies and in the political classes elsewhere --in active
involvement.)
Ariel Sharon’s
political strategy, first hinted in his appointment of Ehud Barak to be
defense minister, appears to be based in a divide and rule approach in which
competing hatreds, and not just competitions in the normal way of politics,
will bring domestic “peace” or stability. In other words Sharon’s
political strategy, in addition to using extra-representative funds or free
money to bribe and control political factions, is also to use factional
hatreds regarding negotiations with Arabs (and others) in which the
representational excess or negation implicit in the peace process will
provide a means, here using Sharon’s words, to do what “is morally
right.” That is, to defend the Jews of Israel (and others) from the Arab
strategy of terrorism as a means to implement the peace process, Israel’s
policy.
A discussion of
the details of this political strategy is the subject of Oped number 4,
upcoming.
Read
Part I and Part II of this
commentary.
