Israel Harel / In this election, Israel's left got what it deserved

Click here for exclusive Haaretz coverage of the elections in Israel

Zahava Gal-On, Shelly Yachimovich and many others in the left are ceaselessly explaining, to the outside world at least, that Labor and Meretz crashed in Tuesday's election because they were not sensitive to the socioeconomic hardships of the public, and also of course because they made strategic errors in their campaign.

Excuses. When terror hits with no letup and no mercy ever since the left brought the Oslo disaster upon the state, and in no few places in the Negev and Galilee Jews are hesitant to travel at night out of fear that their car will be hit by rocks, socioeconomic distress - while still serious and painful - becomes secondary even for poor voters.

Ehud Barak did not lose because of his luxury apartment. He lost because even in Operation Cast Lead he did not have the courage to decisively defeat the terror of the Gaza Strip. And Meretz began calling for an end to the operation on its third day, and some of its people accused the Israel Defense Forces of war crimes.

The increase in oppositional activities among Israeli Arabs - which often exceed the bounds of legitimate expression of opinion - against Israel as the state of the Jewish people has alienated voters from the left. For years those voters have been hearing the strident tones whose main chord, according to the verdict rendered on Tuesday, is an overidentification of this public with Arab-Palestinian nationalism, even during a vicious war of terror against the Jews.

In that arena, not even the slightest bit of regret was expressed after the election. The error, if any, representatives for the left said, was that the way of peace was not sufficiently explained - as if the electronic and printed media were not enlisted to pound the left's messages into the public's collective skull. Arab murderousness reached its heights precisely as a consequence of the far-reaching concessions brought down upon the state by the very same parties that crashed - finally, receiving their just deserts - at the ballot box.

Voters declared that this ideology, which the left championed for the past 20 years, failed utterly in the spheres of security, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict (the various agreements a la Oslo and the territorial concessions a la the uprooting from Gush Katif further postponed peace and certainly did not hasten it), and relations between Jews and Arabs within Israel. The comprehensive defense of the untenable positions of Israel's Arabs on the part of the leftist parties, as well as the law authorities and, above all, the Supreme Court have only heightened the determination of the Arabs to secede from the state and establish their own political and cultural autonomous region, voters concluded.

As a result, voters decided to give the right that is prepared to confront these issues - Likud, Yisrael Beiteinu, Shas, the National Union and Habayit Hayehudi - about 60 of its 65 Knesset seats (United Torah Judaism is out of that picture). A very decisive majority. And the left that fled from confronting them (a la Barak) or adopted a pro-Arab-Palestinian stance (a la Meretz) received only 17 Knesset seats. Kadima, while it is leftist, is not exactly there.

And so even in the safest strongholds of Meretz, kibbutzim of the Hashomer Hatza'ir movement, voters preferred Kadima over the mother party. Even in kibbutz Merhavia, with all that it symbolizes for the radical-Zionist left, Meretz lost to Kadima. The same applies to kibbutz Mishmar Ha'emek. Many members of United Kibbutz Movement kibbutzim voted for Kadima and not Labor. And not only because of Tzipi Livni's glamorous aura. Rather, mainly because of the faded Zionist aura of Barak and a large number of the party's candidates, who stopped playing by the rules and abandoned the national direction of socialist Zionism.