The cynicism of Olmert and Lieberman

When the time comes for the historians or the political or behavioral scientists to reach their conclusions about why so many Israelis voted for populist parties such as Kadima or Yisrael Beiteinu, the motivations cited are sure to include fear, denial and the success of the politicians' manipulations. A significant percentage of the Jewish public, they will write, supported the disengagement and later voted for the withdrawal, because it had an emotional need to deny reality and did not have the strength, or the desire, to cope with its implications. Cynical politicians, whose main goal was to rule but who lacked the solutions to cope with the real issues, above all the imaginary ones confronting the public, succeeded in deceiving it with the false hope that unilateral measures will ostensibly solve what that public views as a dead-end situation.

Dissociation - a disconnect from the true meaning of a situation - and not worldviews, therefore, were the driving force behind voting patterns in the 2006 election. Not a new hope or a desire to act and make sacrifices on behalf of a better future, a better state.

Kadima and Yisrael Beiteinu, and to a certain extent even Likud and Labor, are radically different in their aim from the ideological parties of Israeli Jewish society until the 1970s. The place of the visionaries has been taken by "strategists" and "sectarian experts," who tell the party bosses where the public's interests lie. Since there is no ideology, the policies are cut to fit.

Important existential issues such as the Iranian bomb took second place in the electioneering if they appeared at all. The same was true for issues of religion and state, and poverty and discrimination. The trend of running away from coping with the traumas of the present rather than confronting them is typical of the average Israeli who wants to withdraw into himself at the height of the trauma.

It is not for naught that Ehud Olmert moved from the stage of coping, which he championed for years, to the state of disengagement and then to the stage of convergence. Olmert realized that fear of terror is connected to trepidations about demographics: the fear of losing the Jewish majority. Both Kadima and Avigdor Lieberman's party are riding these waves of fear and gathering momentum.

It is true that some voters believe the cynical politicians telling them that escapist solutions, such as the total evacuation of Jews east of the fences and the walls, or the proposal to transfer the Arab communities of the Triangle to Palestinian rule, are the solutions to their fears. Psychological and physical escape from a reality that seems hopeless for the near future is the main feature of both of these proposals.

The figures who are now Kadima's leaders identified this trend some years ago. Despite Ariel Sharon's fervent opposition in the early stages, they adopted the separation fence and unilateral disengagement plans. Continuing the disengagement or withdrawal will only heighten the causes of these fears; it certainly will not cure them.

Walls and fences, which ostensibly will secure this withdrawal into ourselves, are quack remedies, as the lesson from the uprooting of Gush Katif proves: terror did not decline, the number of Qassam rockets fired from the Gaza Strip increased by dozens of percentage points, and the real disengagement - the main pretext behind public support for Sharon's move - did not take place. Despite the fact that Gaza's border with Egypt is wide open, Israel continues to be responsible for imports to and exports from the Strip, for providing electricity and water, and even for a significant portion of its health services.

This will only increase due to the wide dispersal of the population and the greater territory involved when the "withdrawal" in Judea and Samaria begins. If the Gaza disengagement did not work out in the era of Fatah, how is it possible to believe that this is a logical plan in the era of Hamas, which is committed to the right of return and a continued armed struggle even within the Green Line. How is it possible to believe that it is anything other than a delusion that has no connection to reality?

The populist programs of Lieberman and Olmert, which are void of Zionist ideology, prove that Israel is in a post-historic era. None of the fundamental ideas underlying the Jewish nationalist movement that led to the founding of the state are at the center, or even margins, of their campaign propaganda. The same is true of Likud and Labor, presumably because so few people care about them.

In normal situations, or when the issues are not critical, one can accept a situation in which even important decisions are not based on established ideology. That is not the case when the existence of the State of Israel in the Land of Israel is at stake. The situation is particularly serious when cynical politicians exploit the psychosis of a stressed-out population whose nerves have been frayed by a drawn-out terror war in order to make fateful and historical decisions that could determine the very existence of the Jewish state in Eretz Israel.