West's leadership crisis is different in Israel - opinion

Like a pod of beached whales, the four democratic powers’ leaders committed political suicide one after the other, raising questions about the ailments, and longevity, of the free world. 

This week, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz called a no-confidence vote in his own government, thus triggering a snap election in which he is expected to be trounced. 

That was five months after US President Joe Biden imposed on the Democratic Party a successor who soon led it to decisive defeat. One month before that, French President Emmanuel Macron called a snap election that produced a parliament of extremists from both Right and Left that soon unseated the Fifth Republic’s shortest-serving prime minister, its fourth in one year. 

And hardly three weeks before Macron’s reckless gamble, British prime minister Rishi Sunak called a snap election in which his party, the Tories, was handed its worst-ever defeat. 

Underlying these different settings was one ailment that plagues most of the free world, including Israel: The political Center is under attack, and losing.

The British did ultimately pass power from the Tories to Labour and thus kept intact their historic political Center, at least nominally. That’s not what happened in France, where the historic Center’s two halves have been floored by radicals from the political spectrum’s opposite ends. 

Being the agents of chaos that they are, the ultra-nationalist Marine Le Pen and the neo-Marxist Jean-Luc Melenchon joined hands to derail France’s budget and force prime minister Michel Barnier’s departure. The populist energy at play is such that whatever happens next, there is no chance France’s stagnant economy will get the painful medications its ailments demand. 

The German situation is not quite as chaotic, but the Center-Left’s failure to produce stability since its succession three years ago of the Center-Right is clearly about something larger than the natural transfer of power between the political Center’s rival halves. Underlying this political degeneration is the ascendant Alternative for Germany (AfD), the far-right party that is steadily emerging as Germany’s second-largest political force. 

Two fears feed the anger that AfD fans: migratory waves and economic decline. 

Postwar Germany’s economic miracle is fading. Caught unprepared by Chinese competition’s cheap labor and steadily improving quality, Germany’s fabled auto industry is now laying off tens of thousands of workers. That makes many Germans feel profoundly insecure, but even more unsettling is recent years’ influx of immigrants, including some one million Syrian refugees last decade and a similar wave of Ukrainians this decade. 

Immigration, and other challenges to identity, whether real or perceived, are also what fed the Brexit vote and the French Center’s collapse. Donald Trump’s zenith is similarly fed by fear of immigrants, as well as suspicion of the outer world, and disdain for the elites’ alleged plot to deprive the masses of their identity, security, and wealth.

Now, as Trump’s second term approaches, no one knows what he has in store for American democracy and how that will radiate across the free world. Chances are that what happened so far on both sides of the Atlantic, from Brexit to the storming of the Capitol, will have been but a prelude to much more dramatic events that will test the free world’s moral convictions and political will. 

The crisis of the Israeli Center

In Israel, the Center’s political will, though embattled, is intact and set to resurge. 

ON THE face of it, the crisis of the Israeli Center is part of the crisis of Western democracy:

National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit is the local version of Germany’s AfD; his vote Monday against his own government’s budget is a version of what Le Pen just did in France, and Likud’s war on the judiciary is a version of Trump’s saber dance with his own country’s courts. 

Well, that’s all true, but the Israeli Center’s crisis is different. 

First, Israel’s economy is not structurally ill. The sources of Israel’s wealth, from technology and farming to tourism and gas, are not threatened by China or any other cheap-labor competitor. That is why the shekel endured very expensive war costs, and in fact appreciated more than 5%, from 3.85 to the dollar when the war broke out to 3.59 this week. 

Second, Israel does not have an immigration crisis because the immigrants it absorbs are mostly Jews and their relations. 

Third, Israel has a broad consensus. The politicians that sprawl between Avigdor Liberman on the Right and Yair Golan on the Left, and between opposition leader Yair Lapid and Defense Minister Israel Katz, actually agree on most crucial issues and have also worked well together in the past. 

Fourth, the people in the field share even more, as the past 14 months have made plain. Unlike American and European citizenries, who have not fought together for anything since 1945, Israel’s citizens sure have – vastly and intensely. 

Indeed, the Israeli Center is challenged not by any social undercurrent but by one man, a leader who struck a pact with those who defy the consensus by shunning everyone else’s war and seeking to etch their draft dodging in constitutional stone. 

This, and this only, is what challenges the Israeli Center, and it can only last that long. Ultimately, after this war’s fighters return from the front and digest what they have been made to endure, they will produce a new political leadership, one that will salute, reward, and reconcile those who serve, contribute, and sacrifice – and sideline those who don’t. 

As for Germany, France, America, and the rest of the West’s ailing democracies – God help them. 

www.MiddleIsrael.net

The writer, a Hartman Institute fellow, is the author of the bestselling Mitzad Ha’ivelet Ha’yehudi (The Jewish March of Folly, Yediot Sefarim, 2019), a revisionist history of the Jewish people’s political leadership.