The anti-Netanyahu forces are flocking to Lieberman, of all people
Israel’s war of Annihilation in Gaza is a year old. The state finds itself in the most disastrous situation since its establishment. But salvation has been found in the person of Avigdor Lieberman, one of Israel’s most radical politicians. This is not only a shameful moral failure, but also extraordinary political stupidity
By Orly Noy • Translated by Sol Salbe
I read Ran Shimoni’s article in Haaretz about the dizzying success of Avigdor Lieberman’s September rally in Tel Aviv, and about the prominent presence of members of the liberal camp there, with considerable astonishment. Despair would have covered it closer, perhaps. Jotham’s Biblical Parable of the Bramble King embodied before our eyes in its most grotesque version.
The revulsion at Netanyahu’s eternal rule has already taken the Anyone-but-Bibi crowd to absurd places over the years. But becoming acolytes of Lieberman, who according to polls is expected to more than double his vote at the next elections, is perhaps the clearest evidence of those “processes” that Democratic Party Leader Yair Golan spoke about but failed to see his own role in deepening them further.
The unusual Israeli political constellation, which has largely formed around Netanyahu’s supporters and opponents, has created many anomalies. One of the most absurd of these is the inclusion of Lieberman — one of the most extreme politicians Israel has ever known, the person who labelled B’Tselem and Breaking the Silence “traitors” — in the liberal Centre-Left camp. But Lieberman’s significantly increased support now, at the end of a year of the war of annihilation in Gaza and in the midst of most disastrous situation of the state has been in since its establishment, attests to two other phenomena that make clear what depths Israeli society is sinking into.
The first is the growing yearning for an authoritarian leader who will come and “bring some order” to the bloody chaos of our lives. A year into the war, the concept of democracy as something worthy, if only as lip service, is losing ground among the Israeli public. While the apocalyptic vision of the Right is promoted by messianic politicians who enlist alongside them the Jewish People’s God, Lieberman offers the liberal camp the secular iron fist, which does not come with a kippah and tzitziyot and is therefore perceived as more “rational.”
In a brilliant article, Professor Yagil Levy, who has been researching the relationship between Society and the Military in Israel, recently analysed the Gaza war as dominated by secular rational militarism, not messianic militarism. The strengthening of Lieberman’s standing in the liberal camp reflects the yearning to copy this model from the battlefield back to the political arena. In other words, the genocide perpetrated by Israel in Gaza has not led this camp to abandon the violent and hostile rationale regarding the geopolitical space in which Israel exists, and to adopt democratic and political alternatives over it. This camp’s key requirement is that those who promote this iron fist policy be secular, and who have nailed the battle against the ultra-Orthodox community to their mast.
It is no coincidence that one of Lieberman’s most ardent supporters today is Shimon Sheves, who was General Director of the Israeli Prime Minister’s office under the late Yizhak Rabin. Perhaps he sees in him the same “Rabinist” potential — not the Rabin of the Oslo Accords, of course, but Rabin of “breaking their arms and legs,” Rabin of “without the High Court of Justice and without B’Tselem.” “Of all the people in the country today, he’s what we call a responsible adult. I see him as the right candidate to lead the country,” Sheves said of Lieberman. “Responsible adult” is what the liberal camp is looking for now. One that will not waste our brain space with frivolous notions such as human rights, democracy, or morality. And one that won’t be Netanyahu, and he won’t come with a kippah. Lieberman ticks all the boxes.
Total erasure of Palestinian citizens
But the more dangerous thing that Lieberman’s strengthening in the Anyone-but-Bibi camp signals is the complete erasure of Palestinian citizens from its members’ line of vision. This, of course, is not a new phenomenon either. The Anyone-but-Bibi camp never asked itself where Arab citizens were during the long months of the Balfour St [PM’s residence in Jerusalem] demonstrations, nor did it ask it during the long months of the Kaplan St Tel Aviv demonstrations — as if Palestinian citizens had no interest in overthrowing a corrupt regime, or in stopping the judicial coup of which they were one of the main targets. But becoming Lieberman acolytes is no longer merely ignoring Palestinian citizens, but actively supporting one of the people most identified with their persecution.
It should perhaps be mentioned that Lieberman is not merely just another Jewish politician who advocates Jewish supremacy and subordination of Palestinian rights to Jewish privileges — the entire Zionist political spectrum is at different points on this continuum. Lieberman is the prototype of Ben-Gvir, who based his political career on the image of the fellow who devours Arabs for breakfast, the man who said that an axe should be “lowered” on the heads of Arab citizens who are “against us”; who called for putting Palestinian Knesset members on trial “like in Nuremberg”; who promoted a boycott of businesses owned by Arab citizens; And of course, the person with whom the “land swap” plan is associated, a euphemism for a transfer plan and the denial of mass citizenship to the Palestinian community in Israel.
Support for Lieberman is more than spitting in the face of some 20 per cent of the country’s citizens who are Arab — it is actively joining the persecution of that community, without which this country has no viable democratic civic future. After 7 October 2023, it may be possible to understand the Jewish coalescence into tribal mourning and bereavement (although there are Arabs both among the victims of the massacre and the abductees), but it is impossible to understand — let alone justify — the blindness to the violent institutional persecution that has been waged here against Arab citizens over the past year. It’s not just Ben-Gvir and his militia police — it’s also the white [female] knight in shining armour defending Jewish democracy, Attorney General [the position is actually closer to a Westminster Solicitor-General] Gali Baharav Miara, who, as Adalah Executive Director Hassan Jabarin mentioned on this site, for Arab citizens has become a full-on Ben-Gvir.
There is something almost ironic in the fact that in the face of the [Iranian born commentator] Eliyahu Yossian school of thought, which urges Israel to intensify its war crimes in Gaza because “it is the language of the Middle East,” many in the liberal camp have become acolytes the person whose election slogan was “Only Lieberman understands Arabic,”” while Arabic — the language of the Middle East — is identified from the colonial perspective as a language of violence and destruction. But while Yossian has become the object of ridicule and is presented — correctly — as a weird dangerous person, Lieberman, the father of the transfer program, is considered a darling of the liberal camp and is perceived as a prudent pragmatist.
This is not only a shameful moral failure, but it is also exceptional political stupidity. Recent polls show a recovery in Netanyahu’s power, and it is not inconceivable that by the next elections, the equilibrium between Netanyahu’s camp and the Anyone-but-Bibi camp will be restored, sending us back into a political spiral with no ability to decide. This, apparently, will be the moment when Netanyahu’s opponents suddenly remember the existence of Arab citizens, and again ask them to come and save them from themselves. Perhaps Lieberman will one day be able to translate the Palestinian citizens’ answer to them. After all, he is the camp’s top student in Arabic studies.
