On Feb. 10, a new prime minister and Knesset (the ruling parliament) will be elected in Israel. This election may be more determinative for peace in the region than the U.S. presidential election. With projected instability in the region, Israeli news source Haaretz declared that President Obama would be a wartime president.
The electoral situation in Israel is tenuous. When Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert resigned on corruption charges, Tzipi Livni was nominated to fill the role. In Israel the president is a figurehead – it is the prime minister who has real control. The PM is not directly elected by the people. He/she is nominated by the ruling party of the Knesset, or ruling coalition if no party has a majority. The Knesset is elected by proportion. If 35 percent of the people vote for the Likud party, then 35 percent of the 120 seats in the Knesset go to the Likud party. The party with the most representation in the Knesset nominates the PM. If a coalition cannot be formed, the president calls for new elections.
When Livni was elected on Sept. 17 to fill the spot that Olmert was to vacate, she had 42 days to form a coalition. Failing in this, she asked President Shimon Peres to call for elections. General elections for the new Knesset and PM are scheduled for Feb. 10, 2009.
Power could very well switch hands when the elections take place. The three main parties in Israel are Labor, a dovish party; Likud, a center-right party; and Kadima, which was founded by Ariel Sharon when he broke away from Likud. Kadima has a commanding lead in the Knesset right now over all other parties, but this is likely to change. With Kadima and Likud even in news polls, the likely PM will either be Tzipi Livni from Kadima or former PM Benjamin Netanyahu from Likud. At stake in this election is peace in the Middle East.
The greatest concerns in this regard are peace between Israel and Palestine and Israel and Iran. Livni and Netanyahu have different approaches here. Livni is in charge of the Palestinian peace process and is willing to make compromises to achieve peace. Netanyahu is unwilling to make these compromises like giving back land and splitting Jerusalem. Neither believes that Israel should have high-level negotiations with Iranian President Ahmadinejad. However, Netanyahu takes President Ahmadinejad more soberly. He does not believe negotiations are possible with a man who has called for the extermination of the Jews. Netanyahu also approves preemptive strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities. Such strikes are nothing new to Israel.
In 1981, Israel successfully accomplished Operation Opera, the destruction of Iraq’s nuclear facility. However, the distance to Iran would likely render any attack by Israel impossible without U.S. support. The distance to targets, air defenses, fortifications, probable lack of solid intelligence, and the inability to have aircraft return would render it a suicide mission with little chance of destroying all primary targets. Support from the U.S. also seems unlikely because of how the Arab world would react to the U.S. involvement with Israel.
Israel is on a time table of when they can act, between now and the likely timeframe of Iran acquiring nuclear weapons (perhaps in 2009-10). Israel must act before then. Peace has always been the critical issue. However, does the path to peace lie through negotiation and compromise, or will it be achieved through military might? How much compromise is too much? These are the questions Israel brings to their election and to which Americans also must pay attention to and answer.
