Few Americans -- even among those who follow Israeli politics -- had heard of the political party Shinui until January. But now they have: The party catapulted from six to 15 seats in Israel's elections last month, making it the third-most-powerful party in the Knesset, Israel's parliament. But even these numbers may understate the sizeable influence the centrist Shinui Party suddenly enjoys in the country's new political equation. Not only is the party now poised to sit at the center of a potential national-unity government, but its ascent may point the way toward a new strategy for Israel's moderate left. Indeed, Shinui appears to have seized the mantle of Israeli moderation while the dovish Labor Party -- under the inept leadership of Haifa Mayor Amram Mitzna -- was looking the other way.
Shinui's rise may seem unusual, but this is not the first time a previously unknown party has burst onto the Israeli political scene. In 1977 the Democratic Movement for Change (DMC), a new partnership of three parties, won 15 seats on a conventional liberal platform and became the Knesset's third-largest party. The DMC didn't make headlines until its leadership narrowly voted to join Menachem Begin's conservative Likud Party coalition several months into the 1977 Knesset session. Two years later, the DMC disintegrated when the largest of its three parties abandoned the alliance. That party gave up power in order to keep its integrity, refusing to sweep aside its values in order to remain part of the governing coalition. That party was called Shinui, meaning "reform."
Shinui gained and lost seats over the next two decades, remaining a minute part of the Knesset's strange and ever-shifting calculus until, in 1999, its then-leader invited Tommy Lapid, a prominent journalist and businessman, to take over the party. Lapid preserved Shinui's moderately liberal, middle-class agenda -- the party supports gay rights and a free-market economy -- while seeking to take advantage of Israel's growing anti-religious fervor. He railed against the special treatment that small but powerful religious parties had won for their constituents by joining governing coalitions, and promised never to join a coalition with any such members. He won six seats and kept his promise. Last month, he ran again on the same platform, and won 15.
"The general public doesn't like how [ultra-Orthodox Jews] don't participate in the army," says Gideon Doron, a professor of political science at Tel Aviv University. "Many of them do not work. From the middle class point of view, laborers bear the costs and the ultrareligious enjoy the benefits." But, Doron says, Shinui "stayed in opposition and maintained the line against religious parties, gaining credibility in that dimension." Intellectual honesty (or at least public perception of intellectual honesty) can reap great admiration for politicians, as it has for the likes of John McCain and Vaclav Havel. In Israel -- where the Labor Party first joined Sharon's government, then quit Sharon's government, then in the election's waning days squabbled publicly about whether to join Sharon's government again -- Lapid's principled image is priceless. Labor ostensibly deplores exemptions for the ultra-Orthodox, too, but in its 35-year history, it has never demonstrated its commitment to the issue the way Shinui did in a single three-year term.
Of course, unlike when Lapid took over Shinui, Israel is now at war with the Palestinians -- meaning that the domestic war between secular and religious Israelis that appeared ascendant during the late 1990s has, for the time being, been cast from the political foreground. While there was evidence before the election that voters were growing restive with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's hard-line stance on the conflict, voters also seemed reluctant to embrace the dramatic peace strategy -- and national political inexperience -- of Mitzna, Labor's candidate. Into that breach stepped Shinui's Lapid, with a security stance more moderate than Sharon's yet less dovish than Mitzna's.
"Labor positioned themselves very much to the left of the median, very far from the Likud," Doron says. "And they were not offering any reasonable alternative to solve the situation. And Sharon's performance, even on security, is not something to write home about. So what do you do?"
Doron argues that on security, Shinui became the middle-of-the-road party. It denounced both Labor's conciliatory approach -- which called for a unilateral pullback from the West Bank and Gaza Strip if negotiations failed -- and Likud's willingness to be held hostage by the far-right and religious parties that cling to the notion of a Greater Israel. Moreover, on economic policy, Shinui discredited Labor's quasi-socialist platform and lambasted Likud's utter lack of vision. Shinui wasn't just a protest party; it was truly the party best-aligned with the politics of many moderate voters, who were ignored by Labor and fed up with Likud.
But those reasons alone aren't enough to explain Shinui's impressive showing. Labor's attacks calling Sharon corrupt and inept resonated with voters -- but they didn't help Labor. "When you shake an apple tree, the apples fall," Doron says, referring to the voters who defected from Likud because of the campaign-finance scandals surrounding Sharon. "In this case, they were falling on Shinui and not Labor." If Labor had campaigned as a moderate party, it might have harvested the seeds of resentment it sowed against Sharon; Doron calls Labor's lurch to the left "a political mistake."
That's putting it generously. Labor won fewer seats (19) in this election than in any other in Israeli history. And things are not likely to improve: Labor may now be positioning itself to do significant permanent damage to the left and moderate wings of Israeli politics. If it keeps its promise not to join the inchoate Sharon government, which it deserted in the fall over a budget dispute (resulting in the January elections), Labor will have thwarted the widespread popular yearning for a "civic" coalition of Labor, Shinui and Likud -- the secular trifecta. Without Labor, Sharon will depend on small far-right and religious parties for votes, which means he won't get the prized 15-seat anti-religious Shinui bloc -- and Israel will be governed by radical right-wing and ultra-Orthodox legislators.
Intrigue of this sort is part and parcel of Israeli politics. While some Americans such as Ralph Nader deride two-party politics as a gridlocked oligarchy of "Republicrats," the truth is that Israelis crave such stagnation. The country's volatile one-house parliament will have 13 political parties in the session that begins next month. Each party in a governing coalition is beholden to the others -- if one party deserts the coalition, no party gets its laws passed. Asked if the next government would be able to pass a budget, which the last one failed to do four times, Doron simply burst out laughing. "Our parliamentary system is so bad," he chuckled.
"I don't think the electoral system is a goal by itself," he says. "I think it's an instrument for a democratic society. There are other modes of democracy and I think we should start entertaining the idea of a presidential structure. The parliamentary system in Israel is obsolete. We are 30 governments in 54 years. It's a trade-off between maximal representation and effective public policy." Unfortunately, as Doron points out, Israelis aren't likely to scrap the parliamentary system during a security crisis -- which means the country is likely stuck with this volatile status quo for at least the near future. And if the left is to have any chance of reviving itself, it is going to have to demonstrate some savvy in playing within this system.
That's why the coming weeks may present Labor with its last chance for rehabilitation. If Mitzna and Laborites spurn what voters crave, they will have only themselves to blame for the death knell that may be coming to them in the next election. To save the Israeli left, the party must veer back to the center, make temporary amends with Sharon and create a secular unity government. If it doesn't, it may never end the occupation -- not the one on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, but Shinui's occupation of Labor's place in Israeli politics.
Adam B. Kushner, a senior at Columbia University, edits the Columbia Political Review.
