The Comment Factory

The Shas Party election advert mimics Obama

Before he defeated John McCain, Barak Obama surpassed the Apple iPhone. The Association of National Advertisers awarded the now-president-elect its “Marketer of The Year” award. The subsequent election victory should thus be seen as the gold ribbon certifying what the ANA already recognized. The success of Sen. Obama’s campaign of slogans and “soaring rhetoric” made an impression on a small country which watched the U.S. election with understandable interest. The New York Times reported that Israeli politician Benjamin Netanyahu mimicked Barack Obama’s campaign Web site. A colleague of mine directed my attention to another imitation in that country. Israel’s ultra-orthodox Shas party has gone as far as taking the slogan “Yes We Can.”

Imitation in the world of advertising reflects nothing other than an admiration of success. In marketing, vehicles of delivery are judged by their effectiveness, not their cargo. Preliminary reactions to these Israeli imitations may include surprise. The Democratic Party is seen as the more progressive, and perhaps even more dovish, organization in U.S. politics. But Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party, which might take the single largest number of seats in the Israeli parliament in that country’s coming election, is the most hard-line of Israel’s mainstream secular parties. To be clear — while all the predominant Zionist parties in Israel are the ideological successors of Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s school of the “Iron Wall,” the Likud Party particularly prides itself on its hawkish stance vis-a-vis the Palestinians and Israel’s Arab neighbors.

Beyond trumpeting the party’s intellectual forbear, who stood out among the Zionist thinkers prior to Israel’s independence by openly stating that Jewish colonization of Palestine could not be implemented without coercing the indigenous majority, Likud is now a pirate crew of opportunists in religious garb, free-market privateers, and civil-rights activists turned mercenary.
The party has proven a particularly unwieldy vessel in its relations with the United States. It produced prime ministers in the last two decades notably less compromising than their American counterparts. Yitzhak Shamir, a member of a notorious Zionist militia before 1948, had to be threatened by President George H.W. Bush (who said he’d withdraw vital loan guarantees) before the premier would agree to attend the Madrid Conference in 1991.

When he served as prime minister from 1997-1999 Benjamin Netanyahu resisted tooth and nail against giving even gestures of compromise to the avowedly pro-Israel Clinton administration (which included current Obama advisors Rahm Emmanuel and Dennis Ross). But hard-nosed as the Likud rhetoric sounds, the party has participated in U.S.-sponsored political processes. As much as they’ve fought against concessions with the Palestinians, they’ve never effectively killed a program that wasn’t already dying (they even failed to halt a mutiny aboard their ship when Ariel Sharon led the breakaway Kadima party to power and withdrew Israeli citizens from the Gaza Strip).

With this reputation for obstinacy and a history of foot-dragging in the face of U.S. pressure to compromise, the Likud party’s electoral slogan “Together We Will Succeed” rings hollow. Refusing to negotiate with the Palestinian Authority or to even accept the notion of an independent Palestinian state means that Netanyahu’s faction views “success” as one of two things: either that the current status quo — Qassam rocket bombardment and kidnapped Israeli soldiers — represents success; or that the Palestinians will cease to be a demographic problem for the Jewish state. Hoping for the latter means that the Likud either indulges in fantasy (that the Arabs under Israeli rule will voluntarily relinquish their national aspirations and accept
limited religious and civil second-class status in the Jewish state) or dreams of an apocalypse (wherein the Palestinians cease to exist as a political problem for Israel because they’ve been “transferred,” or ethnically cleansed, from the land controlled by the state).

Thus, as the New York Times reported, the irony of Likud borrowing a page from the Obama playbook is striking. But the frequently overlooked, and arguably more influential, Shas party strays even further from any of the U.S. president-elect’s rhetoric of inclusiveness and change, and their appropriation of “Yes We Can” shows that they too have watched the Illinois senator closely, despite their stark differences.

Students of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict may often miss the real impact of Shas on the Israeli political system, an impact felt especially when push comes to shove and a ruling coalition needs enough support to continue toward a negotiated political solution. On the face of things, Shas presents itself as a purely socio-religious machine within the Jewish Israeli milieu. It comes across as one of Israel’s interest-group parties looking to one sector for support, and advocating on that sector’s behalf.

Founded in the early 1980’s, Shas claims to represent the interests of traditionally religious Mizrahi and Sefardi Israelis (Jews of Arab, Mediterranean, and “Oriental,” extraction). It pushes for social programs, bread subsidies, and the bolstering religious opinion in legal and political matters.

Uniformed in black felt hats and thin jackets, its supporters claim as their base Israel’s original Jewish underclasses – a community with a narrative of unsympathetic treatment by the traditional Ashkenazi (European Jewish) elite. Proselytizing in method, Shas built its support funding religious schools in these hard-up communities and urging the parents to vote for them in national elections, thereby guaranteeing continued funding of their children’s education.

Throughout the Oslo years of the 1990’s, Shas presented an apolitical, and occasionally dovish, approach toward the question of the Occupied Territories. As its support grew, it sat in consecutive Israeli governments and promised to rubber-stamp the national parties’ political platforms in exchange for control over powerful ministries like the interior and education. After voting with the governments of Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, and Ehud Barak, Shas was even considered left-wing by some on the country’s religious right.

But the party was never “progessive” at a national level. Successive Israeli governments fell apart under non-confidence motions in the Knesset right when the country faced a referendum on the latest round of political give-and-take with the Palestinian Authority. Shas deserted the government at these key moments. This abandonment went largely unnoticed at the beginning, when coalitions collapsed and Knesset members deserted like rats; but as Shas grew in influence, it increasingly threatened to desert – and did so – whenever political negotiations with the Palestinians came to a crux. Most recently, Shas single-handedly toppled the government of Ehud Olmert (something the catastrophic Israeli failure in the 2006 Lebanon War failed to
accomplish) over the mention of dividing Jerusalem.

Israeli political sociologist Avishai Ehrlich explained to me that despite Shas’s apolitical and strictly religious facade, the voters who support the party are fundamentally as hawkish (if not more so) than the supporters of Likud. Shas knows this, and as such represents the vocal interests of this community. (This realization comes after seven years of malevolent anti-Arab rhetoric from the party’s spiritual leader, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, language that was largely dismissed as the ramblings of a religiously brilliant but hopelessly bigoted blind man.)

What does “Yes We Can” mean to the supporters of Shas? It means that they can regain the seats they lost to upstart political parties (like the Pensioner’s Party) in the last election, increase their clout in the ruling coalition, and further obstruct efforts at political resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.