DEMOGRAPHICS KILL ANOTHER DREAM:

Election Reveals Israeli Settlement Movement as a Dream Deserted (Scott Wilson, April 2, 2006, Washington Post)

For decades Katzover and other front-line advocates of Greater Israel -- a Jewish state stretching from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea -- settled the pine-covered hilltops of the West Bank in defiance of, and then in collaboration with, the Israeli government. But, as the results of Israel's national election last week made clear, the movement failed to "settle in the hearts" of the Israeli public, as its leaders describe their parallel goal.

During the campaign leading up to Tuesday's vote, acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert pledged openly to empty solitary settlements like this one as part of a plan to set Israel's final borders during his four-year term. When the votes were counted, Olmert's Kadima party had a plurality of 29 seats in Israel's 120-seat parliament and will likely lead a broad coalition of dovish, ultra-Orthodox, Arab and single-issue parties that support trimming back the settlements.

The nationalist parties most committed to the settlers' cause won only 21 seats, their poorest showing since the movement emerged after the 1967 Middle East war.

The results highlight the gulf that has opened between secular Israelis and the religiously motivated settlers, whose movement has received billions of dollars in public money and the army's protection over the years but whose radicalized young generations now clash openly with the state. There are roughly 250,000 settlers in the West Bank, not including East Jerusalem, and Olmert has talked about evacuating 80,000 of them.

The National Union, a religious-nationalist coalition that vowed not to cede any territory to the Palestinians, won 73 percent of the vote in this settlement. By contrast, only 3.3 percent of voters in cosmopolitan Tel Aviv supported the party. Fewer than 1 in 10 Tel Aviv voters chose Likud, which Olmert and Prime Minister Ariel Sharon left last year to form Kadima. Likud dropped from 40 seats to 12, the sharpest decline for a governing party in Israel's history.

"This is a disappointment," said Daniella Weiss, mayor of the Qedumim settlement west of here, where a Palestinian suicide bomber killed four Israelis on Thursday. "Despite this clear threat of a unilateral disengagement, the Israeli public did not stand as a wall against it."

A secular Israeli population was never going to be able to breed enough to realize expansionist dreams, maybe not even enough to retain the state of Israel in the long run.

MORE:
Israeli voters put social issues at top of agenda (Harry de Quetteville, 02/04/2006, Daily Telegraph)

In the 58 years since their country was founded, Israelis have been preoccupied with security, defence and the battle for survival. Now, unexpectedly, many are embracing the more prosaic issues familiar to voters in other countries: health care, pensions and jobs.

So much so that the country had been swept by a "social revolution", as important to Israel's future as the conflict with the Palestinians, Amir Peretz, the Labour leader, told the Sunday Telegraph.

Lost in the wreckage of Likud is Bibi Netanyahu, just about the only Israeli politician who grasped the need for Third Way reforms if Israel was to have any future.

Posted by Orrin Judd at April 2, 2006 9:31 AM