The Militarists and Haters Win in Israeli Elections

But why did the progressive peace voice have so little impact in Israel? The answer to this is startling: it didn't have much electoral impact because it was almost totally absent from the discourse of the supposedly left former Labor Party which now calls itself "The Zionist Union."

That party spent much of its time focused on matters of economic inequality, while simultaneously trying to prove itself equally militant with Netanyahu both in regard to Palestinians and in regard to Iran. They thus followed the same bankrupt path that Democrats have followed in the US, failing to articulate a different worldview from the militarists, instead trying to insist that they would be just as militant and just as determined to wipe out "the enemy" (whoever that is perceived to be).

Its an old secret of politics that when people want a warlike government or a racist government, they vote for right wingers. It's a useless strategy for Labor in Israel or for the right wing of the Democratic Party to present itself as the "better militarists," because people who want that will end up voting for the Right anyway. Obama should have learned that when, instead of ending the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, as he had led his followers to believe he would do, he instead escalated those wars with "surges," the result was not a victory for the Dems in 2010 and ever since, but rather a growing militarism in the U.S. and a consequent capture of Congress by the Right.

If you listened to the television ads in Israel about the elections, one barely heard a peep suggesting that the real issue in the elections was peace with Palestine, peace with Iran, or an end to Israel treating the US President as though they owned him. The parties did their best to stay away from the reality that a vote for Likud would de facto mean more wars and violence for the citizens of Israel.

Yet the left in Israel, like the left in the U.S., has little understanding of the need for a whole new worldview to be popularized as the central task of liberal and progressive Israelis or Americans. They are too busy being "pragmatic" and "realistic" to recognize that they've lost the election because they failed to attempt to challenge the dominant ideology of their society: that it's foolish to believe that people will respond to a vision of a society based on love, kindness and generosity.

Israel, like the U.S. badly needs to hear a worldview that can challenge the great fears that Israelis have about their own annihilation, help Israelis recover from their post-traumatic stress disorder that keeps many from being able to think rationally about their own (or the Jewish people of the world's) self-interest, and instead keeps them focused on the Holocaust and why they think it could happen again. Israelis, like Palestinians, deserve our compassion because they are stuck in fear, and that fear was magnified both by the daily runs to the air raid shelters this past summer and by the outrageous actions of ISIL/Islamic State which, after all, are taking place no further away than say Ohio is to NY or New Mexico is to California.

All this re-stimulates the Holocaust trauma which is so carefully re-introduced to each new generation of Jews with such intensity that many are unable to recognize that the behavior of the Jewish state in denying the Palestinian people the same rights Israelis rightly seek for themselves is at the core of the problem. Unable to see themselves as the most militarily, politically and economically powerful state in the Middle East, they allow the Jewish state to act in an oppressive way toward Palestinians and justify that as their only alternative to annihilation -- and their own behavior helps create the reality that they fear.

And yes, there is a way out of this self-fulfilling vicious cycle. Jews and friends of the Jewish people must join together to champion the Strategy of Generosity as a replacement for the Strategy of Domination as the best path to provide security and safety for Israel and the U.S. I've developed these themes further in my book Embracing Israel/Palestine which you can order for Kindle on Amazon.com or by reading it in print by ordering it at www.tikkun.org/eip.

Popularizing a fundamentally new story about the world is critical to the success of peace, social justice, environmental sanity, and human rights. We have that story, and it is described in Tikkun Magazine, detailed in my books starting with Jewish Renewal: A Path to Healing and Transformation, Spirit Matters, The Left Hand of God: Taking Back our Country from the Religious Right, and Embracing Israel/Palestine.

To popularize a different worldview is one of the reasons why I've joined with people of all faiths and secular humanists and fundamentalist atheists to build a Network of Spiritual Progressives that can articulate the world we really want, rather than remaining stuck in a politics that is so worried about being "realistic" that it only reinforces the very worldviews that lead to wars and racism of every sort. Please join me in that by becoming a member of the NSP atwww.spiritualprogressives.org. When you join at the $50 level or more, you get a free subscription to Tikkun magazine as well.