Despite recent scandals involving his real estate dealings, Interim Prime Minister Ehud Olmert will keep the top parliamentary spot in the Mar. 28 Israeli elections, according to Middle Eastern expert and Colgate University professor Daniel Bertrand Monk.
After winning the vote, Monk believes that Olmert's Kadima, the party of now-incapacitated former leader Arial Sharon, is most likely to engage the rival Labor Party of Amir Peretz as a government coalition partner, and the hard-line Likud organization will become the largest opposition party in the country.
"Contrary to what one might expect, the Jan. 25 victory of the militant Hamas group actually hasn't helped Likud and the Israeli right in a significant way," he explained. "Hamas's refusal to recognize Israel and denounce violence since coming to power has only confirmed the majority view in Israel that it is necessary to unilaterally disengage from the West Bank. Having lost its centrists to Kadima, Likud can only advocate a continuing occupation, and that is no longer a palatable alternative to the majority of Israelis. After all, the Palestinians are now 50 percent of the total population between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea."
Monk, a long-time observer of the Israeli political scene, is the George W. and Myra T. Cooley professor of peace and conflict studies and director of Colgate's peace and conflict studies program. He can discuss the elections, Israelis politics, and any other Middle Eastern issues.
"Sharon's disengagement policies and the creation of Kadima were not the ideas of a clever leader, as many have suggested, but a necessary response to a long-delayed realignment in Israeli electoral politics — a realignment caused by the fact that no party adequately reflected popular sentiment about the perceived quagmire of the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian asymmetrical conflict. Like the Likud's leaders, most Israelis believe that 'there is no one with whom to negotiate.' But like many Labor party leaders, most Israelis also believe that in the absence of a 'partner for peace,' the answer needs to be unilateral disengagement. This is the so-called centrist consensus that dominates Israel's citizenry, despite the underwhelming performance of Kadima's leaders in the months leading to the March elections, and the frequency of rocket attacks from Gaza."
Monk also sees more violence on the horizon: "I think these elections will have a polarizing effect within Israel and also within the Palestinian Authority," he said, adding that in Israel, the proposed disengagement from significant portions of the West Bank will not go as smoothly as the evacuation of Israeli citizens from Gaza. "There will be violence between Israeli security forces and Jewish settlers, and no one can say to what lengths the most extreme among the religious nationalists will go in opposing the disengagement."
On the Palestinian side, a confrontation is looming as well. "Hamas is forcing the Palestinians to confront how and if they want to be governed by religious-nationalists, for whom the democracy that brought them to power has less authority than a specific interpretation of faith. It all makes for a very volatile situation in the coming months."
Monk is author of An Aesthetic Occupation and other studies on the territorial politics of Israel. He is the recipient of a Mac-Arthur Fellowship in International Peace and Security, and is currently working on a history of Israel's 'era of euphoria' following the 'Six Day War' of 1967.
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