Does trauma inhibit Netanyahu?

During apartheid South Africa's real period of siege from 1974 to 1994 there were three white rulers: John Vorster (1966-1978), Pieter Willem Botha (1978-1989), and Frederick Willem de Klerk (1989-1994). South African political scientist Dan O'Meara, who chronicled the apartheid years of the ruling National Party in Forty Lost Years: The National Party in Power 19448-1994, wrote about John Vorster that division within the party during the first half of his rule inhibited him from making necessary reforms during the second half. From 1966 to 1970 the party was torn by an ideological division between conservatives--verkrampte--literally cramped--and moderates--verligte--literally enlightened. This led to the split in the party with a small portion of the verkrampte forming the Herstigte Nasionale Party--Reconstituted National Party--under the leadership of Albert Hertzog. Hertzog was the minister of mines and, ironically, the son of the first leader of the National Party who had ended his career in ignominy rejected by Afrikaner nationalists during World War II. Except for appointing a pair of commissions late in his period of rule Vorster made no attempts at domestic reforms. O'Meara contends that this was in order to avoid the trauma of another ideological battle and another possible split. The HNP did not elect a single MP until 1985 in a by-election and then this MP lost his seat in the next general election in 1987. By calling a snap election in 1970, Vorster largely destroyed the HNP as an election threat to the National Party.

Vorster in his final four years in office concentrated on foreign policy. In October 1974 he initiated a peace effort with Zambian President Kenneth Kaunda aimed at mediating a peaceful solution within Rhodesia. This was before the guerrillas were a serious threat to white rule there. Vorster pressured Rhodesian Prime Minister Ian Smith to release political detainees and to attend talks on a bridge overlooking Victoria Falls in August 1975. The talks got nowhere due to intransigence on both sides. Next Vorster teamed up with Henry Kissinger to pressure Smith into publicly conceding majority rule in September 1976. But when the nationalist leaders and their Frontline State backers rejected the concessions that Kissinger made to Smith, the initiative soon floundered. Both sides then headed to a constitutional conference presided over by a British diplomat at Geneva. The conference went nowhere as Smith refused to deviate from the Kissinger plan and the nationalists refused to accept that plan.

P.W. Botha came to power on the back of a corruption scandal--Infogate, which forced Vorster to resign as prime minister and to take up the then ceremonial position of state president. Botha spent the first half of his decade in power implementing several reforms to apartheid. First, he allowed certain black urban residents to have legal citizenship within South Africa, something which had previously been abolished under apartheid. Grand apartheid created bantustans or homelands, similar to Indian reservations in North America, and all Africans inside South African were assigned to one of them based on ethnicity. Next he legalized black trade unions and allowed them to collectively bargain over work conditions and wages. Then he implemented a major constitutional reform that created two new chambers of parliament for mixed-race "colored" South Africans, most of whom lived in the Cape Province, and for Indians, most of whom lived in Natal Province. But whites retained an overall majority in parliament and in the president's council that was created to replace the senate as the upper chamber. The president's council would reconcile disputes among the three houses over what were "general affairs" and what were "own affairs."  Seeing the powerlessness of these chambers, the vast majority--some 80-85 percent--of both communities boycotted the first elections for the new parliament in August 1984. The elections also led to protests that quickly turned into riots and an internal insurrection by blacks. The reform also changed South Africa from a parliamentary system to a presidential system.

Botha then spent the second half of his time in office repressing internal unrest, silencing domestic critics, and using South Africa's military to intimidate the surrounding countries that might pose a threat. From a triumphal tour of Western Europe in the summer of 1984, Botha was soon faced with trade sanctions from the U.S. and European Economic Community in 1986. 

So far there have been four Likud leaders in power as prime ministers: Menahem Begin (1977-1983), Yitzhak Shamir (1983-84, 1986-1992), Benjamin Netanyahu (1996-1999, 2009-present), and Ariel Sharon (2001-2006). Begin and Shamir were mainly responsible for the mass settlement of the West Bank and Gaza. That effort continued on subsequent Israeli governments. Begin had the solid backing of the American Jewish community and of the Reagan administration until he invaded Lebanon in June 1982. 

From 1982 onwards Likud governments--except that of Sharon--faced some hostility from Washington over their settlement policies. Netanyahu opposed the Oslo agreements in his first term as prime minister but agreed to withdraw from territory on the West Bank under American pressure from Clinton in October 1998. As a result his coalition soon collapsed. Sharon had very good relations with George Bush as a result of American antipathy towards Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat after October 2000. Clinton blamed Arafat--rightfully in my opinion--for the collapse of the Oslo process in late 2000. Bush came into office determined to avoid Middle East mediation and to support Israel. His conservative Republican backers demanded no less and this squared with Bush's own personal preferences. Sharon, like Botha from 1984 to 1988, spent his first several years battling the Al-Aksa Intifada by reinvading the West Bank in 2002 and assassinating Palestinian terrorist leaders.  He then unexpectedly withdrew from Gaza in 2005, defying his previous political support base of settlers and forcing the Gaza settlers to evacuate. Many Israeli conservatives now regard Sharon as the ultimate traitor.

Netanyahu has proven to be more like Vorster. He has consolidated his position within his own party following the exit of Sharon and his supporters in November 2005 to form the Kadima party. Now he has spent his second term in power balancing the various parties of the Right off against one another as Vorster did with the factions in the National Party. He implemented a temporary settlement freeze in 2010, but refused to renew despite the offer of considerable bribes from Washington. With Obama preoccupied with the economic crisis in the U.S. and with the support of American conservatives, Netanyahu can easily evade any serious pressure from Washington until at least well into 2013. By then there will be new elections in Israel. Netanyahu hopes that Mahmoud Abbas will disappear as a serious political force by then, leaving only Hamas to deal with on the Palestinian side. 

If a Republican president replaces Obama in 2013 the gamble will have paid off. Or if Obama is too weak in his second term to put pressure on Israel, it will also have worked. But in either case Netanyahu resembles Vorster in his political strategy.

Siege Democracies

Israel is a unique type of society.  It is a siege society that is also a democracy--a siege democracy. Siege societies are quite common among autocracies as these usually embody the concentration of power in the hands of a single tribe, ethnic group or religion in a society that unites--at least temporarily--the other elements in that society against it. In the Middle East examples of this type of siege society are found among the various military dictatorships especially the present Ba'athist dictatorship of the Alawites in Syria, the former Ba'athist dictatorship of the Sunni in Iraq, the Ghaddafi clan in Libya, and the Sunni monarchy in Bahrain. But because free elections preclude a minority group from permanently perpetuating itself in power, these societies are rare among democracies. They are only found when a tribe or ethnic or religious group constitutes a majority in a state but a minority in the region--part of the periphery in constant conflict with the regional core.

I can think of only four instances of modern siege democracies in the twentieth century. The first was in South Africa where the white settlers established a herrenvolk (master race) democracy where the franchise was restricted to members of the herren volk, in this case the whites. No doubt many Afrikaners would have opted to restrict the franchise to Afrikaners as was the case in the Boer republics in the previous century. But that had ended in disaster and military conquest at the hands of the British Empire. Until decolonization in the 1960s the British Empire (renamed Commonwealth) was fine with democratic rights being restricted to whites. But when former colonies made up the majority of members of the Commonwealth that all began to change.

The real siege in South Africa began after the Sharpeville massacre of March 1960. And it really did not become an effective physical siege until the dissolution of the Portuguese Empire in Southern Africa in 1974-75. Faced with the collapse of white rule in neighboring Rhodesia in December 1979, the ruling National Party began a two-track strategy of offering independence to Namibia and building its own internal settlement there with subordinate ethnic parties. In the mid-1980s the West signalled its impatience with the ruling white minority by voting for largely symbolic trade sanctions in 1985-86 in the U.S. and the EEC. After fifteen years of applying a Total Strategy to cope with the Total Onslaught the securocrats under President P.W. Botha lost power to the traditional conservatives in the National Party. President F.W. de Klerk negotiated an end to white rule from a position of great strength.

The second instance is in Northern Ireland where the Protestant British settlers who had arrived in the early 17th century used gerrymandering and corporate votes to perpetuate their rule over the native Catholic Irish. Under autonomy within the United Kingdom the Protestant unionists ruled for fify years from 1922 to March 1972 when they were forced to finally close down their provincial parliament. From March 1972 until December 1999 they experienced direct rule from London through the Northern Ireland Office. This was a second-best solution that most unionists and nationalists could live with. Irish republicans could not live with it and continued an insurgency until August 1997. There are still small groups of fringe republican extremists that attempt to continue a terrorist campaign against British rule today, but they lack popular support for this.

In 1970 a new multiparty political system was started when a small group of liberal unionists created the Alliance Party in April. This was followed four months later by the Social Democratic and Labour Party, an uneasy alliance of moderate nationalists and Catholic trade unionists to replace the ineffective Nationalist Party. In 1971 the Rev. Ian Paisley, a firebrand Protestant preacher with his own church, the Free Presbyterian Church, created the Democratic Unionist Party. These three parties competed with the former ruling Ulster Unionist Party and with occasional new unionist parties. In 1982 they were joined by Sinn Fein, the political wing of the IRA, as competition for the SDLP. In 1973 the Northern Ireland Office, at the urging of the Alliance Party, changed the franchise system from the first-past-the-post to the Single Transferable Vote (STV), a type of proportional representation, for assembly and local council elections. The DUP and SDLP are in many ways religious parties representing fundamentalist Protestants and the Catholic Church respectively.

The third siege democracy was Maronite Lebanon, which as a democracy controlled by the Maronite Christians lasted from independence in 1943 until the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War in April 1975. The Maronites ruled by a form of consociational democracy in which every important public post as well as the seats in parliament were parcelled out to the various sectarian ethno-religious groups on the basis of the 1932 census. Demographic changes took place in the four decades since the census was conducted, but the Maronites refused to allow a new census to be held out of fear that they would lose power. The result was civil war followed by three decades of Syrian occupation and since then five years of Syrian control through Hezbollah.

The fourth siege democracy is Israel. It has a split personality. It behaves like Northern Ireland internally and like apartheid South Africa externally. Like South Africa, it rules over a foreign territory captured in a defensive war and refuses to give it up. Like South Africa, it had a strategy of alliances with other friendly countries--non-Sunni Arab countries or groups: Turkey, the Shah's Iran, the Kurds in Iraq, the Africans in Southern Sudan, and the Maronites in Lebanon. South Africa had its detente policy under Prime Minister John Vorster in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Pretoria made common cause with conservative African leaders like those in Malawi, Gabon, Zaire and with Israel in the Middle East. Like South Africa, it conducted air and ground raids into neighboring countries that allowed Palestinian guerrillas and terrorists to operate from their territory. In fact Israeli generals taught this strategy to South Africa in the 1970s. 

Jerusalem will in the next decade face a fundamental choice of identity. Will it choose the route of negotiated solution like the unionists in Northern Ireland? Or will it choose the route of herrenvolk democracy and minority rule like the whites in South Africa? Maybe the ruling Likud will be able to disguise this like the Maronites in Lebanon by making half-hearted attempts to negotiate. As the siege tightens the choices will grow starker.