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.

Netanyahu: A Tale of Two Bothas

Because of the very small number of whites who immigrated to the southern tip of Africa some three centuries ago, just as with Latinos in the Americas, there is a limited number of surnames among Afrikaners in South Africa today. One of the most important in politics in the late twentieth century was Botha. In the 1980s there were two Bothas in the cabinet--State President P.W. Botha and Foreign Minister Roelef "Pik" Botha--and the head of the National Party in Natal was Stoffel Botha. Reporters and politicians alike had to be careful to specify which Botha they were talking about. In the 1978 contest for National Party leader Pik and P.W. faced off with another candidate, Connie Mulder. Pik emerged as the favorite of all races nationally (we are talking about the head of the National Party not the country's leader in a majority rule election), while P.W. won the election because of the backing of the powerful Cape Province caucus.

Pik was a lawyer who had entered the diplomatic service out of law school. In the mid-1970s he was simultaneously ambassador to Washington and ambassador to the UN at a time when there was serious discussion of expelling South Africa permanently from that body. Pik was popular both because he told the world to mind its own business and leave South Africa alone and because he spoke out in favor of eliminating at least some of the race discrimination involved in apartheid. During the 1980s it was his job to negotiate with the West over the occupation of Namibia and buy time for South Africa to reform internally.

P.W. (Pieter Willem) Botha was a limited reformer in terms of the National Party who had been defense minister from 1966 to 1978. Before that he had been a professional National Party activist and the longest serving member of parliament. He advocated a policy of punishing South Africa's external enemies with cross border raids and invasions. Internally he brokered a new constitution that gave voting rights and limited powers to the mixed-race "colored" population in the Cape and the Transvaal (descendants of whites, Indonesians, and the local Khoisan population) and the Indian population in Natal. When elections were held in 1984 about 85 percent of Indians and coloreds didn't bother to vote as they considered the power insufficient to warrant antagonizing the African majority who were left out. P.W. also favored limited reforms in "petty apartheid" or the type of discrimination that was common in the American South before and during the Civil Rights Era.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu blends the characteristics of both the Bothas. Like P.W. he was from a distinguished political family. His father had been the editor of the Revisionist Party newspaper in Palestine and the Herut Party paper before moving to America to pursue an academic career. After serving in the elite Sayeret Matkal commando unit in the late 1960s, Netanyahu returned to the U.S. where he had grown up to study business. He then started a business career in sales. Afterwards he served as ambassador to the UN in the late 1980s after having apprenticed under Moshe Arens, a man thought to be a future prime minister. When Arens abruptly resigned from politics in 1992 along with Yitzhak Shamir, Netanyahu was elected leader of the Likud. 

During the 1990s and 2000s his P.W. side came out. He was opposed to the Oslo process and wrote a famous book arguing the importance of retaining the West Bank to ensure Israeli security. As prime minister from 1996 to 1999 he attempted to fulfill the commitments he inherited from the Labor government before him while not making any new territorial sacrifices to satisfy the Palestinians. After he pledged to withdraw from a further 13 percent of the West Bank in October 1998, his coalition revolted and his government collapsed. He lost the subsequent election to his former army commander, Ehud Barak, in May 1999. Netanyahu then took a break from politics and made money while Ariel Sharon took over control of the Likud. About three years later he returned as foreign minister under Sharon and then became finance minister. In 2005 he resigned from the government in protest over Sharon's disengagement from Gaza.

After Sharon quit the Likud in November 2005, Netanyahu became the new party leader. He became opposition leader while the Kadima-Labor coalition was in power from 2006 to early 2009. In February 2009 he returned to power as the head of a right-wing coalition--the most rightwing since 1992. Netanyahu told reporters and foreign leaders that he had learned his lessons from his first tenure in power. But he formed a right-wing coalition rather than a centrist coalition with Kadima. In a famous speech at Bar Ilan University in June 2009 he came out in favor of a two-state solution--the first Likud leader to ever do so. But he argued that the Palestinians must first recognize Israel as a Jewish state, a condition designed to significantly reduce the chance of a two-state solution occurring. He later implemented a settlement freeze for ten  months, but the Palestinians refused to enter peace talks because the freeze did not apply to Jerusalem. 

In South Africa P.W. Botha made the fatal mistake of divorcing party leadership from the presidency after he suffered a debilitating stroke. F.W. de Klerk mounted a coup against him in the party caucus and forced him to retire. Pik Botha helped to see through the transition to majority rule but never gained the top post. In Israel it looks like Netanyahu has left his Pik Botha past behind in order to pursue power as P.W. P.W. was a reformer in white South African terms during the first half of his tenure as executive and then became frozen and leaned on the military during his second half. Maybe Netanyahu has reversed the order here? He was more rigid in the mid-1990s and more open in the second term. But because of fear of Foreign Minister Avigdor Leiberman he has become rigid again.  

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. 

Splitting Functions

Fianna Fail leader Brian Cowen resigned as party leader recently but retained his position as taoiseach (pronounced tee shuck) or prime minister. A similar division of functions occurred in South Africa under the penultimate white-minority government in 1989. South Africa converted from a parliamentary to a presidential system during the late 1970s and early 1980s. State President Pieter Willem Botha, an autocrat who had moved into the executive office from the defense ministry, suffered a stroke in January 1989. While recovering he decided to drop his leadership of the ruling National Party but continue to function as state president. Frederick Willem de Klerk was elected party leader of the National Party by the caucus of MPs. He gradually organized a revolt among the caucus, which had suffered the slights of an imperious autocrat and saw how Botha's brand of apartheid had served to further isolate South Africa over the years since Botha had taken the helm. In August a coup was launched and the caucus forced Botha to resign his position. New elections were held in September, which resulted in the opposition Democratic Party receiving a record number of seats. This influenced the new State President F.W. de Klerk to make his startling announcement in February 1990 that not only was he releasing Nelson Mandela from prison after 27 years, but he was also unbanning the African National Congress, the Pan-African Congress, and the South African Communist Party and would shortly enter into talks with them about the future of the country.

With elections tentatively scheduled for March 2011, Cowen's hanging on seems to be more in the order of saving the new party leader--to be elected Wednesday--from the embarrassment of being associated with the present government. Fianna Fail's coalition partner, the Green Party, deserted the government on Sunday.

Since being formed in the spring of 1926 and coming to power in 1932, Fianna Fail has ruled for 60 out of the 78 years since then. Normally, after a stint in power of between a decade and sixteen years the electorate would elect a coalition government consisting of the opposition parties for a single term. Then the electorate would be quickly seduced by the promises and nationalist rhetoric of Fianna Fail ("Soldiers of Destiny" in Irish Gaelic) and return the party to power. Even the notorious corruption of the Charles Haughey era from 1980 to 1992 failed to dim the enthusiasm of the public for the soldiers. Maybe it was their pioneering of the Northern Ireland peace process in 1993 that served to keep them in power. FF under Albert Reynolds pioneered the peace process in 1992 and then were deposed in late 1994 by the Labour Party switching coalition partners in the Irish version of the "smelly exercise." But unlike Shimon Peres, Tanaiste (Deputy Prime Minister) and Foreign Minister Dick Spring was able to pull this maneuver off smoothly. But the peace process ran into trouble and the Fine Gael-Labour Party-Democratic Left "Rainbow Coalition" was replaced by Fianna Fail once more in the summer of 1997. The peace process and the Celtic Tiger Irish economic miracle kept the party in power for the next 13 years.

The Likud, another party like Fianna Fail with paramilitary origins and a reputation for corruption, has since 1977 created a similar but less successful track record. Labor was allowed to regain power briefly in 1992-96 and 1999-2001. But the Likud has lacked Fianna Fail's "green thumb" when it comes to the economy and has not managed the peace process well, resulting in pressure from Washington. Now there is little opposition to replace the Likud.

Expect to see Fianna Fail replaced by a Fine Gael-Labour coalition in Ireland very soon. Such coalitions ran the country from 1973 to 1977 and from late 1982 to early 1987 and from 1994 to 1997. We will have to wait three or four years to see if Irish politics subsides into the usual pattern of the soldiers returning to their destiny of power. Or maybe the Irish have wised up, and seeing as Fianna Fail finally renounced its claim to Northern Ireland as part of the peace process in December 1999 and have failed miserably at reviving the Irish language as the working language of the country, maybe the electorate will allow the country to develop normal European politics. That would involve Fine Gael evolving into a centrist party so that instead of two conservative parties and a left-wing party that was much weaker, the electorate could have a real choice between Right and Center-Left. Maybe Israelis will also one day get this choice.

Update: The day after this was posted, the four main establishment parties in Ireland agreed to a deal to get a finance bill that would okay the deal with the European Union for a loan pushed through the Oireachtas (Irish parliament), so that elections won't interrupt this. It now seems likely that there will be an election in late February.