The Israeli politician Avigdor Lieberman recently found a novel way to highlight the causes for the enthusiasm he generates and the hostility he provokes. In the midst of a live interview in April, Lieberman, now Israel’s foreign minister, apparently flushed the toilet during a discussion of Hamas. Utterly without airs and utterly without delicacy, Lieberman is the most polarizing figure in Israel. In 2009, his party, the secular nationalist Yisrael Beiteinu, closed election night with its highest showing ever: 15 seats in the Knesset. The strength he displayed compelled Benjamin Netanyahu to give Lieberman the plum position of foreign minister and the title of deputy prime minister.
In most democratic systems, a figure as controversial as Lieberman could not rise any higher. But thanks to the fragmented nature of Israeli party politics, the possibility of Lieberman becoming prime minister of the Jewish state must be taken seriously. That is a nightmarish prospect to those who deem themselves holders of enlightened opinion in Israel and those who pay attention to Israeli politics in the West. Among them, he occupies a position somewhat akin to Sarah Palin’s, with a little Al Sharpton in the mix.
Lieberman is suspicious of the loyalties of Israel’s Arab citizens. He is also an advocate for a land swap whereby Arab towns in Israel would be traded for Israeli settlements. Favoring that swap has opened him up to the charge of supporting wholesale population transfer—one step away from ethnic cleansing. But that accusation has lost a little of its force, given that even the United States envisions some form of land swap will be part of a final-status agreement between Israel and the Palestinians.
These sorts of provocations are far from novel in Israeli politics, and the views from which they derive have been part of the Israeli national discussion for decades. But Lieberman is a master of a form of symbolic politics familiar to American voters but somewhat innovative in an Israeli context. He proposes legislation and policy that would have little practical value but whose framing delights his base voters even as it drives his opponents into choleric and impotent rage. Lieberman has called for prospective non-Jewish citizens to pledge an oath of loyalty to the Jewish state as a Jewish state, something Arabs and the Israeli left regard as both racist and fascist. And in March, a bill Lieberman pushed to revoke the citizenship of anyone found guilty of treason or espionage passed the Knesset. These initiatives would affect very few people overall, but the fact that they dominated the political discussion for weeks affords us a sense of how clever and divisive Lieberman can be.
There is one way in which Lieberman’s political career represents a new paradigm in Israeli politics: he is a heterodox political figure for the 21st century in Israel, a secular nationalist immigrant. His base is within the enormous Russian community, but, unlike previous ethnic politicians, he has interests and goals far more ambitious than bringing home the kosher bacon to his constituents through the use of government largesse. And unlike his predecessors in the ethnic political game, like the Moroccan populist David Levy or the religious Sephardi leader Aryeh Deri, he is playing on a far larger field.
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Evet Lieberman came to Israel from Moldova, then a part of the Soviet Union, in 1978 at the age of 20 and changed his name to Avigdor. After a stint in the Israel Defense Forces, he became active in the nascent world of Soviet-immigrant politics. Eventually, he teamed up with Netanyahu and managed Bibi’s 1993 campaign for Likud leadership. After Netanyahu’s victory, Lieberman effectively became the Likud party’s CEO and then Bibi’s chief of staff when his mentor became prime minister in 1996. Like Netanyahu himself, Lieberman developed a reputation for brass-knuckles politics and dishonest personal dealings, and he became extremely unpopular in Likud circles.
Lieberman resigned from the Likud in protest of Netanyahu’s concessions in 1998 to President Bill Clinton at the Wye River Plantation and went on to form his own party, Yisrael Beiteinu, in 1999. He was elected to the Knesset along with three other members of the party. He served in Ariel Sharon’s cabinet in 2004, until he voiced his opposition to the Gaza disengagement plan and was dropped. But after his party’s great success in the 2006 elections, garnering 11 seats, he was invited into Ehud Olmert’s cabinet and served his first stint as deputy prime minister as well as minister of strategic affairs, a new portfolio designed to counter the Iranian threat.
Lieberman’s rise has long been accompanied by the shadow of scandal. In this he is like many other Israeli politicians. (Recall that Ehud Olmert was indicted while prime minister, and Ariel Sharon would likely have been, too, had he not been felled by a stroke in 2005.) Lieberman is being investigated by Israeli police about whether he has profited from a business registered under his daughter’s name while serving in the Knesset. (Ministers aren’t allowed to earn income besides their Knesset salaries while serving in the government.) Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein has announced that he intends to indict Lieberman, though Lieberman will be granted a hearing on the evidence before the indictment is filed, and any case against him could take years to prosecute. Lieberman insists he is innocent, and will likely not resign even if the indictment goes through. A poll released on May 2 shows why: despite the attorney general’s announcement, Yisrael Beiteinu would gain three more seats if elections were held now. “The Smith Institute survey,” observed Israel National News, “reveals that any future government will not be able to form a coalition majority without Yisrael Beiteinu.”
Lieberman’s empty but catchy political gambits (like the loyalty oath and the treason bit) would not be considered so threatening if he were an outrageous gadfly like Israel’s one-time leading supporter of population transfer, Rehavam Ze’evi, who was shot and killed by Palestinian terrorists in 2001. But liberals in Israel and the U.S. rightly fear that Lieberman is a popular manifestation of political currents that have rarely found mainstream political expression. He speaks for those who have decided that the Palestinians and the Israeli Arabs who seem to support them are intractable enemies who cannot be dealt with and must instead be countered at all costs.
Lieberman doesn’t just silently protest policies with which he disagrees, as his departure from the Netanyahu government demonstrated. When Sharon proposed releasing hundreds of Palestinian prisoners to bolster Mahmoud Abbas in 2003, Lieberman responded, “It would be better to drown these prisoners in the Dead Sea.” And he doesn’t stand on niceties. In 2009, with the 30-year anniversary of the Israeli-Egyptian peace deal looming, Lieberman suggested that Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak visit Jerusalem the way his predecessor did. If Mubarak disagreed, Lieberman said, “he can go to hell.”
Late in his second term, George W. Bush called together a summit at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, and laid out a framework for ongoing peace talks. Upon taking office as foreign minister, Lieberman pronounced the summit irrelevant: “There is one document that obligates us—and that’s not the Annapolis conference, it has no validity.” No one had taken the Annapolis framework particularly seriously, but it was a breach of international etiquette for Lieberman to speak about an American initiative that way. Which is why his ascent to the post of foreign minister has been so maddening to so many. It is also why Defense Minister Ehud Barak, when he travels to Washington, meets not only with American defense officials but also with diplomats at the State Department; Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, not alone among Lieberman’s Western counterparts, has made it clear she prefers to deal with Barak.
A 2009 Der Spiegel profile of Lieberman was titled “Israel’s Pragmatic Thug.” The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, rarely given to hyperbole, called Lieberman “Putin-like,” an intentionally ethnic slight. Tablet’s Marc Tracy recently described him as “Avigdor Lieberman, the former Moldovan nightclub bouncer turned hard-right Israeli foreign minister”—this on a nominally Zionist and Israel-friendly site. The relentless references to Lieberman’s status as an immigrant and the references to goonish Russian-Soviet pseudo-dictators may be insulting, but they get at an important part of his political success—and the changes his success indicates in the Israeli body politic.
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The first serious Russian-Jewish politician was Natan Sharansky, the legendary refusenik and Soviet dissident. His arrival in Israel in 1986, after years of prison and torture, to be reunited with his indefatigable wife Avital, was one of the great moments of unity in Israeli history. In his new history of the effort to save Soviet Jewry, Gal Beckerman recounts the moment: “He was a Jewish hero, the latest symbol of Jewish suffering, husband to a pious woman, herself redeemed, and possibly a recruit to the cause of messianic Zionism. He contained both. And until he opened his mouth he could represent everything to everyone. Yehuda Amichai, Israel’s most beloved poet, watched the ecstasy of [Sharansky’s] arrival and worried. ‘I hope they don’t ruin him,’ he said.”
They didn’t. Sharansky was then, and remains, immensely admired. And he was followed by a human flood of one million immigrants from the Soviet Union—in proportional terms, the largest influx of immigrants into any country in history. All this gave Sharansky an opportunity to transform Israeli politics single-handedly, but he didn’t have the stomach or skills to do so.
Sharansky was not a natural politician, and when he entered the arena, his extraordinarily dry and intellectual sense of humor, and thick accent that made his Hebrew all but impenetrable to native speakers, did not draw followers. The party he began, Yisrael Ba’aliyah, won seven seats in the 1996 Knesset elections but soon fell to two seats before it folded into the Likud.
Sharansky came to embody two strains in the Israeli body politic, as a Soviet refugee and as a religious Jew whose wife had found her home without him among the religious settlers. In the end, he was not settler enough for the settlers—and oddly, he might not have been Russian enough for the Russians. The two sociopolitical species had many things in common, including a hostility to surrendering land, but they actually had far more dividing them.
In 1992, three researchers—Eliezer Ben-Rafael, Elite Olshtain, and Idit Geijst—conducted a survey of Russian immigrants called Identity and Language: The Social Insertion of Soviet Jews in Israel. Its findings provide a window into the causes of Sharansky’s failure and Lieberman’s success.
What the results depicted was an immigrant group that was far from the haggard, penniless, suffering masses that Israel had seen in previous waves. As the authors write, the Soviet immigrants believe that “due to their qualifications and motivation, they contribute more to Israel’s economic progress than Israel does to further their own economic advancement—their difficulties in obtaining jobs constituting a major argument here. Their number, too, serves, in their eyes, as an asset for the security of the state; Soviet Jews tend to emphasize that by immigrating they have agreed to come to live in a troubled, insecure area.”
The Russians did not come with an open hand, looking for help, as others had; rather, they came with résumés in hand. They clearly viewed their aliyah as a partnership. They weren’t just being saved; they had a lot to offer. And that was true as well of those of mixed parentage, who counted as Soviet refugees because their Jewish blood had led to their persecution. Those Russians who aren’t Jewish according to religious law proudly serve in the IDF. Because strict Orthodox conversions in Israel are time-consuming and considered overly onerous by many, Lieberman has pushed for a law that would validate all conversions performed in the IDF. Despite opposition from the Orthodox Shas party, the bill passed its first reading of the Knesset overwhelmingly in December.
All Jewish weddings in Israel must be performed by Orthodox rabbis (as part of a longtime political arrangement). The absence of civil unions is a point of great resentment for Russians because many of them are of mixed parentage. Several prime ministers have made gestures toward establishing nonreligious weddings in Israel, usually as a sop to Russian voters and dropped as soon as the sun set on election day. But when Yisrael Beiteinu was negotiating with Likud after the 2009 elections, Lieberman made advancement on the matter of civil unions a precondition for joining Netanyahu’s coalition. Last year, a limited civil-union bill passed. In neither of these areas has there been a complete revolution in Israeli policy, but Lieberman has nonetheless moved both causes further along than anyone else has. As a partner in a coalition with religious parties, that is no minor feat. And it is an indication of Lieberman’s underrated political savvy as well as his broad base of support.
Far from being harbingers of Putinist totalitarianism, Russian olim see themselves as the cure for statist overreach—overreach demonstrated not only by an overly regulated economy but also by heavy-handed religious impositions on civil society. The Russians didn’t just come bearing credentials as scientists, engineers, and musicians. They came bearing the scars of their time as veterans of one of history’s most successful democratic upheavals. Lieberman has come to represent their aspirations and their desire to bring Israel more in line with their beliefs. They are nationalists with no patience for airy talk about peace with people who want to kill them and who were backed by the Soviet government that tormented them. And they are modernizers who want a greater degree of freedom in Israel.
This is what Lieberman understands, and it is why he has succeeded as an ethnic politician where Sharansky could not, and it’s also why—if he can stay out of jail—he is unlikely to fade as a political force. The longer he remains a player, the more thinkable his ascension to greater heights becomes.
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The degree to which other politicians, of various parties on both sides of the aisle, are alienated by Lieberman’s politics would seem to put a ceiling on his political aspirations. But even a low ceiling, in the current Israeli political landscape, might be high enough for Lieberman to claim the premiership. Two facets of the modern Israeli system work to his advantage: the fragmentation of party politics and the antielitism of non-Ashkenazi voters.
The days when a single party could win a near-majority in Israel’s 120-seat Knesset and effectively govern by itself might never return. Indeed, since 2003 no party has won more than 30 seats. The Labor party is not merely a shadow of the force that controlled Israeli politics for the country’s first 30 years, it is a specter of a shadow. It may not get more than single digits in the next election, and the last Laborite to serve as prime minister, Ehud Barak, has left it to form a new party. (A recent Israeli opinion poll suggested Barak may seek to join Likud to keep his career alive.)
Netanyahu’s Likud party is in better shape, but not radically so. And Kadima, the party started by Ariel Sharon in 2005 before his incapacitation, has stalled out as well. If, indeed, Lieberman’s party wins another few seats in the next election, it may end up nearing Kadima’s total and trailing Likud by only eight or nine seats.
The atomization of Israel’s parties has brought to the surface another advantage for Lieberman. He may not need to expand his party’s vote share all that much in order to take the premiership. The rise of third (and fourth and fifth) parties threatens Likud almost as much as it does Labor and Kadima. This state of affairs prevails for a reason Americans should recognize: antielitism.
The Shas party, at first glance, has almost nothing in common with Yisrael Beiteinu. Shas is Orthodox; Yisrael Beiteinu is secular. Shas gets its base of support from the Mizrahi community (Sephardic Jews from the Middle East and North Africa); Yisrael Beiteinu’s base is the Russian immigrant community. But Mizrahi Jews have long felt discriminated against by the Ashkenazi elite, especially the Labor party. They have usually been willing to join up with Likud for majority representation, which gives them two coalition parties when Shas is part of the government (Shas won 11 seats in the last elections and currently sits in the Likud-led coalition).
But that is a marriage of political convenience—and often an uneasy marriage. After all, are not the Likudniks an elite party?
The Russians have a chip on their shoulder as well. They believe they have brought culture and brains to the country; among sabras, however, they have gained a reputation as importers of organized crime, alcohol abuse, and prostitution to Israel. And the constant caricaturing of Lieberman as a thug (his critics insist it is not a caricature at all) only encourages them to nurse that resentment.
Many Mizrahim think the same was done to Amir Peretz, the former defense minister who resigned after the Second Lebanon War in 2006. When Peretz, who was born in Morocco, ran for the Labor party’s leadership post in 2005, he pronounced, “After I’m elected I will conduct a burial ceremony for the ethnic demon,” a reference to the historically tense relationship between Mizrahi Jews and Ashkenazi Jews of European descent, and to the subtle discrimination that many Mizrahim believe still persists. Peretz’s term as Labor leader and defense minister did not go well, to say the least. Still, Mizrahim thought that he was lampooned as a fool because of his Moroccan heritage.
Peretz certainly didn’t help himself when he was photographed looking through binoculars that still had the caps on the lenses. But Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy wrote a scathing piece criticizing the press for harping on that photo: “Do we similarly disparage other leaders who are no lesser failures—the prime minister [Ehud Olmert], for example? The main reason for the mockery—to be distinguished from legitimate, deserved criticism—is rooted in dark places: the problem is in our bigoted binoculars.”
It is because of this shared resentment that Lieberman’s chances are actually improved by his standing as an outsider who is reviled by the elite and his status as his community’s ethnic champion. And though the “fools” and the “thugs” can be forgiven for awaiting their chance to turn the tables, they are not the only ones who are receptive to the complaint of elitism. When Netanyahu was running for party leadership for the second time in 2007, someone tied to another Likud candidate purchased a dot-com in Netanyahu’s name and set it up as a spoof site. One page of the site was a list of suggested slogans for his election campaign, all making fun of Netanyahu’s past. One of the slogans was “Netanyahu: Because it’s my turn again!”
The site conveyed the sense of frustration within Likud ranks that Netanyahu was simply cycling back because there was no one on the right with his standing, his background, and his position among the elite. One of the recent changes in Israeli politics is that no one loves his party or associates his party with a greater cause. Voters on the right have no strong ties to Likud any longer; many of them would happily throw their votes behind another conservative party if they believed it had a real shot at winning. The question is, how many voters will, at some point in the future, want to see what a non-Likud/Labor/Kadima government is capable of?
There is more at stake, however, in Lieberman’s rise than the ambitions of Russian immigrants or the discomfort of Israeli elites. There is the question of the effect of a Prime Minister Lieberman on both Diaspora Jewry and American support for Israel. Though Israelis may speak at times of their defiance of foreign opinion, the country’s diplomatic and military survival is still linked to the good opinion of Americans. Israeli leaders of all political stripes have always understood that cultivating the goodwill of American Jews, as well as the American people’s as a whole, is a vital part of their responsibilities. Despite the rocky relationship between the Obama administration and Netanyahu, bipartisan backing for Israel remains strong. But it must be admitted that the ascension to power in Jerusalem of a politician like Lieberman is the sort of thing that is bound to make a great many of the Jewish state’s friends queasy, whether they are Jewish or not.
Lieberman would not be the first Israeli leader to frighten Americans (the ascension of every non-Labor prime minister has been greeted with horror by both liberal Jews and much of the Washington foreign-policy establishment), but he would represent a clear departure from all his predecessors. Because he is a politician who seems to have little affinity for the American alliance and a Jew who seems to lack the sensibility or ability to reach out to American Jews, the growth of his influence will be seized upon by critics of Israel and liberals who are always ready to seize upon any excuse to further their alienation from Zionism.
Although the notion of an American veto or even a vote on the identity of Israel’s leader is an affront to Israeli democracy, Israelis are still prone to think of their prime minister as the de facto leader of the Jewish people. That idea is a controversial one, but there is no question that at times a prime minister needs to be able to speak as such a leader. Lieberman may be a tough Russian politician who ably represents the ambitions of his fellow immigrants and understands the populist current that is never far below the surface in Israeli politics.
But at the moment, he is ill prepared to assume a role in which he would need to speak not only for an ethnic group but for the fate of all Jews. Even if the accusations of thuggery or Putinism were unfair exaggerations, a Prime Minister Lieberman would need to demonstrate qualities he has conspicuously lacked thus far. One can only hope that the trends in Israeli politics that seem to be pushing him inexorably to the top will also compel him to adapt to the very different responsibilities such a role would entail.
