Israeli political identity blurring, professor says

In a lecture yesterday in Dodds Auditorium, political scientist Tamar Hermann discussed the evolution of Israeli-Jewish public opinion on the peace process with the Palestinians.

Hermann, who is director of the Tami Steinmetz Center for Peace Research at Tel Aviv University, said the standard definitions of "left" and "right" in Israeli politics no longer apply.

In previous years, to say that you were "on the left" in Israel meant that you were willing to make far-reaching concessions in negotiations with the Palestinians, while saying you were "on the right" meant you believed security should be the top priority, she said.

"This division between doves and hawks no longer exists in Israel in the same way it did in the past," she said. "What we see is a blurring of the classic dichotomy in Israeli public opinion."

Hermann, who also chairs the department of sociology and political science at the Open University of Israel, said there has been a general rightward shift "as far as party map and self-definition" are concerned.

"By self-perception and self-definition, there is hardly any 'left' left in Israel," she said.

Only 17 percent of Israelis in a recent poll defined themselves as being on the "left," she said. However, a significantly larger percentage voted for leftist parties in this year's election. This suggests that the traditional definitions of left and right "don't work very well anymore," she said.

For several years, Hermann has been studying the level of support for the Oslo peace process between Israel and the Palestinians, which began in 1993. Since 1999, she said she has found that the level of support of the Oslo process has been consistently much higher than the level of belief that it will succeed.

When Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres and Benjamin Netanyahu served as prime minister, roughly half the Israeli public supported the Oslo process, she said.

The level of support for the Oslo process began to decline shortly after the election of Ehud Barak in 1999, roughly a year before the process collapsed with the failure of the Camp David meeting in 2000, she said.

In the last year, polls found that only 20 to 30 percent of Israeli Jews support continuing the Oslo process.

Nevertheless, many Israeli Jews still support a renewal of negotiations with the Palestinians, Hermann said. Throughout 2002 and in the first two months of 2003, between 60 and 71 percent supported the resumption of negotiations.

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Although the Oslo process failed to lead to a political settlement, it was a "smashing success" in terms of public opinion, Hermann said.

Seventy-five percent of Israeli Jews surveyed recently said Palestinians "deserve an independent state," a large increase from previous decades, she said. Palestinian statehood is no longer the main impediment to the peace process, she said.

Hermann said in a recent poll, 65 percent of Israeli Jews expressed support for the "road map," a new peace plan proposed this week by the United States, the European Union, the United Nations and Russia.