A Party Without Distinction

If the turnout for the election of a prime minister in a parliamentary democracy has ever in history been only 1% of a nation’s population, I’m not aware of it. Yet this is what it is scheduled to happen in Israel on September 17 when the country’s ruling party, Kadima, holds a primary vote to pick a successor to Ehud Olmert. Kadima is estimated to have some 70,000 registered voters, not all of whom will go to the polls. The population of Israel is some 6.5 million.This is an absurd situation. It would be bad enough if Kadima were a party that stood for something in Israeli political life, so that the 25% of the vote and the 29 Knesset seats that it obtained in the last election — an unimpressive but undeniable plurality — meant that nearly one in four Israelis identified with it and its policies. Then, too, it would make little political sense to let the registered members of just one party pick Israel’s next prime minister, but at least it could be argued that this reflects the most recent electoral expression of the popular will.But this is hardly the case. Kadima was a party invented by Ariel Sharon when he bolted from Likud in late 2005 because of internal opposition to his disengagement from Gaza, and the only policies it had at the time of its establishment were Mr. Sharon’s own. When shortly afterwards Mr. Sharon was disabled by a stroke, he was replaced by Mr. Olmert, a politician with no popular backing, solely because he was Mr. Sharon’s hand-picked deputy prime minister. Mr. Olmert then called for new elections, ran in them on the single-plank platform of extending disengagement to the West Bank, and managed, despite being so heavily draped in Mr. Sharon’s mantle that he was barely visible, to end the electoral campaign with 11 seats less than were forecast for him at its beginning.Kadima is a party that, once it became clear that West Bank disengagement was a no-starter, has had no distinctive policies of it own. Its attempt to be a centrist, middle-of-the-road force has consisted largely of borrowing Likud’s economic views and Labor’s negotiating position vis-à-vis the Palestinians and the Syrians. Although Israelis who approve of such combination might like Kadima to continue running the country, this was not what originally brought it to power.And if Kadima has no distinctive policies of its own, the two leading contenders to succeed Mr. Olmert, Foreign Minister Tsipi Livni and Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz, have no distinctive policies of any kind. Although Ms. Livni has been, together with Mr. Olmert, in charge of conducting the negotiations with the Palestinian Authority that commenced after last November’s Annapolis conference, no one knows to this day what she believes about Israel’s final borders, the desirable status of Jerusalem, or any other issues that are part of the “peace process.” Mr. Mofaz, for his part, has told us that he will not permit Iran to obtain nuclear weapons (has any Israeli politician announced that he will permit Iran to obtain nuclear weapons?) and that while he would like to live on the Golan Heights when he retires from politics, he is willing to negotiate its future “without preconditions,” which presumably means that he may also be willing to live elsewhere.As for other things — economic issues, secular-religious relations, Israel’s Arab minority, etc. — the 60,000 or so Kadima members going to the polls in September know as much about where Ms. Livni and Mr. Mofaz stand on them as they know about life on Mars. If either candidate has any opinions on these matters, he or she has kept it a dark secret.In the final analysis, Kadima’s voters will be voting for an image and a hope. Ms. Livni is a blandly personable woman who keeps tossing the hair out of her eyes; Mr. Mofaz is a blandly personable man whose bald head looks polished by a shoeshine boy. The hope for the woman is that if Kadima has to run in national elections, she can beat Benjamin Netanyahu and his Likud. The hope for the man is that Kadima will not have to run in national elections because he can keep Mr. Olmert’s shaky coalition together.Israelis deserve better than having their next leader selected from one of these two figures by less people than it would take to fill a football stadium. They deserve national elections now.What hasn’t been said against such elections? They’ll be divisive. They’ll cost too much money. They’ll perpetuate the bad habit of changing governments too often. They’ll waste months of the country’s time and prevent its government from making the major decisions it may have to make vis-à-vis the Palestinians, the Syrians, the Iranians.Prevent the government from making major decisions? That’s the best argument for elections that I can think of. Israel’s post-September 17 Kadima government (not that Mr. Olmert will leave office that quickly: he may still be minding the store for weeks or months afterwards) should not be making major decisions about anything. It won’t have been empowered to do so. Fifty or sixty thousand voters who do not even know what policies they are voting for should not be allowed to decide Israel’s future.Elections are indeed divisive and costly. And changing governments too often is truly a bad habit. But keeping governments in power when they no longer have anything to do with why they were chosen is an even worse one. Israelis should be allowed to choose their next government in a vote that is open to all.Mr. Halkin is a contributing editor of The New York Sun.

A Party Without Distinction

A Party Without Distinction

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