Israel's politics of dreams

Jerusalem — ON PREVIOUS election days, the street outside my polling station would be crowded with booths staffed by passionate activists from Israel's three-dozen-plus parties seeking one last opportunity to persuade voters. The sidewalk would be littered with leaflets from right-wing parties promising peace through strength and left-wing parties promising peace through concessions, from secular parties opposing Israeli theocracy and religious parties bemoaning godless hedonism.

But Tuesday, there were no booths, no activists. The street was depressingly clean of campaign debris. When I arrived, the security guard at the entrance was telling a woman that he didn't think people should vote at all.

Apathy is antithetical to the Israeli character, but this year it is understandable. After all, the leader the country really wanted, Ariel Sharon, is lying in a coma, and no one has managed to take his place. Also, Israelis are disgusted with growing political corruption. A dozen members of the outgoing parliament -- fully 10% of the Israeli Knesset -- either have been convicted or face corruption-related charges.

But even more important is the fact that Tuesday's election marked the end of the two visions that together animated Israeli political debate for the last three decades: the left-wing dream of a negotiated agreement with the Palestinians that would bring Israel the first real peace in its 58-year modern history, and the right-wing dream of a "Greater Israel" that would fulfill an ancient longing to return to the biblical land and, at the same time, give Israel the safety it needs to survive.

This was the first campaign in memory in which talk of peace was nearly absent. Previously, even right-wing politicians felt obliged to argue that their hard-line politics would bring a more durable peace. But now, with the rise of the Hamas in the Palestinian territories, even the left couldn't manage to sing the old peace songs.

A slogan imprinted on a giant balloon over Labor Party headquarters in Tel Aviv promised to "Fight Against Terror and Defeat Poverty," but it said nothing about bringing peace, which few Israelis believe is possible.

On the right, it was the word "settlements" that was largely missing from campaign 2006. Only one right-wing party -- the small National Union-National Religious Party -- urged support for settlements as its major goal. And even then, its message to voters wasn't the need to build new settlements but only to save existing ones from the unilateral withdrawal plan promoted by the front-running centrist Kadima party.