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The General Elections in 1996 – the Turn or the End of the Peace Process?
Carl Sunbourg
Regular and Critical Elections
The article analyses the elections for the 14th Israeli parliament (Knesset) at the end of May in 1996 through a comparative perspective. My point of departure is V.O. Key’s theory of critical elections (1955), a paradigm that was again utilised by S. Smooha and D. Peretz in their 1993 article. Key argues that obviously no single democratic election equals another. However, there are elections that lead to crucial change. This change can sometimes be existential and with long lasting consequences. According to Key, only such kind of election is a critical election.
The most dramatic examples for critical elections were the 1932/33 elections in Germany that destroyed the Weimar Republic, as well as the South-African elections in 1948 and 1994, which led into the policy of apartheid and ended this period respectively. For instance, less dramatic but still a turning point was the election that brought Margaret Thatcher to power in the UK in 1979.
In the case of Israel, generally, the elections in 1977 are considered to have been critical. As a result, the state and society were deeply transformed. Also, at first sight the 1992 elections seem to have been critical. For the first time, the political camp that was voted out in 1977 effectively returned to power. I reason that the events that took place between 1992 and the first half of 1996 were a mere deviation from the general tendency of the Israeli establishment towards a neo-liberal policy. Therefore, the 1996 elections constituted a return to this overall tendency, thus they cannot be considered to have been critical elections.
Two electoral groups at the margins
For the first time in history, voters were allowed to cast two votes in 1996, one for a preferred party and one for the candidate for the prime minister, i.e. Shimon Peres or Benjamin Netanyahu. This new way of voting resulted from the new Basic Laws that were passed in 1992. These new laws made the forecast of the voter’s behavior more difficult than usual. In sum, the voters cast an ‘ethnic vote,’ i.e. the two big parties (Labor and Likud) together lost 19 seats, and various electoral groups predominantly voted for ‘their’ party, which represented ‘their’ group interests against the interests of ‘other’ groups.
The Religious Electorate –
The Shass Example
The Shass party was founded in 1984. It emerged from the ultra-orthodox milieu of the Misrachi community (Jews descending from African and Asian Jewish communities). Shass turned out to be the third-strongest party in parliament after the 1996 elections, winning an additional four seats in the 120 seats chamber. Ovadia Joseph, the spiritual leader of the party had declared during the election campaign that it would be justified to return land to the Palestinians if Jewish lives would be thus protected. The priority for Shass is to secure as big a share of public financial recourses as possible, in order to support their constituents’ education and welfare system. Shass leaders are keen to emphasise that this would be a measurement against alleged religious discrimination. In the long run, however, this strategy could well serve Shass’ main goal, i.e. the establishment of a religious Jewish state in Israel.
The Arab Electorate
The Palestinian-Arab citizens cast 98 percent of their votes for Peres, and merely 20,000 were for Netanyahu. A smaller portion of these voters submitted blank paper slips – the name for the favoured candidate for premiership had to be written by hand on a blank paper slip – rendering the votes invalid. This form of protest against the authority’s treatment of the Palestinian-Arab citizens increased during subsequent elections, which emphasises this groups sense of being disfranchised. With regard to the political parties, the votes were cast as follows: 16 percent for Labour, 6,6 percent for the Likud, and 70 percent for Arab parties. This was 20 percent more votes for Arab parties than in previous elections.
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