Unknown to most observers, a coup d’etat of profound significance took place in the aftermath of Israel’s June 1992 Knesset elections. The coup went unnoticed for various reasons.
One reason is that the citizens of a well-established democracy do not associate the results of a lawful democratic election in which they have participated with a coup d’etat or usurpation of power.
One would think, however, that political scientists would be more discerning. The trouble is that contemporary political science purveys itself as morally neutral. This renders the typical political scientist constitutionally incapable of describing the results of Israel’s 1992 election as a coup d’etat, for to do so is to make a “value-judgment” unbecoming to his supposedly “value-free” academic discipline. Unburdened by such pseudo-sophistication, let me offer an atypical understanding of that election.
First, consider the initial distribution of the 120 Knesset seats resulting from that arcane event. Whereas the Labor-Meretz camp received a combined total of 56 seats, the Likud-led camp of nationalist/religious parties received 59 (while the Arab parties received 5).
Also, if one sorts out the ideological orientations of the parties that failed to cross the electoral threshold, the parties of the “Right” received approximately 8,000 more popular votes than parties of the “Left” (including those of the Arab parties). Now let us probe a little deeper.
Given the mere fact that the nationalist/religious parties received 59 mandates as compared to 56 for Labor-Meretz, it would have been perfectly legitimate and proper for Israel’s president, Ezer Weizman, to call on Yitzhak Shamir to form a government—for example, a government of national unity.
Instead, Weizman asked Yitzhak Rabin to form a government, knowing it might be a minority government dependent on the “cooperation” of the five anti-Zionist members of the Arab parties—whose cooperation, of course, would have to be purchased by yielding to various Arab demands. After all, it was common knowledge that the SHAS party was pledged not to join a Labor-led government.
Indeed, that SHAS eventually betrayed its voters, that it was somehow induced to join a Labor-Meretz government, is a matter that still calls for legal investigation. But this was not the only betrayal of the voters in Israel’s democratic election of 1992.
Mr. Rabin repeatedly declared during the election campaign that he opposed withdrawal from the Golan Heights. Lured by that pledge, many people voted Labor. Imagine their dismay when, shortly after the election, Rabin offered to withdraw from the Golan Heights for “peace” with Syria, an unmitigated tyranny whose word on a peace treaty would be worthless.
Meanwhile, during the 1992 campaign, Shulamit Aloni’s Meretz Party was unusually silent about the territorial issue, thereby luring more unwary voters to the Labor-Meretz camp.
Evident here, at least in retrospect, is colossal deceit and deception. But now for the coup itself.
Rabin appointed Aloni minister of education—Aloni, a person whose anti-Zionist and anti-religious views are notorious. Imagine Israel, whose only raison d’etre is to be a Jewish state, having, as its minister of education, a person who frequently makes mock of Judaism, advocates the legalization of sodomy, scorns patriotism as chauvinism, unabashedly embraces an inciter of Arab terrorism Hanan Ashrawi, and advocates the establishment of a PLO-Palestinian state.
That such a person should be placed in control of vast sums of public money allocated for education, that is, for influencing the beliefs and behavior of Jewish youth, is the most obvious manifestation of the coup of 1992.
No one should have been surprised, therefore, when Aloni diverted large sums of money from Jewish educational institutions to Arab causes, that is, to Israeli Arabs who, judging only from their support of the intifada and of Saddam Hussein, are not exactly Israeli patriots. But then, by her own admission, patriotism or love of country—really of Judaism—does not throb in the heart of Israel’s minister of education.
Even if Aloni leaves the scene, Israel will still have Aloni’s patron, Yitzchak Rabin, as its prime minister. Rabin will carry on, less ostentatiously, Aloni’s anti-Zionist and anti-religious program. For the Labor party, the party that did so much to establish the state of Israel, has lost its soul. Devoid of any ideology—socialism having been discredited—Labor has embraced a fraudulent “peace process” as its only road to power—power having become its only purpose.
Mr. Rabin and his trusted foreign minister, Shimon Peres, are embarked on a course which, if unchecked, will see Israel withdraw to its 1949 “Auschwitz” lines. More than 120,000 Jews would then be abandoned to Arab rule. If those Jews leave, the resulting demoralization of the country will spell the end of the Third Commonwealth.
Such would be the grave consequence of the Labor-Meretz coup of 1992.
