In this issue . . .

Guest Editorials:
The threat of bipolarity; China and the WTO; beware the Albanian mafia
Features:
Money laundering, the future of democratic Indonesia, and Europe after Kosovo
Human Rights, Ethnicity and National Identify:
Reflections on the meaning and implication of identity at the turn of the millennium
Elections Outlook:
India, South Africa, Turkey, Israel, Argentina, and Chile
Charles Cook on Washington:
The highly charged polls in the 2000 races

Israel the Improbable

Excerpt:

Folk-song writer, witty Korean War veteran, and latter-day troubadour of the Wobblies, U. "Utah" Phillips, once said: "If elections could really change anything, they'd be illegal." Phillips has written some fine songs, but his political cynicism is overwrought. Elections do matter, at least some of the time. Israelis certainly believe they do, or they wouldn't consistently roll up voter participation levels near 80 percent. That they did again on May 17, when Israel elected its fifteenth Knesset and made a former Israel Defense Forces chief of staff, Ehud Barak, the new prime minister.

In every Knesset election after the first one on January 25, 1949, Israelis have expressed the firm conviction that each successive national polling was the most important in the history of the state. This belief has expressed more than just the standard conceit of the contemporary. It has actually been true, which helps explain the high voter turnout. But it also hints at something more deeply embedded in Israel's nature -- namely, that Israel is an improbable place. Consider some of the evidence.

The Jewish people, while enduring a 1,800-year historical discontinuity from normal political life, remained a single people despite being exiled to the four corners of the earth and speaking a hundred different daily languages. They then managed to restore their sovereignty over the same land, speaking pretty much the same language, and holding the same basic faith as when the exile began in 135 C.E. In the meantime, world Jewry survived, barely, the most systematic attempt at genocide in modern history, and just a few years later defended its nascent independence against seemingly impossible odds. Israel also became, and has remained, a vibrant democracy despite the fact that neither the experience of its founders nor any of its cultural antecedents -- religious or otherwise -- disposed Israeli politics in that direction. And in just over a half-century of independence, Israel raised itself from the ranks of the Third World to the First, its economy now exceeding that of all its immediate neighbors -- Egypt, Jordan, the Palestinian Authority, Syria, and Lebanon combined.

What is even more improbable is that Israel did all this without ever managing to agree internally how to reconcile the religious civilization that gave it seminal definition with the national idea -- Zionism -- that, at long last, brought it back into being. Nor has there ever been agreement on the ideal frontiers of the state, the purpose of the state, how to relate to the majority of Jews not living in the state, or, for that matter, even on the definition of a Jew. Israel has also held fifteen national elections without a speckle of depredation cast on its democratic credentials, but Israelis have never been able to agree on primary political principles long enough to write out, let alone ratify, a constitution.

It is because Israel is so improbable that every national election seems so important. The country's inherent intensity is borne on a hope that one day the country's improbability will give way to the normal, the typical, and the regular -- indeed, to the probable. Thus they hope, because living the improbable national life, though sometimes exhilarating, is also dangerous, nerve-wracking, and now and again exudes hints of impermanence.

There is no mystery as to the core element of this hope: It is the issue of war and peace, which for Israel has always been a literally existential matter. In short, Israelis vote with a sense of portent and solemnity (sometimes also anger and frustration) because each time they do, they hope that those put in charge will find a way to transform the improbable into that moment when Israel's normal future will be stamped with its defining characteristics. This is why the country's national anthem, Hatiqvah ("The Hope"), has always been such a nifty symbolic double entendre.

In recent time, there has been reason to hope for the twilight of Israel's uncomfortable improbability. Its beginnings were small, starting with surreptitious and limited cooperation with Jordan, Morocco, and a few other Arab states in the 1960s. Then came a major breakthrough: peace with Egypt in 1979. That was followed by the very public Madrid Conference of October 1991, and then the very private success of the Oslo track in August 1993, which together assembled for the first time the practical modalities of a comprehensive peace. Then came Oslo II of September 1995, which suggested that, despite all its problems, the Israeli-Palestinian peace track carried vehicles in only one direction only. But, as it turned out in June 1996, it did so a little too fast and loose to suit a majority of Israelis, who elected Benyamin Netanyahu to slow the train down and take more care with vehicular security.

Netanyahu's shorter-than-expected tenure was quite exasperating, even for his supporters. He slowed the train down to a crawl, seemed congenitally unsure of which track to take, and proved incapable of getting his crew to stop arguing long enough to do much work. The passengers, fuming over the delays and disgusted with the general lack of civility on board, decided on May 17 to change engineers.

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