By FANIA OZ-SALZBERGER 

ARE Israelis turning toward the political Right? In one sense, the answer is a resounding yes.  Look at the recent election results: Likud and the six parties on its right scored 65 out of 120 Knesset seats. 

By contrast, Labour and Meretz, the only parties of the Zionist Left, have experienced dramatic falls, with 13 and 3 seats respectively. Clearly, Israeli voters have abandoned the peacenik wishful thinking of the left-of-centre doves, and embraced the grim hardline of the right-of-centre hawks. Or have they?

The “move to the Right” narrative goes like this: since the heyday of negotiations in the 1990s, when a peaceful sovereign Palestine seemed just two signatures away, Israelis have gone down a slalom of disillusionment. Ehud Barak’s attempt to resuscitate the Oslo process crashed into a bloody intifada led by a cynical Yasser Arafat. Ariel Sharon’s unilateral withdrawal from Gaza brought Hamas into power, and its rockets all over south-western Israel.

Finally, Ehud Olmert’s lame efforts at reviving talks with Fatah’s Abu Mazen have left many moderate Israelis wondering whether  there is any viable Palestinian partner to speak of.

No wonder, some pundits suggest, Israel’s voters have veered Right. The Oslo Accords and the establishment of a Palestinian government have led to increasing bloodshed, a thousand Israeli lives -– both Jewish and Arab – lost in the intifada, and hostilities spilling across the Gazan, as well as the Lebanese, border.

Whereas the Left -– so goes this narrative -– is still trapped in the illusion of peacemaking, the Right tells Israelis a bitter truth: brace yourselves. There will be no peace in our times. And voters are lending an ear. Now, this may be a reasonable interpretation of the last election results and the preceding decade. 

But if that is the case, why did Tzipi Livni’s centrist, peace-seeking Kadima Party gain the largest number of Knesset seats? Why is Binyamin Netanyahu so anxious to build a moderate, centre-based coalition?  Why is he unhappy about a narrow right-wing government with his “natural partners” (and mutually unnatural bedfellows), Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beitenu and the ultra-Orthodox Shas?

And, even more poignantly: if Israelis have shifted to the Right over the past decade, how come many of their erstwhile hawkish leaders have journeyed in the opposite direction? Consider an alternative interpretation: Israeli politics is gravitating toward the centre. It is abandoning both leftist dreams of wholesale Jewish-Palestinians reconciliation, and rightist fantasies of a Greater Israel.

Israelis are becoming older, wearier, perhaps even wiser, and certainly tuned to the big wide world. A very broad constituency -– I have elsewhere called it “Middle Israel” -– is consistently giving its vote to leaders who seem to offer responsibility and stability. After the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, this constituency was willing to give Netanyahu a go at national leadership, but then it was even more willing to allow Barak to pursue his agenda of peace. 

When both prime ministers failed to deliver the goods, Middle Israel went for Sharon, and stuck by him despite his dramatic shift from Greater Israel militancy to unilateral withdrawal and an acceptance of Palestine’s right to self-determination.

Significantly, even after years of intifada, and even after the sudden disappearance of the charismatic Sharon from the political stage, Israel’s voters did not abandon Kadima. It did not turn out to be a one-man party. Instead, it flourished against the odds, scoring far better than Labour and somewhat better than Likud in two consecutive elections.

Kadima, you may remember, has always been led by former hawks. Its agenda is consistent: a two-state solution for Israelis and Palestinians; a responsible withdrawal from most of the West Bank; and an internationally brokered peace agreement.  Not starry-eyed, but solid. It is willing to divide Jerusalem, but it will not bow to Palestinian demands to enact a “right of return”.

This, I suggest, is the terrain of Middle Israel. The two-state solution is no longer the flag of the radical Left, or even of the moderate Left. Even Lieberman declares his commitment to Palestinian ­statehood. So it seems considerably more than 50 per cent of Israelis today would agree, if security conditions are met, to a Palestinian state.

This ratio has not changed since Rabin’s peace bid in 1992 or Barak’s negotiation ticket in 1999. The centre is solid, and it is moderate. This is what Netanyahu seems to understand when he yearns for Kadima and Labour partnerships. Middle Israel is not willing to risk its future in impossible dreams of territorial grandeur. As a famous bumper sticker has it, “We have no children for superfluous wars”.