Has "ideology" become such a bad word in our politics? It's true, politics is all about compromises, needs, and negotiating. Politics is a field in which you swallow toads if you need to, in which agendas can be flexible, in which you sometimes need to set a goal and pay a price – in principle, ideology, and sometimes even socially – to achieve it.
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And this is precisely the issue: you do it to achieve your goals, not someone else's. And "you" and "someone else" don't refer to personal, careerist goals, however important they might be. It's a mistake to dismiss them. Ambition and competition are an important part of the political game. But they are only a tool, not the target. We have one contract with our leaders: that they use the tools they have to implement the plans that were why we voted for them. We will understand if sometimes it's done imperfectly, and we'll accept that sometimes promises are broken, or that reality overcomes our plans. But there is a path, there is a general decision on a direction.
And these days, those targets are clear: taking a strong stance against the Iranian threat; defending Israel's interests and freedom of action under any American administration or the European Union; protecting Israel's new alliances on the moderate axis of the Arab world; insisting on the core values of Zionism and patriotism; continued economic development; strengthening pluralism in academia, culture, and the media; and of course – a clear statement on Judea, Samaria, and the Jordan Valley: that after we pulled the doctrine of withdrawal off the table, we now move on to talking about a declaration of sovereignty.
That is the direction the Right is headed, and in which it has made unquestionable progress in the past decade, mainly when we consider the starting point a little over 10 years ago, when the world was pushing for another pullback, warning us about a diplomatic tsunami after our disengagement was met by rocket fire and the Goldstone Report. We aren't there anymore, and there's one clear reason for that – the Israeli governments since then have been led by a solid right-wing leadership. Yes, it included representatives of the Left, and yes, it sometimes was forced into unity when there was no other choice. And yes, it sometimes had to fold here and there, or even upset its right-wing base. But these have been right-wing governments, dominated by the Right, that were formed to move ahead in the direction that the Right wanted to go. All the partners recognized that when it came to the deepest existential questions, to principles, the ideological direction was clear.
And astonishingly, just as we reach an absolute majority of right-wing seats in the Knesset, we are about to lose our orientation. From a majority that was pushing for change, we are now prepared to consider a U-turn when it comes to ideas, or at least a sharp turn to the Left. The Left not only identifies the internal collapse of the Right, it also admits freely that this is the moment it has been waiting for. One after the other, representatives of the Left – sometimes a sitting MK, sometimes a former one, sometimes a newspaper publishers – and admit that any upcoming partnerships will be a "one night stand," that they'll get rid of "him" and then see. To put it simply: their only hope of steering the Israeli ship away from the route the national camp has navigated for it is to have more than one captain take the wheel for a bit.
It doesn't matter how many pretty words you couch it in – unity, healing, change – the excitement on the Left can't be disguised, and we can't deny what this means: the Right can no longer dictate the direction of the journey, certainly not like it once could. Even if the prime minister will be from the Right, it won't be the same. It's not only who kills the king that matters, but who crowns the new king, and what he receives in exchange, and where the king intends to go with it. We don't have the privilege of deluding ourselves: the Left didn't fight to bring down one right-wing prime minister just to replace him with another prime minister from the Right.
Bad blood, problems, boycotts, promises, everyone has plenty of these. If we want to avoid another election or exit the political impasse, it's inevitable that some promises will have to be broken. There is no way to avoid sitting in a government with people we once denied. We can't stay pure. Commitments will be violated, but the question is which ones, and in exchange for what?
So because of this impossible tangle of boycotts and promises, in the most complicated place in all the chaos – it is possible to gather around the only thing on which we cannot allow ourselves to blink: our ideology. If they already need to go back on their commitments or check their egos or hold their noses – at least let them do it to promote the ideology of the Right, the national camp, as fully as possible, as deeply as possible, in the most enabling way possible. In the end, it will all fall apart. The dust will settle, and in a month or two years from now no one will remember who gave in, who folded, who blinked, and who defected. They will remember one thing: who put ideology before everything else, and who allowed the ship of Israel to veer off its ideological course. In the situation we're in, this is the only test we cannot fail. This is the only ideological commitment they must not break.
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