An Israel Without Hope

A good part of Israel's leadership, including Prime Minister Olmert and Foreign Minister Tsipi Livni, is in Los Angeles this week for the annual General Assembly of the United Jewish Communities, the umbrella organization of American Jewish communal organizations. It's a traditional pilgrimage for Israeli politicians — on whom Israelis of all shades of opinion are so down these days that they wouldn't mind if they stayed in Los Angeles.

Never before, to tell the truth, has the political scene in Israel seemed so directionless or depressing. Everywhere are scandals and charges of corruption. The government, whose main coalition party, Kadima, is an ad hoc creation with no grass roots, has no visible program except its own survival. Its cabinet is composed of parties that can't agree about anything beyond the fear of new elections. Its prime minister says one thing one week and another the next; the country has stopped listening to him. The army, once the national institution that Israelis had the most confidence in, is ridden with dissension and recriminations over last summer's botched war in Lebanon and has begun to resemble a squabbling political party itself.

All this might be of no great consequence if Israel were a country in the situation of other countries. Italy, for example, has gone from scandal to scandal and incompetent government to incompetent government for generations without it making a whole lot of difference.

The Italian civil service continues to perform adequately, the garbage gets collected, and the trains run more or less on time, and Italians do not spend sleepless nights worrying about their nation's future. Italy has no real enemies, life in it is pleasant, and it hardly matters who its politicians are or what they do. They're an unavoidable nuisance, like traffic or humidity, best dealt with by ignoring them.

But although this is true of many countries, Israel is not one of them. It does have enemies, they're close by, and they have every intention of destroying it. In the long run they stand a good chance of succeeding. Thwarting them depends on making the right decisions and avoiding the wrong ones. And for this, alas, one needs politicians.

As political leaders go, Israel has not had bad ones. In fact, some of them have been very good. Their caliber, it is true, has declined gradually over the years — David Ben-Gurion was a greater figure than Menachem Begin, who, in turn, outshone Yitzhak Rabin — but this is true of most contemporary Western democracies. Think of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, and then of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. Sound bites and public opinion polls have not been kind to the quality of politicians anywhere.

Yet even in the last decade, Israel's leaders have had their merits until now. Benjamin Netanyahu was flighty and weak under pressure, but he had a clear idea of the direction he wanted to take Israel in, and he worked toward it seriously. Ehud Barak pulled off the feat of getting Israel out of Lebanon, even if he failed at everything else.

Ariel Sharon, though he may have done more damage to Israel's political system than any politician before him, thought big and planned big until the day he was felled by his stroke. Each of these men, however great the enmity or disagreement he inspired, was also capable of inspiring expectations and hope.

This is precisely what Ehud Olmert and his government have been unable to do. Israelis expect little of them and base no hopes on them. A quarter of those who voted in last spring's national elections did so for Mr. Olmert because they thought he would carry on with Mr. Sharon's disengagement plan. Now that this plan is dead in the water, they can scarcely remember why they voted for him at all.

Many others who went to the polls chose the Labor Party, believing its claim that it would change the country's agenda. Now that Labor is in Mr. Olmert's government, all the party has changed is its own image as a force for change. Its ministers sit side by side with Kadima's and with the representatives of right-wing groups whom they swore never to share a table with, and all twiddle their thumbs together.

Meanwhile, the rockets keep falling from Gaza; every Israeli military action there further harms its standing in the world; Hamas slowly gains in its fight for international acceptance; radical Islam grows stronger nearly everywhere; the potential gains of last summer's war in Lebanon have been squandered; Iran goes on building the bomb; and Israelis, for the first time in their history, see no conceivable light, not even an imaginary will-o'- the-wisp, at the end of the tunnel.

Not all of this, needless to say, is the Olmert government's fault. It is not to blame that Islamic fundamentalism is on the march, or that the Iranian nuclear program has gotten as far as it has, or that America is losing the war in Iraq. But in the past, when Israel faced similarly grim threats, its leaders always had a strategy, whether ultimately realistic or not, for dealing with them. There was always the belief that, if Israel persevered in its path, these threats could be met. Israelis always felt that things would eventually get better.

They are gradually ceasing to feel this way today. This isn't because their spirit has been crushed. Israelis are by nature an optimistic people and continue to be. It's because they have a government that, while the garbage continues to be collected and the trains continue to run on time, has failed to provide them with what they need most: a sense of hope that they will not have to live by the sword forever. And an Israel without hope is a hard place to live in indeed.

Mr. Halkin is a contributing editor of The New York Sun.