In his op-ed piece from March 16, Dan Schueftan attacks Meretz and claims that its decline in the polls is the result of its diplomatic positions and its alignment with important organizations such as B'Tselem and Breaking the Silence. He is mistaken.
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Allow me to preface by saying that Meretz's position comes from and should come from what is right, and not what is right in order to scoop up a few more votes. Schueftan's moral position is wrong, and so is his electoral analysis.
Schueftan complains that Meretz continued to support peace even after former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's 2008 proposal. Meretz did so, rightfully. Meretz is the only party that presented the public with a peace plan based on Israeli-Palestinian agreement. The main points of the initiatives are a Palestinian state along the 1967 borders and an equal, mutually agreeable exchange of territories. That is not what Olmert proposed. No prime minister in Israel has yet made any proposal like that. When an Israeli prime minister accepts it, there will be a real chance for peace. This model will improve security, is supported by thousands of reservists, and also had the backing of the late IDF Chief of Staff Amnon Lipkin-Shahak, as well as men and women from academia, civil society, and politics.
The two-state model that Meretz proposes also has the support of most of the Israeli public, even if some of them think that it is not feasible in the near future or do not accept the principle of the 1967 borders with an exchange of territories. Support for this model actually bolsters Meretz.
For decades, Meretz has warned that building up the settlements not only causes security to deteriorate, but is also illegal and against the Fourth Geneva Convention as well as the International Criminal Court charter. And now a probe has been launched because of the Right's policies. We do not want to see any Israeli on trial in The Hague. The way to prevent that does not include enabling the crime of the settlements. The way to prevent Israelis from being tried in The Hague is to stop the settlement crime and reach a mutually agreeable end to the occupation.
To parse what has befallen Meretz's electoral strength, one needs to look at the whole picture: Meretz's loss of strength is not detached from the weakening of the Labor party and that of all social-democratic parties worldwide. Social democracy, as a social idea, is less popular today. To examine the electoral drop, it is necessary to examine how Israel has changed. Since 1992, the number of settlers has increased by a factor of five, and other sectors that don't tend to vote for social-democratic parties, such as the Haredim, Russian-speaking immigrants, and religious and traditional voters also make up a larger percentage of the population.
Meretz's sister party, Labor, has dropped from 44 seats in 1992 to five seats in 2019 (six if you count Orly Levy-Abekasis), a decline of 88%. In that same period, Meretz has dropped from 12 seats to four, a loss of 67%. This begs the question, why has the Labor Party collapsed even harder than Meretz? Labor didn't support Breaking the Silence, did not support B'Tselem, and did not support the ICC. Labor fell apart because of the weakness of social democracy and the demographic changes in Israel. Meretz weakened less because, unlike Labor, it continued to fight the occupation, continued to defend human rights, and continued to align itself with human rights groups. This is our commitment.
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