Soccer Dad

Terror and elections

Getting Shmuel Rosner on board at Contentions was a great move. He's a little too much of a leftist for my taste, but he does have an eye for an interesting story, or an interesting angle. But his effort today, The Terrorism effect is bewildering because of its conclusion.

This means that an additional terror attack in 1992 could have killed the Oslo process-which makes one think about the strange ways of terror, and the deranged ways in which it serves to destroy both victim and aggressor alike.

Another terror attack in 1992 may well have helped Rabin even more. Shortly before the elections, a fifteen year old girl, Helena Rapp was killed. Rabin used her death to argue that Shamir's policies made Israel less safe. A year after the killing this is what Clyde Haberman of the NY Times wrote:

One reason Yitzhak Rabin is Israel's Prime Minister is a teen-age girl named Helena Rapp.

Helena Rapp was viciously stabbed to death by a Palestinian a year ago as she waited for a bus near Tel Aviv, and Mr. Rabin invoked her killing again and again during his election campaign last summer. Install me as leader, he told Israelis, and you will have someone flexible enough to forge peace with the Arabs but also tough enough to stop Arabs who think they can get their way by knifing Jewish girls. As the final vote proved, it was a winning strategy.

However progress on negotiations did not lead to a reduction of terror. As Haberman later noted:

Whatever the reason, the bloodshed was ample and sustained, diverting Mr. Rabin from peace negotiations and forcing him to deal with rolling thunder on his right. The opposition Likud Party, reborn under a dynamic new leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, ran hard with the terrorism issue. So did disaffected Jewish settlers in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, whose anti-Government demonstrations have grown bigger and more violent.

It did the Prime Minister little good to complain, as he did, that the right was trying to capitalize on tragedy, which indeed seems to be the case but is little different from what he himself did last year. Nor did it improve his standing to point out that stabbings pose no existential threat to Israel, or to lash out at young Israelis for being too passive in the face of knife-wielders.

The point is that Rosner's premise is wrong. Another terror attack probably would have helped Rabin and Labor even more..

HIs befuddlement at the end is also strange. In 1992, yes, it appears that terror helped bring Labor to power, which, in turn brought about the Oslo Accords. But in 1996, terror brought Likud to power, even though Likud opposed the unconditional implementation of Oslo with no regard to Palestinian compliance. But the violence of early 1996, showed that Oslo wasn't working. In late 1995, after Yigall Amir assassinated Yitzchak Rabin, Shimon Peres's government withdrew from six Arab cities. It was the Palestinian Authority's job to secure those cities and ensure that no terrorists were allowed to operate there. Of course Arafat allowed Hamas to operate in areas under his control, so the resulting terror took advantage of Arafat's connivance. Unlike the terror of 1992, it showed that the peace process wasn't working. When terror declined under Netanyahu, Israelis relaxed and voted him out of office.

Terror may affect election results. But terrorists are more opportunistic.The effects of terror on an election will be related to how the electorate views the government. I don't think that there is enough data to draw consistent conclusions whether terror makes an electorate more hawkish or more dovish.

Crossposted on Yourish.