The Center That Wasn't

Ehud Olmert stood at the podium last night and said what every centrist believes in the moment of victory: "Israel wants Kadima." Forward. The people have chosen pragmatism. The center holds.

Kadima took 29 seats in the Knesset — the largest party in parliament, built from scratch in four months. Ariel Sharon broke from Likud in November. He hemorrhaged in January. His protégé picked up the franchise and won the election on a single idea: convergence. Unilateral withdrawal from most of the West Bank. Redraw the borders by 2010. If the Palestinians won't negotiate, do it alone.

It is, on paper, the most pragmatic platform in Israeli politics. It is also a platform with no structural foundation beneath it.

Here is what the centrist victory obscures: Kadima is not a party. It is a coalition of convenience — Likud defectors, Labor refugees, and Sharon loyalists who followed a man, not an ideology. Sharon is in a coma. The man is gone. What holds Kadima together now is the absence of a better option, which is a different thing than shared conviction.

The convergence plan sounds decisive. It is decisive in the way that amputation is decisive — it resolves the question by removing the limb. There is no partner for peace, so Israel will draw its own borders. The settlements outside the barrier go. The settlements inside stay. The Palestinians get whatever geography remains, whether or not anyone calls it a state.

Voter turnout hit a historic low — 63.2 percent. The margin of victory was built on the margin of indifference. Likud collapsed to 12 seats, not because the right disappeared, but because the right is regrouping. The ultra-nationalist Yisrael Beiteinu took 11 seats. The energy on the Israeli right hasn't vanished. It has relocated.

This is the pattern that centrist movements miss every time they win: the center is not a permanent political address. It is a waystation — a place voters pass through on the way to somewhere more committed. The forces that drove Sharon from Likud didn't dissolve when Kadima formed. They're waiting.

Olmert will form his coalition. He'll bring in Labor, probably Shas, likely the Pensioners' Party. He'll have his 61 seats. And the convergence plan will meet the same reality that every unilateral solution meets: the other side gets a vote too, even when you've decided they don't.

The center won today. The center always wins for a season. The interesting question is never whether the center can take power. It's whether the center can hold it without becoming something else entirely.

Kadima means "forward." In Hebrew, as in politics, forward is a direction, not a destination.

Sources:

• Olmert claims Israeli election victory — Al Jazeera, 2006-03-29
• Olmert claims victory in Israeli election — NBC News, 2006-03-27