CRISIS GIVES SMALL PARTIES CLOUT IN ISRAELI ELECTION

TEL AVIV - Maybe the most telling fact in this coming Israeli election is
that at this moment of intense crisis, a tiny Israeli party, Green Leaf,
which advocates the legalization of marijuana, could win one or two seats
in the new parliament. Green Leaf's motto might as well be: since every
other solution has been tried and failed, why not just get high? I've
covered a lot of Israeli elections, but I have never seen one like this.
I've never seen the Israeli public less interested in the two major parties
- - indeed, in the whole event. The reasons are not hard to discern. The last
two years of suicide bombings and collapsed peace have knocked the stuffing
out of this place.

It is not that Israelis are about to surrender. The Palestinian fantasy
that the Jews will just pick up and leave if you turn the heat up on them
high enough was so wrong, so foolish. (You should see the number of
concerts and theater and dance performances in Tel Aviv on any given
evening.) Nevertheless, there is a deep and growing sense among Israelis of
"No Exit," a sense that every idea has been tried - peace overtures,
crackdowns, settlements, targeted killings, the left-wing solution and the
right-wing solution, and nothing works. As an Israeli friend told me over
dinner: "You look at your kids and your grandkids now and you ask yourself:
What if it never ends?"

This anguish helps explain some of the bizarre politics surrounding the
Jan. 28 vote - and not only the emergence of the make-dope-not-war Green
Leaf party. While all the polls show Mr. Sharon's Likud Party gaining the
most votes, it seems to be more out of old loyalties and a sense that Mr.
Sharon is a better shield for Israelis to hide behind than out of any
conviction that he has any solutions.

Meanwhile, Likud's main rival, the Labor Party under Amram Mitzna, has the
plan most Israelis prefer: separation from the Palestinians. But pessimism
that any plan will work anymore has limited Mr. Mitzna's appeal. "People
are in fear - they are in a psychology of shock," Mr. Mitzna told me as we
rode around one morning. "They have lost confidence that you are able to
negotiate with the other side, so they stick to what they know - even if it
is not working. What I am trying to bring is logic and the truth, but
people are thinking from their guts."

Because neither Labor nor Likud will win enough parliament seats to rule
alone, they will be more dependent than ever on the small parties, with
their narrow primordial agendas: from the anti-religious parties to the
ultrareligious parties, to the pro-Israeli Arab parties, to the Israeli
Russian parties, to the pro-Sephardic Jews party.

What is amazing is that these smaller tribal parties are likely to get more
than half the seats in the next parliament. So more than half of the next
parliament will consist of parties that offer the wider society no answers
to its deepest national concerns: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the
economy, the social divisions. It is as if America was having an election
in the midst of the Civil War, and more than half the parties had no
position on slavery.

This is not an accident. Israelis actually favor, by a large majority, a
national unity government. They want to feel united. But in the absence of
a leader or party that can offer that, many retreat into tribal dens that
are built around one Israeli tribe negating the other - secular versus the
religious, Sephardic Orthodox versus Ashkenazi Orthodox, Russian immigrants
versus everybody else.

"Israelis are skeptical about peace right now, but they badly want a
border," says Moshe Halbertal, an Israeli philosopher. "They want a border
so that any Palestinian in the West Bank can't just walk over and kill an
Israeli. They want an end to this war of all against all where there is no
front line. They don't expect peace with the Palestinians, but they want a
front for the war with Palestinians. They want a border for a Jewish
democratic state. . . .

"But I think," he added, "that they would also like a leader with a serious
domestic national agenda, someone who has ideas on how Israelis can live
together and heal all of the internal divisions - someone who would be
culturally inclusive, religiously respectful, educationally compassionate
and diplomatically hardheaded. They are looking for an Israeli Third Way."

In short, the leader Israelis crave is someone who can both build a border
with the Palestinians and take down the borders among the Jews.
Unfortunately, the Messiah is not on the ballot in this election.