The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 20

20 COMMENT AND ANALYSIS the guardia: Wednesday March 30 199 people inseparable from counter-insurgency intelligence The insidious Occupation of a nation's consciousness of secular extreme rightists would not have moved from being completely marginal, and wholly unrepresented in parliament, to being accepted parliamentary parties. The religiously orthodox in Israel, meanwhile, would almost certainly not have been tempted, as some were, to translate a general, apolitical belief in redemption into a certainty that the highway to redemption lay. through territorial expansion. Part of a religious constituency that had been either anti-' Zionist or only moderately Zionist would not have lurched to the right and the far right. The Labour Party would have retained its pivotal pre-1967 position but it would have been forced far earlier into a process of re-thinking its programmes and beliefs.

The occupation made it possible for Labour to largely put off such rethinking, to stagger on as a party half committed to agrarian, socialism and a large state and union controlled industrial sector, and half playing with a new approach to free and, later, de-regulation and privatisation. Today the party can be seen to bo split, asithe left-wing journalist Chaim Baram. puts it, between "agrarians" and between an old party preoccupation with land, settle ment, agriculture and military service; and a wing that yearns to leapfrog over peace with the Palestinians to a new world of computers and sophisticated industry and industrial deals across political frontiers that marry Israeli expertise and capital to lower-cost Arab labour and resources. But the debate started late and still seems insubstantial. Even though elections were often won on economic arguments, those arguments were almost always interwined with war and peace issues.

Labour has, in a sense, been as dependent as Likud on the occupation as the basis for its main programmes. "Territorial compromise" for years allowed the party to suggest that you could, by some magic, both give the territories back and keep them. Rabin's division of settlements into "political" and which probably won him the 1992 election, amounted to more of the same even though it is, most military men agree, a nonsensical distinction. The Israeli through the years of occupation, has come to specialise, not in being superbly ready for the high speed conventional warfare which was once its forte, but in the day-to-day business of ruthless crowd control, in the cofr rupfion and physical abuse of teetering centre of gravity, between hate and fear, in a desert void of emotion and consciousness" wrote David Grossman in his 1987 book, The YeUow Wind. The sincerity, of Grossman and those like him can hardly be denied, yet it is true that the moral drama has also, been part of the way in which the ccupation has shaped the country's life.

What happens when, or if, this is all over: when the Palestinians have their entity or state? Israel will have to begin again, in a way that will truly be very strange. The rationale of every political party will be undermined, the purpose and the style of the Israeli armed forces will be radically altered, the duties and some of the beliefs of the orthodox will be in flux, and the moral questions around which the debate about Israel have been conducted will have changed, to be replaced by nobody knows what. The sometimes crippling caution with which the Rabin government approaches its relations with the PLO and its problems with the settlers perhaps has its roots in this fact, that whether or not an agreement results in a true peace, it will certainly be the start of a new life for Israelis, unknowable in advance and more than a little frightening in prospect. the most immediate example of the way in which Israeli society has become not only habituated to the occupation but dependent on it. Politically, militarily, and even morally the occupation, has become the central pillar of Israeli life.

Behind the hesitations and the calculations over how to deal with the Palestinians lies a huge and unanswered question: how will we live and what will we be, afterwards? After a peace, what will Israel be like? It is common to say that-the occupation, now over a quarter of a century old, has "distorted" Israeli life. But it might be argued that it has, instead, actually built that life. Hardly anything in Israel would be as it is today if there had not been an occupation. Imagine what would have happened if, in 1967, Israel's secret warnings to King Hussein, telling to stay out of the war, had been heeded. Israel would have been victorious oVer Egypt and Syria, but would not have taken the West Bank territories, and might therefore, earlier rather than later, probably without an-' other war, have made peace with Egypt and handed over the Sinai.

But these are just the externals. Without the territories, newly formed Likud would hardly have blossomed in way that it did, going from what looked like a position of permanent inferiority in Israeli politics to looking, for a long while, like the country's natural ruling party. Without the territories, Likud would, perhaps, have become mainly a party representing Oriental Jews. Beyond the Likud, the fringe IF THE Israeli Defence Forces had set out to deliberately sabotage progress toward peace between Israelis and Palestinians they could not have done much better than they have in recent weeks. Apart-from being' responsible for the woeful security which gave Baruch Goldstein his chance, they then staged a 24-hour public siege in Hebron, killing Hamas men and a bystander, and now they have shot down six Fatah youths, Arafat's own people, in Gaza.

Common sense would have suggested that, after the massacre, a general order should have gone out to avoid trouble, even where you had wanted men in the cross hairs. But the Israeli army's incapacity to stop doing what, after all these years, comes naturally is only Martin Wool lacott in Jerusalem In voting for the media magnate, Italians hope to turn their country into Berlusconi 's empire writ large Ed Vulliamy HE ITALIANS have delivered their verdict as to what kind of country they want to emerge from the most remarkable political tumult in post-war western Europe. A hurricane of scandals exposed their society as rotten to the core, and brought the country to the threshold of sweeping reforms an opportunity to carve out a role as the laboratory for a new politics in the new continent. But the Italians looked over the edge and did not like what they saw. This election was a battle between two different Italys: the country's effervescent, liberal side, and the new, self-centred materialism.

In the event, the Italians opted for the latter. Italy has voted itself into the hands of a precarious three-way alliance between multi media tycoon Silvio Berlusconis neo-fascist leader Gianfranco Fini, and wayward rebel Um-berto Bossi, leader of the Northern League. The first major business venture by Berlusconi, victor of the battle for Italy's soul, was the construction of a dream housing estate on the edge of Milan, imaginatively christened Mi-lano 2. It became a temple of an emergent Italy, some of the most sought-after housing in the financial capital. There, people wake up in the morning in houses built by Berlusconi and switch on soap operas broadcast by Berlusconi's awful television channels, punctuated by advertisements work, in back alley ambushes, night raids on suspected terrorist hide-outs, and, in Lebanon, on bombing and rocketing from the air in the clear knowledge that many of the victims are more or less innocent civilians.

Meanwhile, its officer corps, once disproportionately drawn from the kibbutzim, is now quite seriously penetrated by men from the West Bank settlements. The tacky reality of this kind of war was reflected in a Jerusalem Post report on the recent Hebron operation: "The IDF has been using the 'fire from afar and above' tactics for over a year in an attempt to avoid frontal assaults on barricaded groups which often led to IDF casualties. The problem with the tactic is the collateral damage." For collateral, read: a pregnant woman shot through the head. Israel's moral and intellectual life has been as consumed by the occupation as that of South Africa was by apartheid. Argument over Israel's purposes, which might, on that alternate time path of an Israel without the territories, have gone in many directions, has been dominated by the fact of occupation.

"We have lived in a false and artificial situation, based on illusions, on a sentially a country of the right. He agreed. "It's not a one-party state, but it's not lar oil being one. Looking back over ISO years you could say that there have been three long periods of ngntwing rule, each louowea by some sort of catastrophe and then by a reassertion of the right. The liberals ran the system until 1922, keeping the opposition out completely.

Then mere was fascism, ana since then the Christian Democrats, who have really done the same. "By preventing the opposition from having a chance of power, you end up with a corrupt regime every time. Finally there is a catastrophe the catastrophe of the first world war which destroyed liberal rule, the defeat in the second war which destroyed fascism -and now this. Italy seems to go on believing in these regimes until the last minute, and then it suddenly changes. You could say it has got off marvellously lightly this time." The Italian political system has a tendency to take itself immensely seriously.

Each tremor in the long-running Christian Dcmocratdominated coalition of the past 45 years has been dubbed a crisis. Few have justified the name- Now that the sys tem is truly in crisis, the fashion is to say that the so-called hrst republic is at an end, and must be replaced root-and-branch. Here Mack Smith counsels caution once again. "A lot of people will say the urst repub lic is dead and we will undoubt edly get wonderful headlines trom Berlusconi saying mat tnts is the moment tor a com-plete change, to puree the past. But I think we may have to wait.

You've got to remember that he is not entirely Mr Clean. He is a genius of a kind, hut of all the people in the election he's one of the most contaminated. He was a member of the P2 lodge. He was a close friend ot craxi. He wangled that in credible media ownership law tor himself.

He's done eX' tremely well for himself, not without cutting a few corners, one suspects. He's something new ana sometning out at tne same time. Of course we'll be told that this is the turning point, but the chances of real change are very slender." Mack Smith says that Italians are not more corrupt than anyone else. Their problem is that they have never found a way of financing their political parties without corruption. It all starts off so innocently.

But the parties soon discovered that they were on to a wonderful thing, living the life of Riley, with big omces, jobs tor every one, private aeroplanes and so on. They never found a way of saving No. In Mack Smith's reading of Italian history, the fundamen tal problem of the political sys- LOOK.justtrustthem.OK? Labour's Peter Hain has the impertinence to ask about the envelope rippers. He demanded of the President of the Board of Trade whether the Security Service and other bodies had been consulted during the Post Office review of mail interception procedures. He got no further than the Par-liamentary Secretary, Patrick McLoughlin, whose answer read, in fuU: "The Government would not make any proposals which did not deal satisfactorily with all relevant issues." THAT Police Complaints Authority report got to grips with one hairy' topic: police dogs who don't stop at feeling collars.

Lots of complaints: "These result from bites at the time of arrest which are sometimes serious enough to require plastic surgery. The "force" exerted by a police dog may exceed 'reasonable force' by a considerable margin. Clearly disciplinary action cannot be taken against the dog." "Huh," snarled our law 'n' tern remains the absence of al-ternanza, the impossibility of achieving a change of government without a change of constitution. When he expressed mis view to me Milan daily La Repubblica during the campaign, he was promptly dubbed a supporter of the left. "Well, in that sense I am," he says.

"Without an alternation in power, you are going to get the corruption we nave seen. There has to be a system which ordinary Italians are able to trust to deliver alternative govern ments, but that does not exist. There is a blocked democratic system. Everything goes back to that. The blocked system is the cause of all the Tangentopoli bribes.

It's a disaster. That's why I believe that only the left can achieve what the country needs above all else. The democratic system cannot function without some sort of alternation." After this week results, the left's prospects look poor. Mack Smith is inclined to blame Achille Occhetto. "I just don't think he was a strong enough leader to seize the moment' as effectively as needed to be done.

He might have lost 100 votes by sticking with the old Rifonda-zlone Communists, but he would have gained 200 by abandoning that link. There was a certain loyalty to the past that could not be overcome, if there had been a Craxi in the PDS, who really understood about power, then I really think that the left might have done much better." The danger now is fragmentation. "The relationship between the North and the South is worse than it has ever been," Mack Smith says. "It was brilliant of Berlusconi to make an alliance with both the neo-fascists and the separatist Leagues. But I shall be astonished if it doesn't disintegrate almost at once.

Bossi can never agree to join any government with the neo-fascist Allianza in the South. The animosity in his movement against the South is enormous and only too understandable. Money has been poured into the South, but it has been almost entirely wasted. How do you see that changing?" The one indisputable thing about the Italian election of 1994 is that it marks the end of the party political system which existed from the fall of fascism to the Tangentopoli crisis. What does Mack Smith sec in the immediate future? "Fewer parties.

Reinvented parties, especially in the centre. A lot of very hard choices and shifting alliances. Whichever way you look at it La crisi continua." Denis Mack Smith's biography of Mazzini Is published by Yale University Press on April 21, E19.95. order man, "why can't they put them down?" (He's been coveringthe Scott inquiry for about 136 years, poor lamo, and it has soured his sweet nature.) PROPERTY slump over, official. This ad has ap peared in the Sale and Al- trincnam Express Advertiser.

Grand lump of a five-bedroom house, sauna, double garage, utility room etc. "Was 229,950, now 270,000. scandals Kickback City. The spectacle of an entire political class being put under criminal investigation brought rival values to the fore: a foe its-radicals, and frustrated for two generations, was rampant in pursuit of the truth; the talk was of change, justice and renewal. But Berlusconi's election puts a brake on the spring-clean of society.

Among the crowds which shrieked "thieves" at the politicians and businessmen as they were sped through prison gates were many who had themselves gained from the system. With yesterday's vote, the Italians have said that Kickback City was going too far for their liking. Berlusconi promises economic renewal, but he would not have got into power if the old forces that stood to be condemned by Kickback City had not backed him. His Forza Italia, which did not exist until two months ago, is a curious mix of Berlusconi's own commercial apparatchiks and a simple transfer of allegiances by members of the old Socialist Party led by Berlusconi's lifelong friend, the disgraced Bet-tino Craxi. Berlusconi's membership of the murky P2 Masonic Lodge has been carefully forgotten.

But it is not Berlusconi alone who represents the Italy that will host the summit of the G7 in Naples this summer. Gianfranco Fini, leader of the neo-fascist MSI, delivered the South for Berlusconi. Until a few months ago, he was an insigifi-cant player, surrounded by posses of Nazi-saluting bravoes and old ladies and gentlemen who remembered "better" times. As fascists, the MSI was excluded from the political club spread across the North, introduced a post-modern politics into the fray. The Northern I League is a stubborn, relatively clean movement in a constituency socially similar to Fini's in the South, but with very different motives.

The League mobilised popu lar discontent under an au thoritarian but forcefuuy free-market; an anti-ideological, anti-estabiishment, and now it emerges anti-fascist assembly around the single issue of protecting the North's wealth from corrupt politicians who spent it on securing votes in the Mafia- ridden South. Bossi is a swashbuckling demagogue a former leftist militant and public official, and a wonderful public speaker, he is utterly unpredictable. His singlemindedness is at present Berlusconi's biggest headache. After delivering more than 100 seats for Berlusconi, he is now insisting on a veto against Berlusconi's premiership and against the presence of Fini in any coalition government. fif the alliance holds together, Italy will have emerged from years of tumult with what amounts to a new republic.

It is a political transition from a system which negated democracy for SO years to something more confident and decisive, but which is equally dependent on servility and, above all on a complete absence of political imagination. This would he the government of the Fininvest television empire, a facile deluge of tawdry entertainment allied to the culture of intolerance. It remains to be seen whether this new palace, built around the fantasy-land of Berlusconi's TV pleasure dome, will be taken seriously oy tne jsurope to which Italy thinks it belongs. "Damned expenses were always on my mind" sold by Berlusconi to himself. They may then go and buy groceries trom a supermarket owned by Berlusconi.

The highlight of the week would be a trip to admire the wizardry of football champions AC Milan, owned by Silvio Berlusconi. It was in Muano 2 that the term "Berlusconi-ism" entered the vocabulary. Berlusconi is likely to be prime minister before long, and as victor of the election he would be fully entitled to take the office. But in no modern country could the head of government conceivably enjoy such hegemony over everyday society. This victory has no parallel.

The Italians have decided that they want to turn their country into one big aspirant Milano 2. It would be wrong to see Berlusconi as a Big Brother who controls society through soccer spectaculars and the bevvy of semi-naked dancing lovelies on evening. We arc closer to- Huxley than Orwell: Berlusconi has been elevated to power by popular consent. His victory is comparable to that of Margaret Thatcher in 1983, an expression of a social flavour prevalent among the people that wished her to lead them. The new Italy has found the natural man for the job.

Berlusconi and his vulgar commercial empire epitomises many of the more cogent changes in post-economic boom Italy; his electoral base bulges among the young; he is a model for a particular way of life and aspirations. That way of life was put backstage by the "Tangentopoli" SERIES which ran the old regime, and became an opposition right-wing. Its enthusiasm for Kickback City helps to give Berlusconi's victory an apparently revolutionary edge. But, by yesterday, Fini was already being treated as a serious government politician, which indeed he now is shrewd, intelligent and now triumphant. He was the first to nominate Berlusconi as prime minister.

Fini knows no life outside his movement. He grew up in communist Bologna, surrounded by ultra-left students, whom he loathed. He went to work on the MSl's newspaper, Italian Century, in the days when it had few pretensions towards real politics except the resurrection of Duce's order. But the furtive Fini had wider aspirations than his grander predecessors, Giorgio Almirante and Pino Rauti, and at the end of last year He moved suddenly and stylishly into the vacuum left by the collapse of the southern Christian Democrats- He narrowly missed victory in the Rome mayoral elections, and his sidekick, Alessandra Mussolini, nearly pulled oft the same triumph in Naples. Within weeks, Fini was pay ing homage to the victims of Nazi occupation, and insisting that fascism was a "closed chapter in He formed the National Alliance which expanded the MSI to offer Berlusconi's party the ingredients it needed to win: conservatism in the South, the religious vote except for a few liberal Catholics, and the angry youth which saw fascism as the best way of opposing the old corrupt order.

In Umberto Bossi, Berlusconi has a tar more complex and unreliable ally. Bossi's rebellion, which started in Lombardy and persist in jamming the door with 20p coins, the unfortunate inspector has to go away and get special equipment to open it up, and as for the trace emissions he uncovers. WHILE the Government does a turn in the fast lane on road building, green departments give staffloansforrailseason tickets, sea green departments bicycle grants. Tradeandlndus-try does, Transport does, National Heritage does. The Department of the Environment er doesn't.

The DoE is defensive: they have showers for the sweaty pedallers, and parp parpl bicycle racks at Marsham Street. MEANWHILE Hilton Hotelshavegonegreehas theinspector'sface. This invitation to save the planet glows in their bathrooms. "Help us to be more environmentally friendly: There are little things we can all do to heln I protect the environment. If Britain's leading expert on Italy, Denis Mack Smith, believes that the political system is in genuine crisis, but there is little chance of real change Martin Kettle DN ITALY they still take intellectuals seriously, and one of our intellectuals in particular.

Denis Mack Smith, doyen of English commentators on Italy, author of biographies of Garibaldi, Mussolini and now of Mazzini, has been much in demand as Italian journalists and pundits called to discover his reactions to the election results. "There's been nothing as earth-shaking as this since the war," Mack Smith concluded as the faxes from Milan arrived with details of the voting. "Who would have said five years ago that the Socialist Party would only get 2 per cent of the votes in a general election? How are the mighty fallen." But as the Italian political landscape shifted this week, Mack Smith was anxious also to emphasise some of the continuities in the outcome. "There will be another unstable coalition government and another general election within a year. In that sense, nothing has changed." I put it to Mack Smith that you could say the election merely confirms that Italy is es- ing morale.

At a main Network SouthEast station (I know which but have been asked not to say: just imagine a background scent of sewage works) he met a duty manager, who shyly confessed to a degree in politics. "How do youfind this is of assistance to you in running the railway?" Mr Horton asked. "WeU Sir," fhemanagersaid, "1 believe it may assist me in unravelling government policy towards the railways." "If you find anything out, do let me Mr Horton pleaded. PASSENGERS at Peterborough heard that the train nowstandingatplatformfour was the 21.50 for Cambridge. Followed by an announcement that it was the train for Ipswich, Followed by another announcement that it was the trainforlpswlch.

Followed by an announcement that the train was for Nottingham. After April 1 you could make the driver an offer and ask for Exeter. Cut out pollution walk cleanly Maev Kennedy Everyone who has to account for their business expenses will be relieved at the way the Psion Series 3 palmtop computer handles it for them. Unlike envelope backs, haphazard records and forgotten claims, it automates expense account reports, and saves time and money by not losing valuable information or forgetting legitimate claims. Its just one of a thousand and one ways the Psion Series 3 helps you to manage your life.

I ir swep aoYN; a new MQNOfRANHED TRACKSUIT. you're prepared to use your towels again, please leave them banging upl If you'd like them changed, simply place theminthebath tub. This way you can help to reduce the quantity of chemicals we use for cleaning. Thank you." I think it would be even greener to recycle the towels bytaklngthemhome. SHOULD the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster invite you in for a snorter, take a hip-flask.

Most departments ducked Roland Boyes's questions on entertainment expenses, but the Secretary of StateforFranknessrepliedhe andhis guests consumed "less than two bottles of whisky and less than half a bottle of gin in ALL Fool's Day chuffs inexorably towards us, shunting in the new golden age of rail. The Chairman of Rail-track, Bob Horton, has been outandaboutonthenetwork, doing his home work and rais BE PREPARED, the next government air pollution report will show that south Wales has some very peculiar cars. They're doing astoundingly well on diesel and lead emissions, but The moaning greenies used to yelp that the monitors were all stuck on top of mountains, or on skyscrapers, or in themlddleof parks. Well, this particular Department of Environment air pollution monitor, Intended to police kerb-side emissions, is commendably centrally located In Cardiff, in Frederick Street. It is a mere technicality that Frederick Street is pedestrianised.

The monitor is in a little hut, and the road-hogpedestrianswillkeep mistaking it for a Superloo. They Harrods, John Lowis Partnership, PC. WOrW, flyman, Soldiiirjos, Silica, WH Smith, WSIInco Hoaion, SIS (Eto), DutyfrOQ OulMsamJ irriop.