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Al-Ahram Weekly 27 May - 2 June 1999 Issue No. 431 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 27 May - 2 June 1999 Issue No. 431
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Profile Living Features Travel Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Israel's 'American vote'
By Abdel-Azim Hammad"Every problem in Israel has a solution made in America." That was the rule which David Ben Gurion, the founder of Israel and its first and most famous prime minister, used in steering the affairs of the state. The problems created by Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu during his premiership which affected Israel, the US and the Middle East, were no exception to Ben Gurion's axiom.
There seemed no better way of getting rid of Netanyahu than through the exercise of the will of the Israeli electorate which brought him to office. The outcome of the election is the result of a "coup" which US policies helped to generate within Israel.
After the 1996 election results which led to the downfall of former Labour leader Shimon Peres, Washington made every effort to come to terms with the outcome and persuade the Arab countries to adjust to the new reality. However Netanyahu proved to be a disappointment because he failed to get his government to make even small compromises with the Palestinians. Secondly, he was unable to attract the Labour Party into a government of national unity which would have prevented the religious parties as well as elements within the Likud itself from blackmailing his administration. Netanyahu's biggest problem became his determination to stay in power.
He tried diverting attention from his vulnerability by challenging American sponsorship claiming that, as an independent state, Israel could survive without US assistance. He even went as far as sending Ariel Sharon, his foreign minister, to establish better relations with Russia, a step which was described by a leading Israeli commentator as "rash". In fact Netanyahu began to experience a sense of isolation from the US and European Union countries. In his rhetoric he was no less hot-headed and was said to have threatened to "set Washington on fire" if it attempted to bring pressure on him.
With such talk and false bravado Netanyahu made himself a liability to Israeli-US relations and sorely tried the patience of the Jewish lobby in the US. The ruling elite in Israel and American Jewry became alarmed at Netanyahu and Sharon's policies especially towards the US which till now is Israel's major ally.
It is unclear at what juncture the US administration decided to cease accommodating Netanyahu and find the means to oust him from office by forcing early elections. The timing probably coincided with the interval between the adoption of the Wye River Agreement by a 70 per cent majority in the Knesset and the rejection of Barak, the leader of the Labour Party, of joining Netanyahu in a national unity government aimed at implementing the agreement.
Within that time-frame the US exerted pressure on Israel to honour the Wye Agreement but the religious parties threatened to walk out of the government and hence bring it down if the government went ahead with implementation. Knowing that Labour had coordinated its position with Washington in deciding not to join a national unity government, Netanyahu was compelled to accept the option of early elections if he was to survive.
By forcing Netanyahu to hold early elections Washington hoped to bring pressure to bear on him to implement the Wye Agreement.
As a second step, Washington attracted former Defence Minister Yitzhak Mordechai to its side with the aim of destabilising Netanyahu's government by bolstering a Likud bloc against him. This process began during the Wye talks when the US used Mordechai to pressure Netanyahu into signing the agreement. Netanyahu himself was keen to bring Mordechai into the process so as to win the support of the Likud hawks and their sympathisers in the religious parties for the agreement.
American tactics succeeded in precipitating a total split between Mordechai and the Likud. He later resigned from the Likud and joined the newly-formed Centre Party.
The main outcome of this split is that the personality of the prime minister became the major issue in the election campaign. Netanyahu had fallen into the trap. The campaign highlighted his personal defects to the extent that David Bar-Ilan, his closest adviser, admitted that the prime minister was possessed by a sense of paranoia, and was convinced that his own party was conspiring against him.
Bar-Ilan's analysis of Netanyahu's personality was surely not the result of a sudden discovery of the prime minister's personal shortcomings but rather a leap to safety by a realist who had witnessed a deterioration in his leader's authority some weeks before elections were held.
In the wake of Netanyahu's removal, three observations seem relevant:
First, Netanyahu was unable to provoke the Palestinians to acts of violence that he could exploit during his election campaign.
Second, he failed to convince Israel's military commanders to launch a military operation against Lebanon which would have given him a high profile as a hawk even though his new Defence Minister Moshe Arens had made public the intention of going ahead with military action.
Third, Israel's Supreme Court ruled against Netanyahu's order to close Orient House in Arab Jerusalem one week before election day. Netanyahu hoped that the closing would provoke acts of violence and afford him the chance to make statements about Israeli sovereignty over a united Jerusalem, an issue he thought could boost his election chances.
We may well ask what tools did Washington use to turn political forces in Israel against Netanyahu? While the real facts may never be revealed, it is reasonable to speculate that because Israel and US interests are intertwined at institutional and personal levels there was an array of tools available to the administration. The Jewish lobby in the US is one and is known to play a prominent role in relations between the two countries. The US government played a role in swaying Israeli public opinion away from Netanyahu and even dispatched President Bill Clinton's election adviser to steer Barak's election campaign.
