Issue No. 611
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7 - 13 November 2002 Issue No. 611 Region |
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 | Recommend this page | ||
Lesser evils
There will be general elections in Israel in February 2003. Few Palestinians expect any good to come from them, reports Graham Usher in Jerusalem
On Tuesday Ariel Sharon accepted fate and admitted that his ambition to see out a full term as Israel's prime minister had come to an end. "I will dissolve the Knesset [Israel's parliament] and call general elections within 90 days," he told a packed press conference in West Jerusalem. "The date will be one of the first days in February," with the likeliest being Tuesday the 4th.
Click to view captionNetanyahu in, Ben-Eliezer out The collapse had been triggered by the Labor Party's decision last week to leave Sharon's "National Unity" coalition after a row over state budgets for Jewish settlements in the occupied territories. But it was confirmed by his failure to put together a "narrow" alternative government in its stead.
For that to endure Sharon needed the seven seats of National Union-Yisrael Beitenu, a far- right bloc which calls for an end to the Oslo process and the physical destruction of Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority. On Monday its leader, Avigdor Lieberman, said his party would only join a narrow government today if Sharon gave a commitment to form a "nationalist" (as opposed to a National Unity) coalition after the elections.
"Why are you afraid of saying that you would form a nationalist government?" Lieberman taunted Sharon in the Knesset. "What are we? A stick of gum you can use and throw away?"
"Yes" was Sharon's short answer on Tuesday, auguring a real split in Israel's right-wing ranks. "I will not stray from the responsibility of government, change its guidelines or damage the deep strategic agreement with the US or the special relationship my government has achieved with the White House," he said. By announcing early elections, "I opted for the lesser of two evils."
Sharon was only slightly less barbed with his Likud rival and former prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu.
Last week Sharon offered Netanyahu the post of foreign minister in his new "caretaker" government. Netanyahu accepted, on condition that early elections would be called "within 90 days to five months" and that Sharon express his opposition to a Palestinian state in the teeth of President Bush's "vision" and the world's advocacy of one. On Tuesday Sharon said the offer still stood. But he pointedly compared Netanyahu's wriggling with the "unconditional acceptance" Israel's former army chief of staff, Shaul Mofaz, had given to the position of defense minister. Mofaz had responded to "the call of the flag," said Sharon. Stung, Netanyahu swiftly agreed to be foreign minister.
Israeli analysts saw these as the opening shots in the contest the two men will wage for leadership of Likud, primaries for which must occur before the February elections. Like Lieberman, Netanyahu wants a "nationalist" government, buoyed by recent polls that show Likud increasing its Knesset representation from its present 19 seats to 34. Sharon has vowed that he will seek to form a National Unity coalition with Labor in a second term no less than in his first.
It is unclear which way Israeli Jewish opinion will swing. Since the outbreak of the Intifada, there has been a rightward shift in Israeli society. But faced with the uprising, economic collapse and the looming threat of a US-led war on Iraq its reflex is to bond together as a tribe and vote for a National Unity government. It is this Israeli "consensus of fear" that has been Sharon's greatest political asset as prime minister, says Israeli political analyst, Lily Galili. He will be loath to throw it away.
Can it be broken in the run-up to elections? On 19 November the Labor Party holds primaries to choose its leader. Should outgoing Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer again be elected, he will almost certainly steer the party back to a National Unity coalition after the February elections. But should his challengers -- Avram Mitzna and Haim Ramon -- win, other, more political horizons may open.
Mitzna has said he will re-start negotiations with the Palestinians, "regardless of who their leader is", and end the Intifada by addressing its fundamental cause: the Israeli occupation. Ramon has said he will implement a "unilateral separation" from all of Gaza and "80 per cent" of West Bank with or without negotiations with the Palestinians but preferably with a post-Arafat leadership.
The Palestinian leadership would obviously prefer Mitzna, but "even Ramon's 'unilateral separation' would be a lesser evil than Sharon. It would at least get us out of the quagmire of conflict," admitted a PLO official in Jerusalem.
They are unlikely to get either, since only a head-in-the-clouds optimist believes Labor will win the February elections. Instead the choice will be between a "nationalist" coalition whose declared policies will be to wipe what remains of the PA and proceed apace with the realisation of a "Greater Israel" from the river to the sea; or the continuation of a National Unity coalition that, in the last 20 months, has re-conquered the West Bank Palestinian areas, destroyed the PA as a central authority and killed over 1600 Palestinians.
For the vast majority of Palestinians both are evils. Few are those who would say one is lesser.
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