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COMMENTARY
November 2, 2002
Governing Israel
One of the things the Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon has said to anyone who happened to be listening over the last year was that he would serve his full term to the next scheduled election in October 2003. To his friends he added With or without the Labour coalition. It will now most certainly be without them for Shimon Peres (foreign minister) Binyamin Ben Eliezer (defence) and their colleagues have walked out. They had often threatened to do so before; though no one really believed Mr. Peres was capable of voluntarily leaving any position of power. The coalition-splitting issue was a budget with extra funding to support Israeli settlements in the West Bank -- as ever hidden deviously in various departmental estimates. The funding itself was nothing new the settlements are hardly economic propositions when you factor in the cost of their defence. Behind this pretext was a calculation by Mr. Ben Eliezer the party leader under siege from his advisers that he could save his own formidable skin within Labour and bring the government down forcing an election -- a coin toss that in the present volatile political environment his advisers thought he just might win. At the time of writing it appears they miscalculated on all bets. As elsewhere in the world and increasingly within the electoral democracies ideology is taking charge. Left and right become deaf to each other. On the supposition that some peace agreement with a Palestinian state will eventually happen (and I for one don't take this for granted) the Israeli settlements are almost certainly doomed. The "left" argument against them within Israel itself is thus perfectly plausible and a considerable section of the Israeli public would dearly love to wash their hands of the settlements and stick their heads in the sands of "peace". But even on their own assumptions the "right" argument is unanswerable: you do not gratuitously surrender a negotiating position against an implacable foe. You save it to trade later. This was among the catastrophic mistakes of the previous Labour government under Ehud Barak. He unilaterally withdrew Israeli troops from southern Lebanon then called in the United Nations to confirm and mark the border. Palestinians throughout the West Bank and Gaza celebrated not an opening for peace but rather what they took as an Israeli surrender. Yasser Arafat led the rhetoric in declaring that the policy of intimidating Israel had borne fruit. On the northern frontier Israel proper was soon under rocket attacks from Hezbollah terrorists who occupied the territory from which the Israelis had retreated. And the Palestinian Intifada was inspired to more and more savage acts of terror against Jewish civilians everywhere else. The inability to learn from mistakes is as much a defining characteristic of the left in Israel as anywhere else. There is a fundamental incomprehension of cause and effect; a failure to grasp that if Israel unilaterally abandons the settlements Palestinian terrorists will then redouble their efforts against the Israel that remains within the Green Line. For them it will be another "great victory". The argument is almost too simple to make; but the people who distribute and receive Nobel Peace Prizes cannot get it. (A bit of an exaggeration: Mr. Arafat understands it perfectly well.) And that is why Israel itself is now lurching significantly to the right. Prime Minister Sharon has apparently invited the former Likud leader and his major rival Binyamin Netanyahu to replace Mr. Peres as foreign minister. This will change the Israeli tone towards the "Quartet" -- the group of American Russian European and United Nations mediators appointed under the Madrid accords and still at least nominally devoted to the defunct "Oslo process" of "brokering" peace between Israel and a future not necessarily democratic Palestinian state. Mr. Peres still had his head in those particular clouds; Mr. Netanyahu has only ever inserted his when left with no choice by the United States. But the U.S. that used to push him around was led by President Clinton and times have changed. An alternative choice for foreign minister is Natan Sharansky now housing minister and deputy P.M. In the loud-mouthed chaos of Israeli cabinet politics Mr. Sharansky the former Soviet dissident who is incomprehensible in speech has nevertheless taken the clearest view of why the "Oslo process" could never work and why there is no substitute for building democratic institutions forcefully if necessary in the West Bank and Gaza. Mr. Sharon would nevertheless prefer the conventionally articulate Mr. Netanyahu at this time and through the very hard passage that lies ahead. For Mr. Netanyahu has a gift for explaining Israel's vital interests to U.S. Republicans. Mr. Sharon is also going to choose a military man Shaul Mofaz a former army chief with a reputation for personal and intellectual belligerence to take charge of defence. Given the imminence of a major regional war the choice of such a no-nonsense commander has some logic. Appointments will be confirmed on Sunday. The Israeli budget was passed in the Knesset with the help of the farther right and religious parties ending the immediate threat of government collapse. The question now is how far to his own right Mr. Sharon will have to lean to maintain his razor edge in the Knesset; he can only lean so far without falling over in the polls. The opposite pressure to keep things calm will of course be coming from the U.S. at least until Saddam Hussein can be removed in Iraq. For from the point-of-view of the Bush administration the Quartet and others might as well continue their ridiculous "brokering" activities. The whole shape of the region will begin to change as Saddam comes down and anything arranged now will be obviated. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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