Strikes, prisoners, pilots and the fence

Thursday, October 02, 2003

Bloodline, acrylic on canvas, 35x50 cm, Painting by Silvia Rosenberg

Daylight savings time was to end tonight, and in a sense so was the summer as the first rain of the winter was supposed to reach the country from the sea sometime this afternoon or evening, lasting as local showers from the north to middle of the country. Perhaps the rain, though expect to be brief could help cool off some of raised tempers on several issues.

Businessmen and longshoremen rumbled in a brief ruckus outside Haifa port this morning, where for the third day running, ships waited to unload imports and shipping containers filled with exports were stalled as Israel’s sea-bound commerce with the world was paralyzed by a strike at all three ports.

Finance Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is trying to privatize or at least incorporate the three ports (Haifa, Ashdod and Eilat) as competitors and the unions say he’s unilaterally torn up a 3-year-old agreement with the government for reforms in the ports because even more than he wants competition between the ports, he wants to smash the Histadrut.

Netanyahu has written to Histadrut chairman Amir Peretz asking for a meeting, and Peretz has responded that Netanyahu has turned tearing up wage agreements and the blaming union leaders into ‘a system.’

As part of the government efforts to break the strike, Netanyahu announced yesterday that the government would subsidize trucking for importers and exporters who choose to use Port Sa’id and Aqaba as alternatives to the closed Israeli ports. Aqaba port said it isn’t large enough and the Histadrut said it was in touch with ‘international’ contacts to persuade Egyptian longshoremen not to ‘scab’ against their Israeli union brethren.

Just in case, Transportation Minister Avigdor Lieberman signed a series of orders paving the way to turn a stretch of property on Haifa bay into a dock licensed to handle imports and exports. And meanwhile, with some 50,000 state workers on partial strike and job sanctions, the government announced it would not pay any state worker who showed up for the job but did not do their work. Nonetheless, the strikes continued.

Troops meanwhile found a car bomb on the outskirts of Nablus, with the IDF saying the car was meant for one of the settlements in the area. Overnight, the army arrested 20 Palestinians, including an Islamic Jihad bomb-maker, while in Gaza, troops demolished the home of an Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades man on the outskirts of Dir el Balah refugee camp.

In Tel Aviv, the district court agreed to hear a petition by several media outlets to lift the gag order on the circumstances in which Elhanan Tannenbaum was kidnapped by the Hezbollah. The media were claiming the public had the right to know, since the government was planning an exchange with the Hezbollah that would include Tannenbaum. The Tannenbaum family said that the publication would endanger the kidnapped man’s life. The court will announce its decision, it said, after next week’s Yom Kippur.

Meanwhile, Israel and Hezbollah finally agreed on something – last night they both denied that the negotiations for the prisoner exchange had been put into deep freeze over the issue of missing navigator Ron Arad’s fate. Hezbollah’s Sheikh Nasrallah has promised he will do what eh can to find out what happened to Arad after the air force crewman was handed over to Iranian envoys in Lebanon 15 years ago. Germany meanwhile has been asked by Israel to use its influence in Tehran – and to offer the release of some Iranians in German jails -- to see if it can find out what happened to Arad.

The Arad family continues its campaign ‘to free Ron, not Mustafa Dirani,’ the Hezbollah-affiliated south Lebanon man who held Arad for two years before handing him over to Iran and then was kidnapped by Israel as a bargaining chip for Arad. The Arad family campaign, which includes legal measures, is angering the families of three presumed dead soldiers, whose bodies are also expected to be returned with Tannenbaum to Israel as part of any deal. Last night, one of the fathers of the three soldiers complained that ‘a family with money behind it was trying to prevent a deal that would bring home the three boys.’

The refusenik pilots continued making waves. Today it was the education ministry’s decision to forbid an Ashdod school from staging a debate between one of the pilots who signed the letter and another pilot who opposes the letter. According to Education Minister Limor Livnat, speaking to Israel Radio, ‘free speech does not include allowing people who advocate breaking the law to have a platform for their views in the schools.’ But the minister said she doesn’t mind of the students want to debate the issue of the pilots’ refusal to accept assassination missions over populated Palestinian areas.

The other major issue, of course, was the government’s approval of the route of a separation fence between Israel and the West Bank. The route will include some 80 percent of the settlers (not counting those in the Jerusalem area) inside the fence – but to avoid a clash with the Americans, the government decided to leave gaps in the fence in four settlement bloc areas: Ariel, Modi’in, Gush Etzion and south of Hebron.

While most of the fence will parallel the Green Line, the 50-100-meter wide, 430-kilometer long ‘obstacle against terror’ as the defense ministry refers to it, will be built inside the West Bank, rather than directly on the Green Line or just to its west, inside Israel. The American opposition to the fence is the way it creates facts on the ground that could change the outcome of negotiations for a two-state solution. But Washington’s objections to the fence, like its opposition to the settlements as ‘obstacles to peace’ for the last 30 years or more, is not being translated into substantive pressure on Israel.

Nor do the Americans appear to be taking much of an interest in the formation of the new Palestinian government. The latest news from Ramallah is that Ahmed Qurei’, who has announced both plans for a broad, ‘national unity’ type coalition, and a small coalition, is now tilting toward the latter, a cabinet of perhaps less than 12 ministers. But as he’s said for the last three weeks, he will only announce his government next week. Officially, Israel is referring to the formation of the Qurei’ government is an internal Palestinian affair, and semi-officially, Israel is saying the Qurei’ government will be a puppet regime for Yasser Arafat. But some officials, not for attribution, are saying that Qurei’s consensus-building approach might be more effective than Mahmoud Abbas’ confrontational approach, for achieving a substantive cease-fire, even if it is not formally announced.

An Israel Radio poll taken last night revealed some interesting data about public opinion on all these issues: Eighteen percent of the public would be ready to sign a letter identifying with the pilots. And while 2/3rd of the public does not identify with the pilots, a third believe the letter was a legitimate from of protest, while more than half the public regard the letter as a political, not a moral protest.

Most of the public – 61.5 percent – said it was illegitimate to strike during an economic crisis. Only 35 percent of the public justifies the sanctions by the public sector workers. While 54 percent expect the government to ‘win’ the struggle, 44 percent oozes the treasury’s intention to ‘break’ the strike at the ports by encouraging the use of Port Sa’id and Aqaba as alternative ports.

Fifty-nine percent are against a prisoner exchange with the Hezbollah that does not include Ron Arad. Three years into the intifada, most Israelis believe the Palestinians achieved more than Israel in the fight.

Half the public believes Sharon should not run again for prime minister after he finishes his current term. Forty-three percent believe he should run again. Sixty percent of Likud voters want him to run again.

Fifty-four percent believe Shimon Peres, the current acting chairman of the Labor Party, should not run for the leadership of the party next year. Among Labor voters there is a slight, statistically inconsequential majority in favor of Peres running for the leadership.

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