The Tannenbaum dilemma
Thursday, October 23, 2003
The loving dream, acrylics on paper, 70x50 by Silvia Rosenberg
The Tannenbaum case was making headlines in the morning papers, but the radio was more interested in the Histadrut’s declaration of a general strike starting on November 3, a day before the eighth anniversary of the Rabin assassination, ten days from now. Histadrut chairman Amir Peretz met with finance Minister Binyamin Netanyahu today to try to find a way out of the crisis, which has already cost the state some $500 million, say the experts, since public sector employees stopped serving the public early this month. The meeting led nowhere – but they’ll talk again tomorrow. The Histadrut is calling their planned strike ‘a mega strike.’
The argument is over the government’s decision to toss out a series of collective wage agreements and implement a restructuring of many parts of the public services, as Netanyahu undertakes a Thatcherite reform that is even more radical than the one imposed on the British economy by the legendary Margaret Thatcher. Simultaneously, he is trying to smash the unions, break up civil service sector state monopolies, restructure pensions for civil servants, slash welfare, and lower income tax for the wealthy. Considering that les than half the working people in Israel earn enough money to have to pay taxes, unemployment is at 10.6 percent and expected to top 11 percent by the beginning of next year, and the economy has contracted by nearly 20 percent since the intifada began, Netanyahu’s program is either brilliant or a disaster.
The Tannenbaum case boils down to a dilemma for the prime minister – to what extent is the state responsible for an Israeli in trouble elsewhere in the world, particularly in the Arab world, even if that Israeli was not sent there on a state mission, as a soldier or spy. Tannenbaum, a failed businessman and former reserve colonel in the army, was apparently lured to the Gulf by an Israeli Arab acquaintance in the hope of striking it rich enough in a mysterious business deal (which some say involved drugs) that would resolve all his financial troubles at home. But once in Abu Dhabi, he was somehow kidnapped, possibly ‘sold’ to the Iranians, who then handed him over to the Hezbollah.
Tannenbaum is alive, and ailing. In addition, there are the three bodies of soldiers kidnapped by the Hezbollah around the same time, about a month after the intifada broke out. The Hezbollah is demanding the release of Lebanese and Palestinian prisoners. Israel has already said it won’t give the Hezbollah Egyptians and Jordanians (who might be released in separate deals, as goodwill gestures to the two countries with whom Israel has peace treaties) and now Sharon is troubled by protests inside Israel demanding that he not strike a deal unless it includes information about what happened to Ron Arad, the airman who bailed out of his plane over south Lebanon 17 years ago and for at least 15 years has been missing.
Meanwhile, Ahmed Qurei’, the Palestinian prime minister of an emergency government that he has said will resign on November 4, was meeting this morning with King Abdullah of Jordan. The prevailing view in Israel and the territories is that Yasser Arafat will persuade Qurei’ to extend the emergency government’s tenure for another month. But there are also reports of veiled threats being made to the Americans that if they don’t step up their involvement, the entire Palestinian leadership might decide to quit the territories, to force Israel to assume full responsibility for the occupation, an extremely expensive responsibility for the Israeli economy. The Red Cross is reportedly running out of food vouchers for the needy, and the World Food Organization doesn’t have enough to meet demand.
In the West Bank, troops made routine overnight arrests of wanted men, and some 75,000 Palestinians living in areas that are being fenced on both sides by the Israeli separation fence, have received word from the IDF’s Civil Administration that they now have a new status – ‘permanent residents,’ which ostensibly is meant to enable them to reach their land, but effectively gives the Civil Administration the right to decide who is eligible for the status. And those who are not eligible will not be allowed inside those areas. The Palestinians are calling it ‘quiet transfer.’
Ariga Recommends
 Death as a Way of Life David Grossman's collection of essays, starting in 1993, on the arc of the peace process from its optimistic begbeginnings the disaster known as the intifada. Highly recommended reading for anyone wanting to know what life is like in a land caught up in a spiraling madness in which people are taught terror and counter-terror, which have grown so interwoven that it has become impossible to tell where one begins and the other ends, is preferable to generosity of spirit, and compromise resulting from dialogue.
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