Monday-Friday mid-day reports from Israel by Robert Rosenberg
Images by Silvia Rosenberg (unless otherwise noted)
Everyone won
Wednesday, October 29, 2003
Tropical landscape, acrylics on paper, 100x70 by Silvia Rosenberg
All the major political parties claimed victory in the municipal elections held yesterday. Many incumbent mayors held onto their seats, but the Likud lost some key towns, like Bat Yam, a major suburb of Tel Aviv, gaining a few small towns, like Beit She’an, where former foreign mister David Levy’s son finally won the mayor’s office after years of trying. According to Hanan Kristal, the veteran political analyst for Israel Radio, Labor actually did well, considering how devastated the party was after the general elections – ‘Peres got what he wanted, an infrastructure to work with,’ said Kristal this morning. But all the analysts agreed, these were not bellwether elections to explain something about the future general elections, slated for four years from this week.
Nonetheless, the low turnout – 41 percent nationwide -- was surprising and many attributed it to a nationwide sense of sheer helplessness in the face of the overwhelming problems facing the country and a profound lack of faith in the political system’s ability to solve the problems.
One area where there are real problems is law enforcement and an open clash broke out today between the attorney general, and the state prosecutor over whether the criminal investigations chief overstepped his bounds by ordering transcriptions made of wiretaps of Avigdor Lieberman as he was putting together his political party in the mid-1990s. Lieberman was under investigation at the time for suspicions that he was dealing with Russian underworld figures.
Attorney General Elyakim Rubinstein believes CID Chief Moshe Mizrahi overstepped his bounds –not enough to prosecute him in criminal court or a disciplinary tribunal, yet enough to seek his resignation. State Attorney Edna Arbel (backed by her deputy, a key district attorney and chief of police Shlomo Aharonishki) believe Mizrahi is an exemplary police officer who should be commended for his work. And in a nine page letter to Rubinstein, leaked to the pres, Arbel challenges Rubinstein by saying that he was well-aware of the wiretaps and the transcriptions in real time, and never put an end to them or argued against them.
With the prime minister now slated to be interrogated about suspected bribery in two separate cases at the end of the week and beginning of next week, the resilience of the law enforcement agencies – and the backbone of the investigators -- is becoming an important issue. Arbel said her dispute with Rubinstein was professional and not personal. Rubinstein is trying to complete all the weighty political cases on his desk before he ends his term of office at the end of December, and he hopes to win an appointment to the Supreme Court afterward.
No less important a clash that broke out in the open today is the one between the army, and Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz, and to a certain extent the entire political echelon. According to reports in both Yedioth Ahronoth and Maariv there is a growing unease in the army about the political echelon’s insistence on relying only on force to deal with the Palestinian problem.
High ranking army officers, speaking anonymously to both papers, say the government missed an opportunity for progress by being miserly with the Abu Mazin government, that Shaul Mofaz has been hardheaded in his refusal to ease conditions for the Palestinians in the West Bank, and that the security/separation fence route the government wants – actually, Sharon and Mofaz want – will cost three times the treasury estimate and will be very expensive in terms of manpower to maintain it.
Since the Maxim massacre just before the New Year holidays began, Palestinian traffic has been banned from main roads in the West bank, the closure has been tighter than ever, and as the separation/security fence goes up, thousands of Palestinians are finding themselves living inside ‘corralled’ areas surrounded by fences and requiring permission from soldiers to come and go from their homes.
While the army argued in favor of easing conditions, and opening closures, the Shin Bet worried that any opening in the closure would result in immediate terror attacks. Mofaz today announced that some gradual easing of conditions, while Industry Minister Ehud Olmert announced that he was ordering Ramadan holiday bonuses be given to the estimated 26,000 Palestinians who work in Israel. It was not clear how that order would be enacted, since most of those Palestinians are employed by small businesses struggling to keep afloat as the recession deepens.
Between the lines in the reports in Yedioth and Ahronoth was surprising ‘political’ criticism of the political echelon from army officers who have been on guard against any politicization of the army by ‘refuseniks’ objecting to army policy. The hidden agenda was so obvious that as so often happens in the Israeli media, the debate on the morning talk shows today about the report did not deal with the substance of what the anonymous officers said, but whether they should have said it.
Meanwhile, as the Hamas indicates it is ready for talks with Ahmed Qurei’, the Palestinian prime minister trying to resurrect the hudna-cease-fire, Jordanian Foreign Minister Marwan Muasher said Amman was awaiting a Palestinian plan for reviving the peace process that King Abdullah could take to Washington to present to the administration. The comment came hours after President Bush first slammed the Palestinians for not fighting terrorism and then warned the Israelis against using the fence as a means of ‘land acquisition.’ According to Israel Radio, ‘high ranking government sources expressed satisfaction with Bush’s comments about Palestinian terrorism, and explained the remarks regarding the fence to mean that Israel should not do anything to disrupt America’s current efforts to stabilize matters in Iraq and the region.’
On the economic front, Finance Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Histadrut Chairman Amir Peretz were meeting again today to try heading off a slated general strike next week. As of mid-day, no progress was reported by either side in those talks.
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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