Monday-Friday mid-day reports from Israel by Robert Rosenberg
Images by Silvia Rosenberg (unless otherwise noted)
Interrogation of the prime minister
Thursday, October 30, 2003
Tropical landscape, acrylics on paper, 100x70 by Silvia Rosenberg
Just before closing himself up this morning in his official residence with interrogators form the Fraud Squad and International Investigations Department of the national police, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon made sure to let it be known that he regarded the crisis over Chief of Staff Moshe Ya’alon’s complaints about government policy toward the Palestinians as over. Nobody was seeking Ya’alon’s resignation, ‘sources close to the prime minister’ told Israel Radio, after last night, Channel One and Channel Two claimed that Sharon was so angry he wanted either Ya’alon’s apology or resignation.
The prevailing wisdom regarding the Ya’alon interview was that while the brouhaha over his not very oblique criticism of his political masters will pass, his criticism will sink in, and the press, public and eventually the government will have to deal with the issues he raised. These included the government missing an opportunity for progress by being miserly with the Abu Mazin government, that Shaul Mofaz has been wrong in his refusal to ease conditions for the Palestinians, 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.
Two key ministers who backed Ya’alon – though were critical of him rtaising the issues in the press and not to the government – were Foreign Minister Silvan Shalolm, no doubt feeling pressure from foreign governments about the grave humanitarian conditions resulting from collective punishment in the territories and Deputy Prime Minister and Industry Minister Ehud Olmert, who used his authority this week to decide to hand out NIS 300 Ramadan bonuses to every Palestinian worker with a permit to work in Israel. That’s about 25,000 Palestinians. Given the fact the poverty line in the territories has dropped to barely $2 a day, and nearly half the population of Gaza is living beneath the poverty line, the $66 worth of shekels will surely be welcome.
Some reports quoted sources around Ya’alon as saying that the political echelon pounced on somewhat needled headlines over reports from the off the record Ya’alon briefing as a way to distract attention from the Sharon interrogation today. Sharon is being questioned about suspicions he took bribes from foreign friends, who made illegal donations to his campaign for Likud’s leadership in 1999 and then, when Sharon was caught accepting those donations and offered to pay them back, the same friends gave the money to Sharon’s sons to pay back the illegal contributions. That case is known as the Cyril Kern affair, after one of the friends.
He is also being questioned about accepting bribes from businessman David Appel, a backroom Likud apparatchik who used his political contacts in the Likud over the last 25 years to build a fortune and allegedly sought Sharon’s help, when Sharon was foreign minister in Netanyahu’s government, to win the Greek government’s approval for a tourist resort Appel wanted to build on a Greek island. The bribe came n the form of six-figure dollar payments to Sharon’s son to market the resort, which was not only not operating, but hadn’t even been built.
But the issue that did overshadow Sharon’s interrogation, which was expected to last for hours today was the economy, particularly the annual report on poverty in 2002 issued by the National Insurance Institute: The numbers: one out of five Israeli families, 339,000 families – some 1.32 million people, including 618,000 children – live under the poverty line. That’s 21 percent of the population.
For the first time, said the NII, the number of children living in poverty crossed the 600,000 line, ten percent of the citizenry, and some one-third of Israeli children. Earlier this week, a Bank of Israel report said the number of poor tripled over the last 14 years. The poverty line is less than $500 a month, with the average wage in the economy a little less than $1,000 a month.
Treasury officials – not Finance Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, meeting today with Histadrut Chairman Amir Peretz to discuss ways to avert a general strike next week – went on the radio after social workers, single mothers and others who felt he daily bite of poverty, to argue that their plan for the economy would repair the situation. They said the expulsions of foreign workers, for example, would open up the job market to able-bodied Israelis, who have been collecting welfare and now won’t be getting that monthly dole. The process, said Uri Yogev, budget director in the treasury, ‘will take a year or two or three, but the results will come.’ Speaking to Israel Radio, Yogev insisted ‘the only solution to poverty, in the enormous number of people you mention, there are people who can work, and work is the only solution to poverty.’ He called the government’s policy of cutting welfare, ‘gradual and moderate,’ though for many, the cutbacks essentially meant half or more of a family’s income disappeared overnight – and the government’s own budget for 2004 predicts a rise in unemployment from 10.6 percent to more than 11 percent.
In another development, Haaretz was reporting that there are indications Tehran has been quietly signaling through third parties it is interested in a dialogue with Israel, perhaps to thwart increasingly pugnacious Israeli warnings against Iran’s nuclear development program, which Israel believes is aimed at acquiring a bomb that would be used to threaten it. Nor have recent Iranian steps, including the signing of the additional protocol to the nuclear non proliferation treaty, done anything to assuage Israeli concerns. Government and NGO experts here say that Iran is simply trying to gain time while it proceeds in secret with its nuclear bomb plans.
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak was quoted on Israel Radio as saying he’s doing what he can to calm the situation in the territories. His intelligence services chief, Omar Suleiman, is back at work trying to mediate a ‘hudna’ cease-fire by the various armed Palestinian factions, with Palestinian Prime Minster Ahmed Qurei’ trying to hammer out such a deal as a prelude to a dialogue with the Israelis.
A much touted storm that was supposed to touch down in Israel over the last 24 hours barely dampened the center of the country. And workmen have begun putting up the platforms and stages in Kikar Rabin, the Tel Aviv city hall plaza, ahead of Saturday night’s annual memorial rally for the prime minister whose assassination led to the collapse of the Oslo process. In a related development, Ami Ayalon, the former Shin Bet chief working with Prof. Sari Nusseibeh, president of the Palestinian Al Quds University on a ‘people’s petition’ for a peace between the two peoples, said that more than 160,000 have so far signed the petition, which began circulating three months ago.
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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