Today's Situation

Down a slippery slope to nowhere

Friday, March 05, 2004

According to Yedioth columnist Nahum Barnea, Cohen’s business dealings with Sharon consisted of serving as a front man, a pseudo-farm manager when Sharon became agriculture minister n Menachem Begin’s first government and needed to at least put on a show of not having a conflict of interest. Sharon claimed the connection with Cohen ended in 1979. Maariv and Globes have found records showing the business relationship lasted in various forms into the early 1990s.

But while Maariv polls showed earlier this week that nearly half the public does not believe Sharon’s version, a somewhat more comprehensive Yedioth poll today shows that while 66 percent no longer trust him and his government, the latest scandal was not the straw that broke the camel’s back. However, despite the steep decline in public faith in Sharon and his government, without a credible opposition leader, the Likud would more or less retain its hegemony in the Knesset in a new election. But the polls show clearly that the public is ripe for change.

So, what passes for routine continues as normal: with around 60 ‘terror alerts,’ meaning intelligence reports on Palestinian plots to try to hit Israeli targets, the army clamped down a closure on all Palestinian territories, meaning no Palestinian can enter Israel until this coming Tuesday, due to very high terror alerts as usually occur during holiday weekends. The holiday is Purim, the holiday marking the Jews’ rescue from the wicked vizier named Haman, who planned to hang all the Jews. Instead he was hanged.

It’s a time for costume parties, and there is enormous concern that a suicide bomber could use a popular costume as camouflage. Purim is also the tenth anniversary of the Hebron massacre, when a settler from Kiryat Arba massacred 30 Muslims in ancient town’s tomb of the biblical patriarchs. By the way, the most popular costume this year for ultra-Orthodox children, the stores are reporting, is to dress up as a Zaka volunteer, one of people who rush to the scene of a terror attack and help gather all the body parts for proper burial.

hile few in the press mentioned the tenth anniversary of the Purim massacre, it was nonetheless on people’s minds, because of the arrest this week of a 22-year-old army combat engineer from Haifa who was discharged early from the army on psychiatric grounds and has told police that he was responsible for at least nine attempted bombings of Arabs and what he called ‘Arab lovers’ in the Haifa area. His father was also arrested on suspicion that he knew about the bombing attempts and did nothing to stop them. A soldier was arrested late last night as a suspected accomplice in the case but denies any connection to the case, saying he met the bomber, Eliran Golan, in a security guard’s training course.

Golan was very pedantic about his bombs, say police, but apparently very sloppy about his methods. The delivery boy’s last bombing attempt was aimed against his employer, apparently for having Arab friends, and the police naturally questioned all the people who worked for the delivery company when they realized the signature style of the bomb found in the employer’s car was the same as the bomb found in the car owned by Hadash MK Issam Mahoul, a Haifa Arab, whose car was bombed last October, causing no injuries. The Knesset Guard, under orders from Speaker Reuven Rivlin, has assigned bodyguards to all the Arab MKs.

Meanwhile, as Haaretz reported that Central Command officers have been conducting ‘war game’ type simulations of what will happen ‘the day after’ 75-year-old Yasser Arafat dies (of natural causes), in the territories the internecine struggle continues. Military Intelligence commander Moussa Arafat’s troops in Gaza raided the home of a top aide to Palestinian Gen. Nasser Yusuf, confiscating Yusuf’s jeep and his guards’ weapons. Yusuf openly challenged Arafat last week, complaining at the Fateh Revolutionary Council meeting that Arafat’s divide and rule management of the security forces led to anarchy and calling for a unification of all the security forces under one command. Arafat reportedly threw a microphone at Yusuf and then stormed out of the session.

There are reports Arafat subsequently agreed to allow all security service salaries to be paid through bank accounts, as donor countries insist, and not in cash handouts by squad commanders, which made for very corrupt and very non-transparent financial management. There are also reports Arafat is agreeing to the construction of a new security headquarters where all the security services’ – there are at least seven -- top commands would be headquartered. But Arafat has made such promises in the past with nothing actually happening. At the Fateh council meeting last week, under pressure for a change in the party’s leadership, Arafat promised elections within six months. Gaza’s Mohammed Dahlan, one of those wanting sweeping reforms – or a position of power to enable him to maintain his high-flying lifestyle – promised he’d make sure the internal party elections are held.

On the Israeli side, despite a growing consensus that the slipping polls and the mounting scandals have greatly impinged on his political power, Prime Minister Sharon was touting his ‘unilateral disengagement’ plan, meeting with two key ministers – Likud Education Minister Limor Livnat and National Union Transportation Minister Avigdor Lieberman – to tell them the plan has not been finalized and asking them not to object to it.

He told them he is waiting to hear if the Americans will agree to his conditions for a Gaza withdrawal – Washington’s recognition of de facto annexation of three major settlement blocs (Ariel, east of Kfar Sava; Gush Etzion, south of Jerusalem; and Ma’ale Adumim, east of Jerusalem); Washington’s support for Israeli refusal to negotiate with the current Palestinian leadership; and a U.S. declaration against Palestinian refugees right of return. It does not seem likely the first condition will be met – in any case, British Prime Minister Tony Blair already bluntly told Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom, and opponent of the unilateral withdrawal who was in London this week, that Britain would not agree to it.

Livnat says she will agree to a very limited withdrawal of isolated settlements in exchange for full de jure annexation of all the settlement blocs. Lieberman is against any ‘prize for terror.’ And the settlers, whom Sharon’s office and associates blame for the Maariv report, are vowing to resist evacuations of any of the outposts that the roadmap to which Sharon still says he is committed required him to remove more than a year ago. A Supreme Court justice has given the settlers another ten day reprieve as they appeal an earlier ruling this week saying the government has the right to order the outposts removed. But one sign that the government might be serious about a Gaza withdrawal has been reported by settler sin the Gaza Gush Katif area – police were seen counting the graves in the cemetery there, presumably in advance of plans to move the graveyard.

haron is still waiting for his longed-for invitation to Washington to present his plan to President George W. Bush, probably envious of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s invitation to Bush’s family ranch in Texas. There are reports meanwhile that Condoleezza Rice has been complaining to American Jewish leaders that Sharon’s emissaries have not been precise in relaying White House views to the prime minister.

What has been obvious for some time is that his bureau chief and lawyer, Dov Weisglass, has been in charge of the spin from the Prime Minister’s Office, which has consistently made it sound like the White House is enthusiastic about Sharon’s still very vague unilateral disengagement plan and that Bush and Sharon see eye to eye on everything. Sharon’s Jerusalem, by the way, is already making clear it prefers Bush to John Kerry in the U.S. election race, because Kerry is too reminiscent of Bill Clinton, promising a hands on approach to the peace process, the last thing the Sharon government wants.

And Elhanan Tennenbaum was going through more polygraph exams, this time for the police, who want to know all thje details of his self-confessed drug dealings. According to the press this morning, Kais Obeid, the Israeli Arab turned Hezbollah expert on Israel, who was Tennenbaum’s contact for the putative drug deal, was formerly a Shin Bet informant, who in exchange for information about Palestinian terror cells, was treated with kid gloves by the counter-intelligence agency and police. The somewhat hyperactive chairman of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee Likud MK Yuval Steinitz has still not decided if he is going ahead with a full-scale probe into the prisoner exchange deal, including the Tennenbaum case. Meanwhile, according to Israel Radio, the Nazareth newspaper A Sinara, says a pro-Syrian group in Lebanon has sent DNA to Israel that belongs to Ron Arad, as part of the delicate tango between Israel and Hezbollah about the fate of the missing aviator and four missing Iranian diplomats. And according to the newspaper, basing its report on Arab sources in Europe, when Israeli troops kidnapped Mustafa Dirani, intending to hold him as a bargaining chip for a prisoner exchange deal that would bring the missing aviator home, Arad was still in Dirani’s home -- and the IDF troops wounded him, believing he was a Dirani associate.

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