A little satisfaction, a lot of hutzpah

Thursday, August 26, 2004

Gal Fridman (whose first name means wave, which made for plenty of puns in the sports page headlines this morning about Israel catching a wave, him being in a wave, etc.), became a national hero overnight, not least for his cool demeanor and easygoing approach to life. Unlike most of the Israeli athletes seen on TV here over the past week and a half of the Games, he always wore a smile on his face and did not seem to be emotionally burdened by what had turned into a national mission by the last race.

Indeed, after the singing of the Hatikvah anthem – spontaneously in the water at the end of the race, with the Israeli journalists on board a motorboat floating nearby, ceremoniously last night at the official event – he told reporters that in yesterday’s heat he ‘somehow felt a surge of energy, as if the entire country was pushing with the wind.’

There was the obligatory phone call from the prime minister who praised him for going down in history as the first gold medalist for the country, and Education Minister Limor Livnat, never one to stand around on the sidelines, appeared out of nowhere at the medal ceremonies, insisting on planting a kiss on Fridman’s forehead, prompting many of the columnists who wrote this morning to comment sarcastically about her sudden interest in a sport that gets practically no state support.

Woman Crucified # 12 by Silvia Rosenberg, mixed media on recycled paper, 20x30 cm.

he minister who probably most appreciated Fridman’s success was undoubtedly Public Security Minister Tzachi Hanegbi because last night, the State Comptroller’s office released a special report on Hanegbi’s brutal use of the Environmental Affairs Ministry from January 2001 to March 2003 to hand out jobs at the ministry to some 80 members of the Likud central committee. If not for the Fridman victory, the Hanegbi scandal would have topped the news.

In any case, Attorney General Menachem Mazuz, who had an advance copy of the report, said he would be convening staff to discuss whether Hanegbi should be prosecuted. The only problem is, who will investigate and interrogate the minister in charge of the police? Hanegbi, by the way, was so proud of his appointments that he published a special newsletter about the jobs that he handed out at the Likud central committee meeting that voted on the party’s candidates for Knesset before the 2003 elections. Hanegbi came in first in that central committee vote and his only comment since the State Comptroller’s report was issued – and broadly covered in today’s newspapers – came through an unnamed associate who said, ‘the minister did not know there was something illegal in what he did.’

According to former environmental affairs minister MK Yossi Sarid of the Leftist Yahad opposition , there are only about 250 employees in the ministry and almosty all are professionals, meaning biologists, etc., which means Hanegbi essentially stocked the ministry with unqualified people – all from the party central committee or their relatives. And, said the comptroller, who was able to point to more than 40 specific jobs, many of the jobs were non-existent, meaning people were paid for doing nothing. Not that Hanegbi has any reason to worry. Judging from comments from central committee members this morning, the scandal has only increased Hanegbi’s popularity in his party’s central committee. As Uzi Cohen, the deputy mayor of Raanana and a powerbroker in the central committee said last night, ‘obviously, the state comptroller should be replaced because he does not understand democracy.’ The state comptroller, former Supreme Court Justice Eliezer Goldberg had no comment on Cohen’s remark.

In another case of political hutzpah, the settlement movement, which fought the separation fence tooth and nail until it realized it was popular inside Israel, is reportedly planning to flood the High Court of Justice with petitions against the fence’s new route, arguing that it should encompass all the settlement blocs. The new route of the fence is on or close to the Green Line after first the High Court of Justice in Jerusalem ruled the fence should not infringe on Palestinian rights, and the International Court of Justice in The Hague ruled that the fence’s incursion into the West Bank was illegal – as are all the settlements. The settlers plan to argue that the fence now infringes on their rights.

The two rulings have prompted a flurry of activity inside the Justice Ministry, with Mazuz making the announcement, for example, that the government should ‘thoroughly examine’ its policy not to formally and officially accept the Fourth Geneva Convention n the territories (which Israel has long argued is not ‘occupied’ but rather ‘administered’ by Israel, so the convention governing occupied territories does not fully apply). One of Mazuz’s deputies has also pointed out that if Palestinian terror attacks on Israel proper cease, the fence becomes illegal (unless it is inside or at the most, on the Green Line). And while the government’s position is that the ICJ had no jurisdiction in the matter of the fence, Mazuz has said bluntly that Israel must take the ICJ ruling into consideration. It’s all maneuvering before the upcoming UN General Assembly session where Israel can expect to be excoriated for ignoring the ICJ ruling. Already, the unaligned countries have announced a ban on settlers visiting their countries as tourists and that kind of semi-sanction is likely to become more prevalent, espcially as long as the government does not appear to be capable of moving forward with the prime minister’s disengagement plan.

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