After Sharon's speech

17:25, Monday, October 25, 2004

Binyamin Netanyahu is up to his old tricks, telling Channel 2 at 1900 hours Monday that it is not certain he will vote in favor of Sharon’s disengagement plan. He’s teaming up with those demanding a referendum, which really means an open fight for the leadership against Sharon inside the Likud Central Committee.

That committee was somewhat stripped of its infamous powers over ministers, and deputy ministers, when the Attorney General warned he would prosecute ministers who are directly involved in any appointments of anyone from the central committees of any party to government positions – making the office director general’s liable if requests for jobs from central committee members are not immediately sent to the personnel office.

Not that Netanyahu could vote against the Sharon package on Tuesday evening if he really wants to become prime minister in the future. But the demand for a referendum is not merely a delaying tactic by opponents. It is part of the long-term attack on Israel’s parliamentary democracy as a republic. It’s no accident that the same people calling for the referendum are those who want a constitutional court in Israel, meaning a court that would restrain what they regard as overaggressive intervention by the High Court of Justice in religious law: the National Religious Party and some of Netanyahu’s followers in the Likud.

Meanwhile, Silvan Shalom has reportedly come out against a referendum if Sharon remains against. And Sharon remains against a referendum. He’s counting on the Knesset teaching the Likud rank and file, the settlers and their supporters a lesson in national responsibility, a genuinely bipartisan step by a democracy trying to save itself from the lunacy of the settlements in Gaza.

The next vote

11:30 Monday, October 25, 2004

The Likud already seems to be on the verge of a split, with only 21 of the party’s 40 MKs now certain to vote for the Sharon disengagement plan when it goes to its first (of three) readings tomorrow after 12 hours of parliamentary debate starting this afternoon. A key NRp hold-out, Nissam Smolianksi, who has sided with Zevulun Orlev about staying in the government until the disengagement actually begins, is now saying the party should pose an ultimatum to Sharon – a referendum or the party quits.

Sharon is absolutely against a referendum, preferring elections if he is unable to forge a new coalition. And despite much talk about how he wants to form a new government, the chances for doing so seem very limited – unless he really wants to smash the Likud (the party he more or less forged out of the right wing opposition to the Labor government after the 1973 war). The Likud central committee very explicitly told Sharon he could not form a government with Labor and Shinui, unless he brings in the ultra-Orthodox. But Shas Rabbi Ovadia Yosef announced on Saturday night that every MK should vote against disengagement. United Torah Judaism will probably abstain – their rabbis will only decide this afternoon on how the five MKs from the Ashkenazi party will vote. They will not want to appear to be following in Ovadia’s footsteps and since Shinui has indicated it could stay in a coalition with UTJ (but not Shas) maybe Sharon will be able to accept UTJ into a coalition even if it abstains on the disengagement issue. After all, he’d also Labor.

r would he? Labor won’t join a coalition without a reshaping of the budget – and that would mean a clash with Binyamin Netanyahu, who feels he’s on a mission to smash the Israeli welfare state, and turn the economy into a model of free market capitalism in which the rich get much richer and a theory of trickle down growth that really doesn’t seem to be working – unemployment has remained steady at 11.7 percent for the last year. And predictions of 4 percent growth for the year have proven to be somewhat premature – while most of the economic growth has been enjoyed by only a very small part of the population: the high tech professionals and the industries that service that community of about 50,000-100,000 professionals.

His advisors are saying that Sharon will nonetheless try to forge a Likud-Labor-Shinui coalition, which would be the first coalition government in Israel since 1976 not to include a single religious party. The 1976 government – headed by a very young Yitzhak Rabin -- collapsed very quickly, leading to the May 1977 elections that the Likud won, mostly because 17 Labor seats in Knesset landed in the lap of the Democratic Movement for Change, a centrist party that ended up in a coalition headed by Menachem Begin.

Thousands of demonstrators from both sides of the argument are expected outside the Knesset tonight, and police are making special preparations – including helicopters, if necessary – to make sure no MK is prevented from attending the session, which is being dubbed ‘historic.’ True, when the Knesset does vote tomorrow night – the current tally shows 63-66 MKs will vote in favor, and 46-50 will vote against – it will be the first time that the Knesset votes in favor of uprooting settlements in ‘Eretz Yisrael’ (as opposed to Sinai, where Israel dismantled settlements before returning the peninsula to Egypt). And despite Dov Weisglass’ bragging about how the disengagement plan is really all about foiling the establishment of a Palestinian state and preventing further withdrawals from the West Bank, most overseas experts and quite a few local politically engaged Isrealis believe that it will be impossible to avoid the two-state solution that is embodied in the Clinton Framework, the Geneva Accord, and just about every other plan proposed in the last 30 years (other than the Jordan is Palestine plan, originally espoused by Sharon).

Indeed, the flaw in Weisglass’ view of what disengagement will engender is that it presumes all things remain equal, all the time, and that nothing other than the disengagement from Gaza will happen ‘until the Palestinians turn into Finns.’ Neither Sharon nor Arafat is immortal. Even if the Israelis are wrong and Arafat does not have cancer and as the Palestinians say, he is merely fatigued by a recent bout of flu, the Palestinian leader is not in great shape. And neither is the Israeli prime minister. Their health, let alone the threats to their lives, must be part of the calculation for the future. If either of them disappears from the helm of their respective political constellations, the entire picture of the conflict will change overnight.

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