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Text by Robert Rosenberg
Painting by Silvia Rosenberg

Arafat's white cell count, Sharon's Knesset count

Tuesday, November 02, 2004

he suicide bombing in Tel Aviv yesterday prompted all the predictable reactions from Left, Right and Center, with the unavoidable connection being made to Yasser Arafat’s medical condition along the lines of Prime Minister Sharon’s statement that made no mention of Arafat but emphasized that ‘nothing has changed’ in the Palestinian Authority. Judging from the attitude of a spokesman for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which claimed responsibility for the bombing that killed three Israelis and wounded about 30, Sharon might be right. When Al Jezeera pointed out to the spokesman that the national leadership had condemned the attack, the spokesman smiled and said that ‘God will help them.’ In other words, even if Mahmoud Abbas and Ahmed Qurei’, backed by Mohammed Dahlan and Jibril Rajoub, are going to step into Arafat’s very large shoes (if Arafat does not return to power), they will be challenged from the street. They certainly won’t take action against the people who sent the 16-year-old bomber on his mission, at least not until they know if Arafat is coming or going.

And Arafat’s condition remained a mystery. French doctors were reportedly only going to release their diagnosis on Thursday but there seemed to be some second thoughts on the Israeli side this morning about their certainty Arafat is on his deathbed. Yedioth Ahronoth buried on inside pages a report that ‘credible’ Western intelligence sources were reporting to Israeli counterparts that Arafat does have a problem with his blood, but there is no evidence of leukemia. The report said that Arafat’s Parkinson’s disease was making it difficult for the doctors in Paris to conduct their exams, but that meanwhile, Arafat is cogent and functioning – and the report warned that if Arafat is not found to have some life-threatening disease, the conspiracy theories about an Israeli attempt to poison him will abound. Other reports, of course, continued to say the Palestinian leader is gravely ill. Military Intelligence Commander Aharon Ze’evi Farkash told the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee this morning that Arafat refused to hand over full powers to anyone during his hospitalization, but that Mahmoud Abbas is emerging as the strong man in Palestine, in a post-Arafat era.

uch attention this morning was on the Knesset, where Sharon was facing another test of his ability to cobble together a majority for tomorrow’s vote on the first reading of the budget for 2005, which was prepared by his rival, Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The two shook hands for the cameras yesterday at the Likud faction meeting, but otherwise they are not speaking after Netanyahu was caught so clumsily last week trying to organize a putsch against the prime minister on the disengagement issue. Labor has announced it cannot support the budget, but that might be the result of an apparent Netanyahu deal with United Torah Judaism and Shas for those two parties to abstain on the budget in exchange for increased budgets for their pet projects. Some reports put the cost of those deals at more than half a billion shekels. But the negotiations will no doubt continue to the last minute, as is the tradition in the Israeli parliament for such critical votes. And the vote is critical. If Sharon cannot muster a majority for the first reading of the budget bill, it means his government has fallen. Some of the ‘rebels’ against his disengagement have recanted, but others remain firm in their determination to try to halt the disengagement plan and since the budget includes allocations for the Gaza and northern West Bank withdrawal, they will vote against. He does not need a 61-seat majority and the conventional wisdom is that he will find a majority for the budget.

If he does win that vote tomorrow, Sharon will be a prime minister with two separate coalitions. He’ll have one coalition for the disengagement plan, which he is insisting will proceed as a unilateral move because there is no change in the PA leadership. That coalition is a Center-Left alliance that includes slightly more than half the Likud faction, Shinui, Labor, Yahad and a few rogue votes from the opposition benches. The other coalition for the budget, includes all the Likud faction, Shinui, four votes from the National Religious Party (which will quit the coalition next Tuesday because of the disengagement plan), the Rightist opposition faction National Union, and abstentions by the religious Right. It is a squeaker, but he could pull it off.

The big question is whether Netanyahu will actually go ahead with his threat to resign because Sharon refuses to countenance a national referendum on disengagement. Netanyahu has reportedly been saying that he wants to regard himself in the British model – the way the British finance minister Gordon Brown can serve under Tony Blair but at the same time promise to challenge Blair for the leadership when the time comes. But Sharon won’t want that – and there’s no centuries-old democratic parliamentary tradition in Israel.

Sharon’s biggest worry might be that Netanyahu is still harboring a plan for a putsch – for example, if Sharon decides new elections are necessary because he can’t guarantee a majority for the budget. Sharon would then have to go to the president to resign, but the president then must ask the MKs if there is another MK who can form a coalition. In that case, Netanyahu might be able to cobble together a coalition of his own. The emphasis is on might, however, especially after the farce of last week’s Knesset drama over the disengagement plan.