Changing of the guards

Thursday, November 04, 2004

n Washington, say the Israeli reporters, there’s talk that Condoleezza Rice will replace Rumsfeld and UN Ambassador John Danforth will replace Powell. In Paris, Yasser Arafat’s medical condition remains a mystery – though his French doctors promised a press conference this afternoon – and the ailing Palestinian leader was back in intensive care after a few days of feeling better. And in Tel Aviv, Ehud Barak’s official return to Labor Party politics promises a fight inside the party for its leadership, with Barak, Matan Vilnai, and Amir Peretz all promising to throw their hats into the ring.

The polls are notoriously unreliable for judging possible results right now from a race that has not been scheduled, since the main effort of the candidates in that Labor race will first be focused on registering new voters for the party. And everyone is waiting for the old man of the party, Shimon Peres, to make known his plans.

Those plans, say the political analysts, apparently dovetail with the old man of the Right, Prime Minister Sharon, who must broaden his government because as of last night, he might have a coalition in favor of disengagement but he does not have a coalition in favor of his budget for 2005. Of course, nobody really knows if he doesn’t have a majority for his budget because he wants to apply pressure that enables Labor to join, or because he wants to apply pressure on Finance Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to resign, or because Netanyahu does not want to pass the budget because he wants to bring down Sharon’s government, or because …

In short, the Israeli political arena is in a tizzy, largely because Sharon smashed the ideological touchstone of the Likud and the Right by pushing ahead with his plan to pull out of Gaza and the northern West Bank, but also because of the overall constellation of forces at play on the local and international political stage. The prevailing view is that Bush, in a second term, will want to heal wounds with Europe and Tony Blair made clear right after the Bush victory speech that means progress on the Israeli-Palestinian front, which means pressure on Israel to dismantle the outposts and, if Arafat is really fading from the scene, dialogue with the Palestinian leadership to make sure the disengagement is not unilateral.

haron apparently has confidence in the letter from Bush, which was backed up by Congress, promising that in any future negotiations, the roadmap is the only peace plan on the table and that the U.S. would regard the large settlement blocs as fait accomplish – and apparently Sharon reckons the only argument with the U.S. is over the size of those blocs.

Judging by what Sharon and his people have said, they figure Israel can hold onto as much as half the West Bank. Judging from what the Americans have said over the years, any loss of land in the West Bank for the Palestinian state will more or less be matched by a tradeoff with land from the Negev added to Gaza.

But that’s all much further down the road to the first step: getting out of Gaza and the northern West Bank, something Sharon has promised will be done by the end of the summer of 2005. Not coincidentally, the roadmap calls for the establishment of the Palestinian state in 2005, and while it’s not popular to make note of it, Sharon was the first Israeli prime minister to say bluntly, as prime minister, that Israel wants to see the establishment of such a Palestinian state. His vision of a Palestinian state may not match that of Mahmoud Abbas, Marwan Bafghouti, or the Hamas’ Khaled Mashal, but like George Bernard Shaw once said, ‘now that the principle has been clarified, we can negotiate over the price.’

The Palestinians, in any case, are doing their utmost to contradict everything that almost every Israeli analyst has long predicted – that with Arafat out of the way, the Palestinians would begin fighting. Last night, on Channel 10, Jibril Rajoub said it bluntly: ‘if the collective leadership (meaning Abbas and Prime Minister Ahmed Qurei’) decides that Mohammed Dahlan is head of all the security services, I will serve under Dahlan.’ Since the West Banker Rajoub (head of Arafat’s National Security Council) and Dahlan (the strongman of Gaza) have been rivals for years, the statement was politically significant. The only question is now, is whether Sharon, with or without Peres at his side, is prepared to give the new/old Palestinian leadership a chance – and if the Palestinian street is prepared to do the same.

For my view on Ehud Barak's political skills, click here