Sharon makes a move

Friday, November 19, 2004

The Likud vote on Sunday for the chairmanship of the central committee, the party executive and the party secretariat is a critical one for Sharon. If his men, particularly Tzachi Hanegbi for the committee chair, and Yisrael Katz for the executive chair, are not elected, it means Sharon has lost control over the central committee and his plans to ram through a decision to allow him to bring Labor into the coalition have once and for all been foiled. In effect, it would mean he has no choice but to go to elections – and last night he made crystal clear the fact he intends to run for another term in office if faced with elections.

A poll in Haaretz shows that he has no real rival in any elections, both inside Likud and in the general public. True Shimon Peres at the head of the Labor Party could beat Netanyahu – according to the polls, which have notoriously predicted victory for him in the past only to be foiled by the voting electorate; and Netanyahu, according to the polls, could beat Barak at the head of Labor, says the poll. But as long as Sharon remains in the arena, he is the ringmaster, even if not all the players obey his commands.

The reason seems to be clear – his strides toward the Israeli Center, away from the Right that he has lately come to term ‘messianic,’ ‘extremist,’ and ‘deluded.’ Not that he believes he is heading very far Leftward, which he now defines as anyone with a plan for a final status agreement. Last night, he complained the Left still believes in such ‘delusional’ plans. He is convinced that the only plan that will work is his, and it is based on long-term interim agreements.

It’s not certain that is what the Bush administration has in mind, and despite various conspiracy theories in the far Left (and far Right) in Europe and America about Sharon pulling Bush’s strings, it is the White House, not the Prime Minister’s Residence in Jerusalem that sets the course. Right now, that course is still somewhat experimental when it comes to the Abu Mazin leadership in Ramallah. On Sunday, just before the Likud central committee votes, outgoing Secretary of State Colin Powell will be visiting Ramallah, and is said to be carrying a $20 million check in his pocket to give to PA Finance Minister Salam Fayyad, for the first direct U.S. to PA aid in years after years of filtering the money through international agencies for fear that Yasser Arafat would divert the funds to pay off armed groups.

nd in another sign of a changed mood in the White House, President Bush, speaking with Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom at the Clinton Library dedication ceremonies, reportedly said that he has decided to make peacemaking in the Middle East a top priority for the second term. For four years, Sharon has basked in Sharon’s indifference to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Bush was considered good for Israel, went the conventional wisdom in the Israeli street, ‘because he lets us do what we want.’ Suddenly, however, after Arafat’s passing, the mood has changed. Bush told Shalom that Israel is the first foreign country his new secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice will go to after she is sworn in -- and presumably the PA, as well as Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Morocco, the five top American allies in the Arab world.

Shalom, speaking to Israel Radio this morning, added a new ‘day after’ to the lexicon. For the last two weeks, ‘the day after’ referred to the day after Arafat’s demise, meaning the start of the Abus era – Abu Mazin and Abu Ala, Mahmoud Abbas and Ahmed Qurie’, respectively. But now, Shalom has added ‘the day after the Palestinian elections’ to the pot. On the day after, Shalom said, ‘if not before,’ security cooperation with the Palestinians can resume.

The PLO Executive, which Abbas now chairs, reportedly decided that after the elections, the position of chairman will be merged with the position of PA rais, a resurrection of the all-powerful role Arafat held – to the dismay of almost everyone who dealt with him, until he passed away. That makes it more likely than ever that Abbas will be running for the rais position. Furthermore, Abbas last night revealed that he is at work on forging plans for a Palestinian national unity government after the elections – and that he has not given up hope for the Hamas to field a candidate in the January 9 election. Hamas does seem to be softening, almost by the day. It is now calling for general elections for towns as well as the Palestinian Legislative Council to be held on January 9 as well and promises to take pare in those races. It also wants a unification of all the voting districts in the territories into one district, so that its overall strength in the population can be better expressed in the elections. In 1996 it boycotted the elections and encouraged people to stay away from the polls. It still isn’t promising to field a candidate for president, but its talk is turning more toward politics and seemingly less toward resistance, while not giving up its arms – yet. Abbas, by the way, says that for technical reasons, the January 9th elections can only be for president but that general elections can be scheduled for the spring – depending on the Sunday vote in the Likud central committee, it is entirely possible that Israel and the PA will both be going to general elections sometime in May or June. The conventional wisdom is that in both electorates, the ruling party – Likud in Israel (if it is headed by Sharon) and Fateh in the Palestinian territories – will win.

For history’s sake, it is worth noting that today was the 27th anniversary of Anwar Sadat’s visit to Israel at the invitation of Menachem Begin, setting in motion the peace process. Yesterday, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak accepted Sharon’s apologies for an incident early in the morning on the Philadelphi corridor south of Gaza, where three Egyptians were killed by Israeli fire. Chief of Staff Moshe Yaalon said today that the fault was Israel’s – a recon squad from Golani had spotted three armed terrorists trying to cross over from Egypt to Gaza, but when they relayed the information about the location of those three to the tank crew, the soldiers in the tank thought they were referring to another three armed men, the Egyptian soldiers.