Raful’s funeral

Wednesday, November 24, 2004

He was being remembered in the Israeli press today with page after page of hagiographic eulogies and while none of the paper forgot to mention that he opposed the peace deal with Egypt and once termed the Palestinians of the territories ‘drugged cockroaches in a bottle,’ the overall coverage was of the loss of a beloved leader of the type who no longer exists.

Perhaps it was a reaction to the horrific tale of the decorated officer from Givati who ‘verified the kill’ of a Palestinian girl who accidentally encroached a free-fire ‘security zone’ around one of the Philadelphi corridor IDF outposts on the Gaza-Egyptian border where soldiers try to halt arms smuggling from Sinai to Gaza. ‘Raful,’ as he was known to all Israelis, was a symbol of a different kind of combat soldier – extraordinarily brave, straight spoken and honest in ways that politics, at least, cannot tolerate.

That honesty and personal courage was why he enjoyed brief incandescent popularity as a politician in the early 1990s -- and why he was such a failure in politics, where compromise, not straight shooting is the key to success. Raful was never a compromiser.

or apparently, is the Likud central committee and it could be leading the country to elections. Reports were insistent this morning that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon unhappily told Labor opposition leader Shimon Peres yesterday that his hands are tied and he cannot bring the Labor Party into the coalition.

The rumors are rife now that Sharon’s ‘Farm Forum’ – his closest advisors who meet with him at his Negev estate on the weekends – is pushing him to announce early elections. Now is the best time for Sharon, goes that speculation, because the polls show him far ahead of his only Likud rival, Finance Minister Binyamin Netanyahu (who suffered another political blow yesterday when the National Insurance Institute unveiled its annual report on poverty, showing that some 20 percent of Israelis – 1.5 million people -- are living at or below the poverty line.

With Sharon at the head of the Likud, it probably won’t win the 40 seats it has in the current Knesset, but will still certainly come out way ahead of any other party. If elections are called early, he’ll want them as soon as possible, to keep the Labor Party off-balance as it tries to resolve its leadership issues, and to prevent any rebellion inside the Likud from rising up against him.

In any case, Peres came out of his meeting with Sharon in a combative mood, announcing that henceforth there won’t be any safety net for the Sharon government (except on disengagement issues) and next week, the first test of that new opposition frame of mind will take place when it remains to be seen if Labor actually votes on a no-confidence motion it presented today to the Knesset.

With the motion explicitly about the government’s economic policies, it has the chance of drawing support from the entire opposition – and since Sharon’s government now can only muster 55 votes from Likud and Shinui – the chances are rising for the success of a no-confidence motion. That won’t really mean anything unless the opposition can agree on an alternative prime minister or coalition, hardly likely given the makeup of the opposition from parties both on the Left and Right. Still, it would be a step closer to elections.

The election would be a referendum on his disengagement plan, which is very popular among a majority of Israelis, and he presumably would hope that it would finally isolate the disengagement opponents as a small but vocal minority. Nor would an election necessarily hold up the disengagement, which is scheduled to take start at the end of June, 2005.

By then, the direction of a newly elected Palestinian government should also be clear. Despite some grumblings from some quarters – most notably the armed Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades (which are said to have changed their name to the Arafat Martyrs Brigades) – Mahmoud Abbas appears to be firmly in charge of Fateh as its candidate for president of the PA.

The Israeli press made a relatively big deal this morning of Abbas’ vows to the Palestinian Legislative Council, which met for a memorial session in honor of the late Arafat, that the Palestinian leadership would continue Arafat’s legacy, including insistence on the right of return and the establishment of a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital. Little noticed was that Abbas has consistently spoken in the past of the right of return to the Palestinian state, not to Israel proper.