The smell of elections?

Monday, November 29, 2004

Shinui’s boss, Yosef Lapid, a veteran political reporter in his previous career as a newsman, could smell the elections – otherwise there was no way to explain his sudden retreat from an earlier promise to Sharon that he would not object to United Torah Judaism joining the coalition. Sharon took that to mean he had a free hand in dealing with UTJ, which was demanding several hundred million shekels in ‘pickle-barrel’ funding for pet projects – mostly its school system, where children through adults study Judaism, and indoctrinated in UTJ’s instrumentalist approach to the Zionost state. Sharon’s negotiators worked down the UTJ demand to NIS 290 million, 90 million more than what Lapid had apparently indicated to Sharon was a palatable amount (and presumably, Lapid could ask for parity funding for his pet projects – theater and other arts).

Yesterday, when Lapid said no to Sharon’s largesse to the UTJ and vowed Shinui would vote against, he may have been expecting Sharon to open the coffers and offer Shinui some generous funding. Instead, Sharon’s office made it it known to the press that the prime minister does not like to be pressured. ‘Anyone from the government voting against the budget when it is brought on Wednesday to its first reading will be fired,’ said the announcement from the Prime Minister’s bureau.

Complicating matters for Sharon is that if he thought he could lose Shinui, but gain UTJ, Shas and Labor, he may be mistaken. Labor won’t join any coalition with any partner opposed to disengagement and both UTJ and Shas still insist say they oppose the plan to withdraw from Gaza without an agreement with the Palestinians.

rue, there appears to be movement on the Palestinian side that encourages Israelis: reports today said the Palestinian Authority-controlled media is lowering the rhetoric of its anti-Israeli reporting. There were surprisingly moderate statements over the weekend from newly released West Bank Hamas leader Hassan Yusuf about the Hamas being ready for a 10-year hudna. And there is talk, if not actual steps yet, about getting unauthorized weapons off the streets of Palestinian towns and villages. It’s all being cited by the Israelis media as signs that the post-Arafat era will indeed be different, even if the actual positions held by Mahmoud Abbas and Ahmed Qurei’ are not different from Arafat’s – a state along the 67 borders, East Jerusalem as the capital of the Palestinian state, refugees have the right to return (though it is not clear yet if Abbas, at least after the Jan 9th election will say that right is to return to the Palestinian state) and freedom for the Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails.

Sharon may be betting that all that ‘progress’ is enough to persuade the religious parties that an agreement with the Palestinians is possible in the future so they should drop their opposition to disengagement and thus allow him to bring Labor into the coalition. But inside Labor, largely because of the emerging clash between Shimon Peres and Ehud Barak, there is much less certainty about which way Labor is going.

Indeed, the turmoil in the political arena is numbingly complicated. For example, this afternoon, there is a Shas-sponsored no-confidence motion because of the recent annual report on poverty, showing it is growing under the Sharon government’s neo-Thatcherite policies. The only reason that the opposition won’t muster a 61-seat majority against the government is that Yahad, the party to the Left of Labor, has decided it will abstain, because it wants to see Sharon remove settlements. And right after the Shas proposal to vote the government out of office, Shas’s leader, Eli Yishai will be going into a meeting with Sharon to discuss Shas joining the government.

If this is all confusing, wait until Wednesday, when, if Finance Minister Binyamin Netanyahu does bring his budget bill to the vote, Labor has vowed to vote against while Shinui MKs are saying that perhaps, instead of voting against, the party should only abstain – and not be so quick to allow Sharon to fire them. Ironically, the entire crisis over the budget vote, which has already been postponed once, may be one huge red herring. While it is true that if the government fails to win a majority for its budget, the government automatically falls and elections are called. But the government has until March 31 of 2005 to win that majority. Elections are supposed to follow in three months time, which leads directly to the beginning of July, when the actual evacuations are to begin taking place from the settlements. Theoretically at least, Sharon could wait until the end of March, allow his government to fall over the budget, and then go into an election campaign that would be, in effect, a referendum on the disengagement -- unless he wants elections sooner than even that. His only problem if he does is how to find a majority in the Knesset for those elections, because right now, the only person in Israeli politics who can read the public opinion polls with a smile is Sharon.

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