The fractured political arena

Tuesday, November 30, 2004

But appearances are not all. For one thing, it is not at all certain Labor will be joining the Sharon government. True, party leader Shimon Peres has been waiting to join the government for more than a year. But timing is all and Labor’s central committee is meeting this evening to decide on when it will hold internal party elections for the chairmanship of the party – Peres, after all, was a compromise ‘temporary’ chairman when he was selected last year after the elected leader of the party, Amram Mitzna, realized he was in over his head and quit the chairmanship.

Peres wants the party vote next November. Matan Vilnai, whom the polls show is the next most popular candidate after Peres, wants the vote as soon as possible, in February. And wild card Ehud Barak, the former prime minister who spent the last four years making millions as an international consultant, is back gunning for the party leadership – he wants the vote in April, to give him time to get organized. Tonight’s vote is a test of their strength inside the party’s central committee.

here is a general consensus in the party that it must do everything it can to support the prime minister’s disengagement plan. If that means joining the government, with or without portfolios, so be it. But if Labor stays in the opposition, it is totally unclear how it can provide what Barak has called ‘an iron bridge’ on which Sharon can cross the disengagement gorge. After all, just yesterday Labor submitted a no-confidence motion and if it does engage in serious negotiations with Sharon about joining the government it will insist on changing the budget’s priorities, if not the framework. In any case, if Peres wins tonight’s vote on the schedule for the party primaries, it will give him time to join the Sharon government. But if Vilnai or Barak win, it seems unlikely that Sharon will even want a party that is in the midst of a leadership struggle at his side inside the coalition.

Sharon will also have to win Likud central committee approval for bringing in Labor, which is now likely after Tzachi Hanegbi, the new central committee chairman said that he thinks a Likud-Labor-Haredi coalition is possible, despite the intense hatred for Labor inside the central committee. Trouble is, when Hanegbi says Haredim, he means both UTJ and Shas. Peres might be ready to sit in the same government with Shas, but it is not certain he has all the Labor MKs with him on that. Besides, for Shas to join a Sharon coalition it would have to reverse its position against disengagement and Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, who calls all the shots in Shas, is not the type of person who changes his mind overnight. Yosef wants withdrawals from Palestinian areas to be made as part of an overall peace plan. Sharon insists that the only possible deal with the Palestinians is ‘a long-term interim agreement,’ which Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas calls a non-starter.

And it is still not absolutely certain that Shinui will vote against the budget. Its reason for opposing the budget was so transparently an excuse rather than a principle – NIS 290 million for UTJ, the Haredi party that Shinui had already accepted as a potential coalition partner – that it is entirely possible that the Shinui leader, Yosef Lapid, is having second thoughts. It already happened in August, when Sharon began talking about widening his government with the ultra-Orthodox and Shinui threatened to quit. So, Sharon turned to Labor and it did not take long for Shinui to drop its demands to leave Haredim out of the coalition. Sharon is positioning his maneuvering as an attempt to protect the national interest, thus turning the rebels in the Likud, Shinui’s sudden whiff of elections, and Labor’s internal leadership struggles as petty politics meant to place party and personal interests ahead of the national interest. It may work to win Lapid back.

The complexity of the situation makes it seem as if elections are close. But nobody really wants elections, except the disengagement opponents who are convinced that an election campaign will delay or even cancel the withdrawal from the settlements of Gaza. On the other hand, the Israeli political arena has been so shaken by Sharon, founding father of the settlements, deciding to dismantle the settlements of Gaza and northern Gaza, that it elections are practically the only way to reorganize the political alignments in such a way that they reflect the public’s approval of Sharon’s plan. Trouble is, Sharon can’t be sure that the Likud will even send him back into the arena as its candidate for prime minister. So, he’ll watch what happens tonight at Labor’s central committee meeting and we’ll all watch tomorrow to see what happens when he brings the budget to the Knesset.

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