Don’t bury Sharon just yet

Wednesday, December 01, 2004

rime Minister Ariel Sharon was doing what he does best: staying calm under pressure. He was heading to the Knesset this afternoon where the 2005 budget is to be presented for its first vote (out of three) and as far as anyone could tell, he did not have a majority because his coalition partner, Shinui, was determined to vote against the budget since it includes NIS 290 million for the ultra-Orthodox United Torah Judaism party.

Instead of reaching out to Shinui with some generous offer of one kind or the other that would smooth their ruffled feathers, Sharon was spending the morning with Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Gheit and Egyptian intelligence chief Omar Suleiman, talking about Egyptian plans to beef up its police presence on the border with Gaza. The two countries will exchange letters to enable the increased uniformed presence, with armored cars, which the Camp David accords preclude.

Also on the agenda was Syrian talk about wanting to resume negotiations (Maariv was reporting this morning that Sharon ignored a message from Syrian President Bashar Assad last year saying that he was ready to come to Jerusalem to talk peace, a Sadat-like move that could have shaken the entire Middle East – but no other Israeli paper was following up the story). Egypt had offered to mediate between Israel and Syria, but a summit yesterday between Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Assad apparently did not go as well as expected on that front and the Egyptians were backtracking, at least partially because Assad apparently denied that he was ready to resume negotiations with a clean sheet and insists on picking up the talks where they left off. Terje Larsen, the UN envoy, yesterday told the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee that Assad is serious, and that Israel should test that seriousness.

And of course, the talks were focused on the overall situation in the Palestinian Authority, where almost daily, Mahmoud Abbas and Ahmed Qurei’ appear to be shifting the direction of the ship of state. According to Haaretz, for the first time, the PA government took a step meant to at least try to obstruct the Israeli settlement efforts in the West Bank, formally informing the donor countries that the PA objects to any financing of new roads in an Israeli plan that appears to the PA to be aimed at maintaining territorial contiguity between the settlements in the West Bank, and only ‘transportation contiguity’ for the Palestinians. In another sign that Sharon is trying to turn over a new leaf with the Palestinians, permission was reportedly granted to Marwan Barghouti’s wife to visit her husband in Israeli prison. Probably also on the agenda between Sharon and the visiting Egyptians was the Iranian nuclear issue, but it is unlikely that either side will want to emphasize that part of their talks. Suleiman, by the way, stayed behind for a private meeting with Sharon while Gheit went ahead to a meeting with Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom. Suleiman would join that meeting and then meet on his own with Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz.

n any case, the budget vote this evening in the Knesset, meaning the overall coalition crisis, was the top of the agenda for the press today. There were three aspects to the story: First, there was Ehud Barak’s astonishing performance last night in the Labor Party central committee, where he grabbed a microphone away from party elder statesman Moshe Shahal and shouted that there was a conspiracy to ‘steal the party’ – a move that the entire press agreed showed Barak had lost his cool and if he was a new Barak, it was only because he was showing in public behavior he had kept behind closed doors. Barak was himself trying to make a sweeping comeback in the party, to take over from Shimon Peres, but Peres taught him a lesson in politicking.

Peres’ lesson was meant to gain a couple of weeks in which to negotiate with Sharon over Labor entering the government. The working assumption is that if Shinui votes against the budget, Sharon will fire them and will bring in Labor, overcoming Likud central committee objections to Labor by adding United Torah Judaism and possibly Shas to the coalition (if Rabbi Ovadia Yosef changes his position against the disengagement plan). But reports at noon today said Sharon, who has been playing hardball with Shinui’s threat, was working with his finance minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, offering Shinui some political gifts to ease its opposition to the UTJ funding. If Sharon and Netanyau succeed at keeping Shinui in the coalition, Labor will once again be left with egg on its face – and a rescheduled central committee meeting in mid-December can be expected to schedule internal party elections for early spring, sometime between March and April. Right now, the polls show Peres easily beating both Barak and the other significant contender, Matan Vilnai. The polls also show Vilnai handily beating Barak. Shahal this morning accused Barak of being ‘morally degenerate,’ claiming that in a phone call between them before the party meeting last night, Barak tried to offer the commercial lawyer a bribe of possible business, if Shahal, who was to run the party meeting, helped Barak’s effort to take over the party from Peres.

The conventional wisdom is that Sharon wants to lose the vote today in the Knesset to hammer home to the Likud central committee and the so-called ‘rebels’ in the Likud faction that if they keep up their refusal to allow Labor into the government, he’ll have no choice but to go to elections – and nobody really knows how elections would turn out, especially since the disengagement would be the main issue at stake and the polls show a massive majority of Israelis in favor of quitting Gaza and the northern West Bank as delineated in Sharon’s plan.

Today's Situation || Yesterday's Situation