100 years of political experience

Friday, December 10, 2004

The ease of this morning’s dialogue between them, however, is belied by the tensions of the past few days, when Sharon suddenly began to fear that a low turnout in the central committee would lead to yet another defeat for him in his own party. Peres meanwhile faced a rebellion sparked by his challengers, Ehud Barak, Matan Vilnai, and others who wanted as early as possible showdown with the octogenarian over the party’s leadership. But with 157 years between them, and more than 100 of those yeas in politics, Sharon and Peres handily found ways to solve their respective problems.

Sharon spent the last few days before the central committee vote on the phone, haranguing, cajoling, threatening, seducing and otherwise persuading recalcitrant or hesitant central committee members. He had a carrot – his promise he would also negotiate with Shas, through it is unlikely the Sephard-Haredi party will be quickly joining the coalition because there won’t be any major changes of the government’s neo-Thatcherite budget allocations. But mostly, Sharon used a stick: the threat of new elections with its implicit warning that nobody could be sure that the Likud would return to power with 40 MKs like it has now in the 120-seat parliament. The Likud ‘rebels’ against disengagement, who only four months ago counted nearly half the party faction, have been reduced to only nine MKs, and the real strength of the disengagement and Sharon opponents in the central committee has been noted: about 900 out of nearly 3,000 members of the committee. True, for a little while yesterday afternoon, when the turnout was still quite low, it looked like Sharon was in trouble. But by evening, the turnout rose, finally reaching a reverberating 1,410 to 856 victory, with a nearly 75 percent of the committee members voting.

In Labor, Peres orchestrated a classic Labor solution – a compromise. He had been against any race for party leader until at least November 2005, by which time the disengagement will presumably be over and perhaps, Peres reckons, more diplomatic developments with the Palestinians and the wider Arab world would be underway. His challengers, led by the former premier, Ehud Barak, and Matan Vilnai, the former deputy chief of staff who has been building a power base of his own in the party for the last five years, wanted the internal party elections – ‘primaries,’ in Israeli terms – as soon as possible, in February 2005. The dispute threatened to fragment the party, which has been lackluster and seemingly rudderless ever since Barak’s terrible loss to Sharon in 2001, with recriminatory accusations of forged signatures, backroom manipulations, and backstabbing between the camps. But compromise has always been Peres’s main modus operandi, and it was obvious that one would be found. June 29 is the date set for the party’s vote for chairman.

t’s not merely a compromise date between two party factions. It is also a few days before the “12 weeks of disengagement” are to begin, according to Sharon’s timetable. Indeed, while Sharon and Peres are using the traditional term “national unity” to describe the coalition they plan with the two leading parties as partners, a more apt term will be the “disengagement government,” because that’s the only reason Labor is ready to join. Of course, there is also the possibility that it will go down in history as the “civil war” government, because that is what a dwindling, but ever more militant camp opposed to the disengagement from Gaza ands the northern West Bank is threatening, if the disengagement actually takes place.

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