Electioneering all around

Thursday, August 25, 2005

Among Likud party members, Sharon loses in a head to head race against Netanyahu. But if Uzi Landau sticks to his guns – and there is no reason to believe he won’t -- and stays in the race, he and Netanyahu will split the Likud’s Right, leaving Sharon to win the party leadership. But with Sharon at the head of the Likud the party hemorrhages votes to the parties to its Right. With Netanyahu at its head, the Likud hemorrhages votes to the Center.

Meanwhile, on the Left, there’s chomping at the bit for Labor to quit the government now that disengagement has taken place. Yahad-Meretz leader Yossi Beilin is ready to do the deal with the devil – Shas and the far Right inside the Knesset, including the so-called Likud rebels – to find a 61-vote majority for an early elections. Ehud Barak is on TV almost every night, talking to this or that current events show, trying to win back the support of the Center and Left, arguing that Labor should quit the government and hold primaries based on an entirely new voter registration drive. Shimon Peres, of course, is not at all eager to quit. And he, after all, is still chairman of the Labor Party.

In short, the coming weeks are going to be all about jockeying for position as the Likud showdown between Sharon and Netanyahu draws to a head while a five-way fight for the Labor Party leadership resumes after it was put on hold during August, for the disengagement. There’s a lot of spinning going on, the latest being that Sharon’s ‘Farm Forum’ – his closest advisors – are recommending that he follow the polls, pull out of the Likud and form a new party as an independent candidate for prime minister. It’s very risky, of course.

And everything depends on what happens on the ground. Last night’s killing of a yeshiva student in the Old City by a knife-wielding Palestinian, and an IDF raid that killed five members of a Tulkarm cell allegedly involved in last February’s discotheque bombing has reminded people on both sides that disengagement certainly does not mean peace. The Israeli Right, whether led by Netanyahu or the ideological Landau, is counting on Palestinian terror – lately, Netanyahu has been trying to persuade listeners that al Qaida is going to take over Gaza – to defeat the Center and Left.

The Center and Left are meanwhile counting on Sharon, though it is very unclear for what. While the world applauds the Gaza withdrawal, he is meanwhile moving in East Jerusalem to make sure there is territorial contiguity between Maale Adumim and the Israeli capital. That would also make sure there is no territorial contiguity between northern and southern West Bank and would effectively cut off Palestinian East Jerusalem from the Palestinian hinterland of the West Bank.

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