Speculation as news, Friday, September 02, 2005

The latest example is coincidental reporting in Maariv and on Israel Radio today about ‘secret’ plans for Netanyahu to muster a 61-seat majority in the Knesset to make him prime minister instead of Sharon. True, half a dozen MKs from the Likud could make the difference, if they were to throw their support behind Netanyahu instead of Sharon. But the government that would result would be so Rightist that Netanyahu himself would be considered a Leftist on board – and while the Right would be momentarily satisfied with the catharsis of defeating Sharon, it would also quickly find itself deeply at odds not only with the rest of the world, but also with much of the Israeli public.

Briefly, of course, the speculation captured the imagination – there was talk about how Sharon could head off the ambush at the bend, with a surprise resignation or even better, a surprise vote in favor of new elections, preempting Netanyahu. And then there’s the ‘big bang-small bang’ theory, which says that Sharon won’t allow the Netanyahu confrontation even reach the voting stage inside the Likud and will preempt any primaries elections with the formation of a new party, leaving a radical Rightist Likud to Netanyahu while Sharon gathers the Israeli Center to his bosom.

Meanwhile, the IDF is finishing up the withdrawal from Gaza. The cemeteries were emptied this week, the houses have all been flattened, there’s still discussion about what to do with the synagogues – nobody wants to leave them to the Hamas and ideas range from taking them apart and bringing them back to Israel to filling them with cement and forcing the Palestinians to bow them up. But by mid-September, the army will be finished with the job and then the delicate process of handing Gaza over to the Palestinian Authority will begin.

To the utter surprise of the army, the security coordination with the Palestinians has worked. Just as all the predictions of civil war turned into saccharine demonstrations ranging from dignified to insensitive and vulgar, so did all the predictions of barrages of Palestinian mortars on the disengagement turn into just talk.

Not that anyone in power on the Israeli side seems ready to give the Palestinian Authority credit for the quiet – if they did, it would mean that perhaps the time had come for direct negotiations with the PA, something that right now is far outside the mainstream of Israeli politics. Instead, the typical analysis by Military Intelligence – and most of the Arab affairs commentators – says that the quiet is for the short term, and that once the Israelis are actually gone from Gaza, the chaos and anarchy in Gaza’s streets will burst into the open in a race between the PA and Hamas to plant flags on the emptied settlements. As for attacks on Israelis – the conventional wisdom now is that those attacks will continue from the West Bank.

Perhaps they will. There is another view, which is that the Palestinians are also in an election campaign and with the Palestinian electorate now agreeing with PA President Mahmoud Abbas that ‘now is a time for construction’ and his ‘one PA, one law, and one gun’ policy. Hamas, which is running for the PA parliament, is unlikely to be eager to resume the kind of anti-occupation military campaigns it conducted during the years of intifada.

Meanwhile, there’s no formal agreement on the border crossings from Gaza into and out of Egypt – will Israel be able to monitor the goods entering the territory? Israel argues that if the PA wants to keep the customs envelope that covers Gaza and the West Bank, an arrangement that brings in hundreds of millions of shekels in taxes to the PA a year, Israel must be able to monitor goods coming into Gaza. Its real concern, of course, is not the customs to be earned by the PA, but the weapons that might flow into Gaza. But not to worry. As has often been the case during the process of disengagement, things fall into place at the last minute. Next week, for example, the Egyptians will start deploying their 750 policemen on the Philadelphi Corridor, after the Knesset this week approved the protocols enabling the deployment.

More news from today || Yesterday's situation (Archive)

© Today's Situation From Ariga, http://www.ariga.com by Robert Rosenberg; Feel free to pass this page on, including this line: Subscribe to get it daily by email -- or unsubscribe -- at http://www.ariga.com/signup.shtml >>>>>>>>>>RSS Feed

Feed Shark

Today's Situation || Yesterday's Situation