Petty politics, Monday, September 19, 2005

During his five days in New York at the UN General Assembly where he was feted as a new peacemaking Sharon, the prime minister made clear at every opportunity just how little respect he has for his challengers, but particularly Netanyahu the Sloganeer, as Sharon refers to him.

He left for New York with the polls showing him rising and apparently on his way to handily defeat the Netanyahu challenge, which is technically a vote in the Likud central committee to advance the party primaries. But since then, while his UN speech won kudos from the Center and Left, the ever more hardcore Right only found more reason to depose him, and applause in the UN has never been turned into votes in Israel. In short, the momentum in the polls may have stalled, just when it looked like it was going over the top for Sharon. On the other hand, almost every poll, whether of a sample of the 3,050 Likud central committee members or the 150,000-strong rank and file that votes in primaries for the leader of the party, gives different results. Sharon will hold at least two gatherings of central committee members this week and spend a lot of time on the phone, to make sure that the vote goes his way in the committee next week.

Meanwhile, his two sons, Omri the MK and Gilad the farmer-businessman, have apparently persuaded him to drop the idea – for now – of quitting the Likud, a fanciful political speculation that has fueled many a dinner party for the chattering classes here for the last year. Polls consistently show that the public only trusts Sharon – and Shimon Peres – with various configurations of political alliances between Sharon and Peres leading to extraordinary electoral victories of the type not seen here since Ben Gurion was the undisputed leader of the country and Mapai defined the way a ruling party in Israel had a grip on everything.

Nowadays, the Likud, which has been the ruling party for almost 30 years, doesn’t seem to have a grip on very much. Divided within by Sharon’s relatively newfound pragmatic peace policies as enunciated in his UN speech and more importantly by the execution of his Gaza and northern Samaria evacuations, the ruling party looks like it will be torn apart by the competing centrifugal forces of ever-more-radical Rightist ideology spinning one way, while the other spin is that of purely pragmatic backroom power brokers who wheel and deal for connected businessmen seeking government tenders, or openly use nepotism in local governments where the Likud’s national power holds sway.

Thus, the Likud’s central committee struggle will be played out as a form of the pettiest of politics: backslapping and promises, browbeating and brinksmanship, but it will be a fateful struggle for the fate of not only the leading political party in the country, but also the next decade of politics in Israel. If Sharon roundly defeats Netanyahu and Landau, it will shift the party from the Rightist body known so well to the world since 1977, to a much more Centrist body, much more reflective of the mood of the electorate, which has lost interest, enthusiasm and empathy for the messianic settlement movement. If he only squeaks past them, they will nip at his heels at every step, constraining his ability to move down the path he laid out in the UN speech – reconciliation with the Palestinians. And if he loses to them, it is not at all clear if he will be able to remain in the Likud.

A few days after the Likud vote next week, Sharon is to meet with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, the man whom Sharon has to persuade that he really meant the conciliatory tone at the UN that so upset the Right in Israel. But Abbas has to prove to Sharon that the Palestinian Authority still has authority of some kind, able to put down the growing audacity of the military wing of the Hamas. Abbas plan is to coopt the armed groups, including the Hamas’s 1,000-2,000 uniformed and disciplined, arms-bearing men, into the PA’s security services. Sharon newest policy line is that if the Hamas is not disarmed, Israel won’t allow them to participate in the upcoming elections, even if that means disrupting the PA elections, a threat the U.S. didn’t like. But Sharon could probably accept Hamas being coopted into the PA security services, if they really are reformed into a three-wing armed forces, one for policing, one for intelligence, and one for national defense. That has been Abbas’ promise all along. But so far, he’s been better at promises than fulfilling them. Sharon, on the other hand, won his laurels buy fulfilling the promise he made almost two years ago – to leave Gaza. That’s why, right now, the outcome of the Likud central committee vote next week is so important.

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