Sharon strategy, Tuesday, November 01, 2005

The Israeli campaign against the Islamic Jihad continues in the West Bank but the negotiations with the Palestinians over the border crossings out of Gaza continue, with Sharon saying today that Israel expects a third party – the EU, with the Palestinians and Egyptians – to have enforceable powers if its officers at the border between Gaza and Egypt discover illicit border crossings of terrorists or their equipment.

Sharon said it to the press during a press conference with Italian Deputy Premier and Foreign Minister Gianfranco Fini, where Sharon also vowed that he won’t meet with PA President Mahmoud Abbas ‘as long as the terror continues.’ The Palestinians are saying that the struggle against terror requires dialogue and are frustrated by Israeli suspicions and stinginess. The Israelis of course are frustrated by the Palestinian Authority’s inability to rein in the armed groups. Sharon’s insistence that the EU have enforceable powers at the border crossing puts the Europeans on notice that they may be sending a new kind of peacekeeping troop to what can be expected to become a front line of the world war of terrorism. It will be a new semi-military role for the Europeans as a unified political entity, another complication in the very complicated world.

Sharon, in any case, is focused on his political problems at home, and has to walk a very fine line between the political schedule that includes the November 2006 Israeli elections as well as Palestinian elections in January 2006. The Americans have decided to give Abbas’ plan a try so Sharon has to take it into consideration: that plan is based on the theory that the showdown between the Palestinian government and the armed groups can only come after the Palestinian parliamentary elections.

The November elections are foremost in his mind, of course, since it means a showdown inside his own political party, where anti-Arab jingoism is still very popular. That showdown was supposed to have been settled by the central committee vote Sharon won in later September, when it seemed Binyamin Netanyahu was humiliated and the Likud rebels were neutered. But this week, Sharon found himself forced to postpone by a week the appointment of loyalists Ehud Olmert as permanent finance minister (instead of acting finance minister), and Ronni Bar On and Ze’ev Boim as ministers because he could not find a majority in the Knesset for the government expansion. That turns next week’s vote, ‘on exactly the same issue’ Sharon promised, into a constitutional issue, since if Sharon can’t appoint a finance minister, the government must fall. The attorney general is examining the issue.

But on the assumption that Sharon can get through the next week vote somehow, he still has the budget to pass, ostensibly by December 31, but actually by June 1, 2006 if he stretches the law as far as it can go. And before then, he’ll have the primaries inside the Likud, which is where he must crush Netanyahu once and for all – and somehow avoid a situation in which the Likud central committee nominates a Knesset list under him that will be even more contrarian than the current 40-member faction in which he can’t be sure he can count on more than 30 of the Likud MKs.

So, even though he knows it is in Israel’s interest to conduct a dialogue with Abbas and do everything it can to accelerate the process of the Palestinians getting statehood status, he can’t be seen giving the Palestinians anything as long as it appears that some form of armed intifada is brewing in the West Bank – and Gazans continue shooting missiles into Israel.

Trouble is, much of the violence in the West Bank, by the admission of both sides of the fighting, is just tit for tat with each side finding an easy reason for retaliation, whether a bombing in Hadera or the assassinations with their innocent bystanders getting killed or sonic booms in the middle of the night over all of tiny Gaza.

Sharon strategy is to go down in history as one of the tiny pantheon of Israeli leaders who made peace: Begin with Egypt, Rabin with Jordan. His tactic seems to be a combination of brinksmanship and ignoring whatever gets in his way. A poll conducted by Mikna Zemach and revealed on Channel 2 last night asked Israelis whom they trust to be prime minister. Nearly 40 percent said Sharon, nearly 20 percent said Peres, nearly 10 percent said Uzi Landau, Amir Peretz or Matan Vilnai, and 4 percent said Netanyahu. But meanwhile, Netanyahu works behind the scenes trying to bring down Sharon, announcing first – ahead of the rebels – that he would vote against the Bar On and Boim appointments, which he called ‘corruption’ because the prime minister was rewarding MKs who were loyal to him over the past 18 months of controversy over the disengagement.

The security cabinet today assigned Peres the job of negotiating with the Europeans about their involvement as the third party with enforceable powers meant to watch out for terrorists crossing the Gaza-Egypt border at Rafah. It could be months before everything is in place there, and at the other crossings in and out of Israel from Gaza. True, Defense Minister Mofaz allowed some 500 Israeli Arabs to visit Gaza for the Id el Fitr holiday, as a humanitarian gesture, and the Karny crossing, where most of the supplies to Gaza and exports from Gaza pass, has been reopened. But it is slow moving and meanwhile the Gazan economy withers.

But there was one hopeful sign this week: Sharon made it official – Mofaz’s comments about having to wait for another generation of Palestinians to make peace, is not Israeli policy. Mofaz, trying to position himself as the alternative to Netanyahu in the Likud as a potential premier, looked like a reprimanded schoolboy.

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