Political tizzies, Monday, November 07, 2005

As of this morning, Peres has the advantage, after Matan Vilnai, the ex-general who has campaigned for the last two years to replace the octogenarian Peres, dropped out in the face of lagging numbers in the polls. The conventional wisdom is that Vilnai’s base, located largely in the kibbutz movement, will switch to Peres, especially after Vilnai announced his support for the longtime party leader whom he had called ‘a loser’ only two days ago.

The polls right now in Labor are volatile, with the Peres advantage – less than 5 points ahead of Peretz -- falling within the standard deviation error and Peretz, not Peres, looks like he might be able to build momentum because of the Vilnai move, since suddenly it looks like a real race in Labor. Whether he wins or loses, Peretz will emerge from the race as a power to be counted inside Labor, which has seemed to be in a coma ever since Barak returned from Camp David to announce there was no Palestinian partner. Peretz at least is committed to traditional Labor Party values, which may not resonate with the new yuppie class in Israel, but has great appeal in the ever-growing lower classes, which have been further impoverished by Likud economic policies. The big question is whether Peretz, who has an authentic appeal for those voters, can break the seemingly genetic code of the traditional Likud voter from the underclasses. With typical flair for sloganeering, Peretz said today that the Peres-Vilnai coalition is a move to support Sharon, not Peres.

Meanwhile, all those interested in politics were waiting for this evening’s voting in the Knesset, where Sharon is said to be going ahead with a showdown against the so-called rebels, a group of mostly freshmen MKs with no public appeal but a grip on the party’s all-powerful central committee with jingoistic demands on the prime minister.

Sharon wants to name three supporters as ministers. The rebels – seemingly led from behind the scenes by Binyamin Netanyahu – will accept Ehud Olmert as finance minister, but only because he has been acting finance minister since Netanyahu resigned and constitutionally, the government must have a full time finance minister who is not the prime minister. But the rebels want Sharon to name two of them as ministers, not two loyalists like Rony Bar On and Zeev Boim.

The reasoning inside the rebel camp is very similar to that of the Rightist anti-disengagement forces who called the disengagement from Gaza undemocratic: Sharon dares to fire ministers who oppose government policy, and dares to reward MKs who supported government policy. By the standards of the Likud rebels, who refer to themselves as the Likud loyalists, Sharon’s appointments are another form of corruption.

Sharon is making it clear that he is fed up with the faction within the Likud faction, and once again there is talk of him calling snap elections, quitting the Likud and heading a new party that the polls show would easily defeat both the Likud and the Labor Party.

But it is difficult to believe the polls especially because of the volatility of the situation. In 1981, a terror attack on a bus outside Jericho lost Shimon Peres the election. In 1996, he lost an enormous lead over Netanyahu because of a series of suicide bombings on buses in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Afula and Hadera. Israeli polls show the vast majority of the public is prepared for a two-state solution and many ‘painful concessions’, but the same majority wants an iron fist against terrorism. Indeed, typical of the unreliability of Israeli polls is the one that appears in The Jerusalem Post today, commissioned by the National Union bloc, which says that if the National Religious Party merges with the National Union bloc, it will end up as the second largest party in the country.

That’s the ongoing paradox of Israeli politics, accompanying the political process since the days of Rabin’s recognition of the PLO. Sharon’s unilateral withdrawal from Gaza and the northern West Bank was not meant, at least not at first, as a move toward advancing the political peace process. But it has turned into that, at least in the minds of the rest of the world – and much of the Israeli public. Sharon has indicated that he, too, would like to move further, but the excuse of terror always gets in the way, largely because of the pressure from the Israeli street. And that is the main difference between Sharon and Rabin, who never gave up the principle of negotiating for peace as if there is no terror and fighting terror as if there are no negotiations. Sharon, perhaps out of habit, perhaps out of spite, and perhaps as a strategy to force the Palestinians to take action, always halts talks with the Palestinians in response to a terror attack inside Israel. It’s his instinct, as much as he instinctively regarded the withdrawal from Gaza, when it was first conceived, as punishment of the Palestinians.

Yitzhak Rabin's Last Speech, which he delivered at the Tel Aviv peace rally on Nov. 4 1995

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