As Sharon decides, Friday, November 18, 2005

Polls this morning make clear that Sharon’s problem is not Binyamin Netanyahu, who is rumored to be trying to save his political career by winning a guaranteed Number 2 position in the upcoming Likud selection process for the party’s nominees for Knesset. Netanyahu knows why he wants such a guarantee – if Sharon leaves the Likud, the competition for the Likud leadership will be wide open. Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom has pretty much made clear he will seek the leadership if Sharon is out of the way. Education Minister Limor Livnat also seems a likely candidate, and there’s always Uzi Landau, who is trying to force Sharon out.

The polls show that the public loves Sharon and hates the Likud. A Yedioth poll today says that 27 percent of the public thinks the Likud is corrupt, while only 4 percent think Labor is corrupt. And that’s after months of attacks by the Likud and the media on what they described as a corrupt Labor membership drive. On the other hand, nearly every day there’s another story about a Likud politician caught with their hands in the till in one way or another. Livnat’s mother, it turns out, gets Education Ministry money for an npo she founded and since Livnat’s been minister, the budget for her mother’s project has quadrupled. Livnat’s husband made millions selling ‘Jewish heritage’ curriculum materials to the ministry – without a tender – after Livnat announced the introduction of ‘Jewish heritage courses’ in the schools. And that’s just one example of several that now fill the newspapers. And of course there’s the ongoing saga of the Sharon family’s corruption – nobody writes about how Sharon was able to afford the largest private farm in the country (he was given an interest free loan by ex-Israeli Meshulam Riklis) – but Omri Sharon has been convicted of crimes that include perjury, resulting from illegal campaign finance maneuvers he conducted on his father’s behalf in the 1999 Likud primaries.

The prime minister meanwhile remains coated with Teflon. Today’s Yedioth poll shows that Sharon party would win 28 seats in the Knesset, Labor would also get 28 seats, and Likud, without Sharon at the head, would get only 18 seats. Shas, Shinui, and Meretz-Yahad all lose votes to Labor, headed by Amir Peretz.

Today's conventional wisdom is that it’s a 50-50 decision for Sharon. He is said to be fed up with having to fend off the rebels – and has good reason to worry that the party’s central committee, which nominates the party’s MKs, will elect even more rebels in the coming elections. The polls show that with him at the head of the party, however, the Likud would only lose half a dozen seats in the Knesset, even as Labor grows under Peretz. But starting a new party – for a 77-year-old man, no matter how vigorous – is hard work, and costs a fortune. Sharon can hardly afford any hanky panky raising money, and while he can count on perhaps a dozen and maybe more of the current Likud MKs and ministers to join him in the adventure, but he would need some new and attractive names to draw voters.

Furthermore, the Likud may be as despised nowadays as Labor was in 1977 when it lost its first election since 1948 (the comparison is being made more and more often in the press) but it is still a ‘brand’ and more importantly, it has a machine. Historically, new parties that look good in the polls here, dwindle to very little by the time election day arrives.

And even when they make a difference, like in 1977, when the clean government Democratic Movement for Change took 17 Knesset seats away from the Labor Party, enabling Menachem Begin to form a government, the DMC (also known by its Hebrew acronynm, Dash) very quickly disintegrated as it became apparent that it was comprised of political opportunists who used it as a platform for election to the Knesset and political tyros who thought their management style as army generals or industrialists and tycoons would work in the parliament. It’s just such people who would likely be recruited into a new Sharon party. So, down on his farm, Sharon can hear the voices inside the Likud – including the rebels – promising unity. But many of those same voices are saying there can only be unity if the ideological hard core of the Likud is revived as the Likud platform and the prime minister salutes it as his plan.

There is talk that he will bring his plan for the future political steps – the roadmap – to the party’s Knesset faction, before making a decision. But the rebels, led by Netanyahu and Landau, will insist on a strict interpretation of the roadmap, based on the 14 reservations Netanyahu dictated to Sharon as a condition for supporting the roadmap. Any reading of the 14 reservations shows that it completely neuters the roadmap, essentially rendering it meaningless. That’s something that Sharon probably cannot accept, knowing it will sour his relations with the Americans, his most important ally.

Then there’s the wild card known as Amir Peretz. The polls today show that 37 percent of the electorate wants the campaign to be about social affairs and economic policy, while 30 percent think security and foreign affairs should be the campaign debate. Only 12 percent, right now, think corruption is the real issue for the campaign. If Peretz can keep setting the agenda – and his victory over Shimon Peres is why Israel is going to elections this spring – he will not merely maintain his position in the polls, he could make further gains.

True, a terror incident can always change the course of an election in Israel. In 1984, Peres at the head of the Labor Party was four Knesset seats ahead of Yitzhak Shamir at the head of the Likud, but two days before the voting, a Molotov cocktail thrown at an Israeli bus passing through Jericho on the way to Jerusalem, killed a mother and her baby. The vote ended in a tie that forced a ‘national unity government.’ Terror in 1992, on the other hand, propelled Yitzhak Rabin at the head of Labor, into the prime minister’s office, while it defeated Shimon Peres a second time in 1996. But there is also a feeling that the jingoistic, hawkish rhetoric of the past is no longer a hard currency for much of the public, which like Sharon has accepted the basic concept of a two-state for two people’s solution. Peretz is a dove unafraid of standing up to the hawks and arguing to the longtime Likud constituency of the poor working class that the occupation is one of the reasons for their poverty. Yes, he will have to mainstream his message but his appeal is largely his transparency and authenticity, his sincerity and his personal warmth. And while on the chessboard of Israeli politics, Sharon is still king, with the ability to move like a queen, Peretz is like a rook, with the potential power of a castle.

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

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