Left, Center, Right, Monday, November 21, 2005

This is a watershed moment in Israeli political history. The political map is being redrawn by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon so he can plunge ahead with his plans to be counted with David Ben Gurion as Israel’s great leader. B-G established the state in 1947. Sharon wants to set finally the borders with the Palestinians and possibly the Syrians and Lebanese – but first he had to smash his two great political enterprises: the settlements, which he built as an obstacle to a Palestinian state, and the Likud when it proved it preferred its heartfelt ideologies over the pragmatism Sharon discovered in the Prime Minister’s Office.

It’s being said that Sharon has decided on the name National Responsibility for his new party, which will draw on around 14 or 15 existing MKs – some of whom are ministers – and ‘new’ faces: former Shin Bet chief Avi Dichter, outgoing president of Ben Gurion University Avishai Braverman, and Shinui eminence grise Uriel Reichman. Shimon Peres won’t leave Labor but he’ll be there after the elections to work out some deal enabling a Sharon-Labor (or Labor-Sharon) coalition. Sharon’s leaving behind a Likud fraught with internal strife between at least seven announced contenders, with no certainty that Binyamin Netanyahu is the winner, and a Right chomping at the bit to unite, but also chomping at itself with personal rivalries behind the high-falutin’ rhetoric about saving the Land of Israel.

It’s too soon to judge what will happen. But if everything coming from Sharon ‘associates’ about his intentions is true, the Center-Left, not the Center-Right, will be the coalition born from these new elections. And there is a chance that an astonishingly revitalized Labor under Amir Peretz, could win the election – as long as the security front remains relatively calm.

Not that there aren’t differences between the two. Sharon wants to negotiate a territorial deal with the Americans, get their approval for it and then talk to the Palestinians about implementing it – the ‘unilateral’ method of the Gaza withdrawal – for a very long time interim arrangement that leaves whatever is inside the security fence to Israel and all the rest to the Palestinians. The fence right now takes up about 8 percent of the West Bank. Peretz prefers dialogue, arguing that the only way to make the Palestinians partners to a peace process is to regard them as partners.

There will be a week of jockeying around technical matters and much drama over who ends up in Sharon’s new embrace. Typically, in the morning, Shaul Mofaz was reportedly running in the Likud to replace Sharon as chairman, by noon, he was reportedly dithering. Nobody knows which way Tzavchi Hanegbi will go – technically he will be chairman of the party. Reuven Rivlin, the Knesset Speaker, is tempted to help the Right, which is interested in making the date for the vote as late as possible – perhaps May. And there is futile talk about the Right forming a coalition of 61 behind someone else as prime minister, now that Sharon has resigned.

But the moment long-awaited in Israeli politics has come. It’s not a Big Bang, with Peres and Lapid joining Sharon (though Lapid might yet end up there with his Shinui faction since it’s already been cut in half from 15 to 7 Knesset seats in the polls). It is, however, a bang nonetheless, the starting gun for the debate on priorities – social or security -- never before seen so clearly in Israel, a chance to settle, once and for all, the internal debate between Israeli and Jew, which would be a big step forward to settling the Israeli-Arab conflict.

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

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