Shifting loyalties, Wednesday, November 30, 2005

While Labor and Kadima are drawing new members daily, the Likud is not only not drawing new voters, it is firing or purging anyone suspected of sympathies for Ariel Sharon. The longtime legal advisor to the Likud, Eitan Haberman, was either thrown out or quit this morning – depending on whom one asked -- after it turned out that his law office was providing services to Sharon’s new Kadima party. There’s already an ‘informant’s line’ to call to report secret Sharon sympathizers in the Likud central committee or Likud employees.

Meanwhile, Sharon and everyone else is awaiting a formal announcement by Shimon Peres when he arrives from Barcelona later today, that the oldest statesmen in the world has decided to drop out of party politics, denying Amir Peretz’s request that Peres take the honorary 120th position in the party list of nominees for Knesset and a formal title of President of the Israeli Labor Party.

Peres is not expected to actually join the Kadima party, but rather to express support for Sharon’s peacemaking efforts. In exchange, Peres is said to have a Sharon promise for a role in the peace process. As one columnist wrote this morning, that’s a promise written in ice in a heat-wave. Sharon wants to deny Peretz -- who betrayed Peres by running against him and then winning to boot – Peres’ prestigious presence in the Labor Party, and there were those in Labor in mourning this morning that the their longtime leader is turning his back on the party. Peretz will probably heave a sigh of relief – and if he wins the elections, there’s nothing to prevent him from offering Peres a job if he needs the statesman for something. Peres has never been known to turn down a position of power.

A Yedioth poll this morning gives Kadima about 34 seats in the next Knesset, with Labor getting 27 – that’s enough for them to form a government together without any other party. Shas is next largest, with 11 seats, and only then does the Likud appear, with 10 seats predicted for it. All the other parties – the ultra-Orthodox Ashkenazi, reformist Shinui, :Leftist Meretz-Yahad, Rightist Yisrael Beitenu, Rightist National Union, Rightist-Centrist National Religious Party get between 6-4 seats. The Arab parties would bring in 8 seats if elections were today. In short, it looks like the Center-Left will dominate the Knesset, with the Right barely able to muster a third of the seats.

True, there’s nowhere for the Likud to go but up. But that can’t begin to happen until after their vote for a new party chairman on December 19th. And then it depends on who wins – and perhaps even more so, on the list of faces on the Likud list of nominees for Knesset behind the leader, if the Likud is able to unite around their man, whoever it is. Binyamin Netanyahu, both fighting and parading his reputation as a hard-line Rightist, depending on his audience, has his lead, and like Shaul Mofaz and Silvan Shalom, is arguing that the Likud remains the Center, and that Sharon moved Left. On the right of the Likud, Uzi Landau, Israel Katz and Moshe Feiglin fight it out for a leadership role in a larger Right wing.

The surge to the Center-Left, stripping the Likud of so many voters, has left the party confused and a mystery about its true power – on the one hand, it still holds the jobs and has the bureaucratic mechanisms of a ruling party. On the other, it is less and less attractive by the day as it lashes out with pained hatred at Sharon and his ‘Leftists.’ Shalom backed Netanyahu’s hated economics, Mofaz conducted the hated disengagement, Landau and Katz claim to be fighting to preserve Likud’s honor as a Rightist-Revisionist Party, while Moshe Faiglin, on the far right of the party is the spoiler. In short, even if a leader emerges, it is not at all clear that the party will be able to unite around him.

Kadima and Labor right now are not merely united around their leaders, they know that their leaders hold all the reins of power in their respective parties. Kadima has formally handed Sharon (and presumably his sons) the right to choose the party’s Knesset lineup, and its order. Peretz controls more than half the voters in Labor and whatever ticket he wants – and he’s bringing in new faces all the time, today former Jerusalem police chief Arye Amit – he’ll get.

According to the Elections Commission, it will take about 80,000 votes to cross the threshold for the first seat in a Knesset faction, and then about 30,000 votes for each successive seat. Electioneering is done on TV, in allocated advertising spots to the parties according to their size. That advertising time on the three public channels is free to the parties, but appeals to what is believed to be the critical Russian vote in the past have included paid ads on Moscow-based TV stations. However, those expecting the Russians to vote en masse for the Right, as they did in the past (except once, for Ehud Barak) are probably in for a shock – the Russians have been Israelized by now.

These are the most exciting elections Israel has seen since the Six Day War, because the eventual outcome seems so clear but so much is new and different. Never before has a ruling party’s prime minister walked out in his party and kept the seat of premier; not since the days of Ben Gurion, has there been such explicitly socialist rhetoric, delivered with such impassioned belief, coming from the Labor Party. Moreover, for the first time, Labor has a leader who looks hungry.

In short, the focus on politics can be forgiven in the coming months. Besides, everything is politics. For example, the Knesset voted today to wait until Omri Sharon’s sentencing hearings, starting in January before it moves to suspend his membership in the Knesset after he was convicted of among other things, perjury to the State Comptroller and falsifying corporate documents. The legal difficulties of the prime minister’s son – especially if he appears to get off lightly in the sentencing – could yet do great harm to the Kadima list.

Or, on another legal front, the plea bargain that will finally free Tali Fahima, the young Israeli woman who appears to have become enchanted by the Fateh’s Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade’s cell leader in Jenin, Zakariya Zubeidi, and was arrested almost two years ago for various charges relating to association with the enemy, up to and including treason. The treason was dropped from the charges, and she was sentenced to three years in the plea, which means she could be out of prison before the end of the year.

There was one other legal case that appears to have been resolved today – and which principals also charged was politically motivated. The High Court of Justice ruled that underworld boss Ze’ev Rosenstein can be extradited to the U.S., where a federal court in Miami has charged him with being the world’s biggest dealer of Ecstasy, the party drug illegal throughout the world. His wife appeared on Israel Radio to complain that the ruling was ‘purely political. The Americans wag their finger and everyone jumped,’ she complained. Rosenstein has been in Israeli police custody for more than a year as he fought the extradition.

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