Pulling at polls, Friday, December 02, 2005

The polls show that Shimon Peres support for Ariel Sharon gave another added boost to the newborn party, while Labor remains relatively stable and Likud continues to crash.

But nobody believes the polls of today will reflect reality by the time the March 28 voting day comes around. Much depends on who heads the Likud, what new faces show up on the Labor Party list and whether the Kadima list can maintain its momentum.

One thing seems relatively certain – barring unpredictable acts of God (or Palestinian terrorists) the Right is fragmented, with a lot of talk but so far little action about unity, and not all the Right will join a new coalition of Rightist parties. Furthermore, while the Center has moved Leftward all the way to Sharon's new party declaring support for a Palestinian state (albeit a truncated, demilitarized one), the Right seems to have lost its grip on public opinion.

In that sense, the 'big bang' of Israeli politics was not merely Sharon forming a new party and Peres quitting Likud: it was the unclogging of the political paralysis created by the near tie between Left and Right, election after election.

Sharon and Amir Peretz are both under strict orders from their campaign management to stick to messages that appeal to the Center, which traditionally in Israel means messages as vague as possible, with big promises about changes to come. Sharon is more experienced than Peretz at this game, but Peretz did not manage to ride the Histadrut tiger for a decade of fighting with successively more economically conservative governments by being a slouch. Besides, the real campaigning has yet to begin in earnest. That will only begin in early January after all the party lists of nominees for Knesset are known. Meanwhile, Binyamin Netanyahu leads in the Likud, but Shaul Mofaz's challenge to him has made clear that Netanyahu's days as the self-evident heir apparent in a post-Sharon Likud, is not so self evident any more.

Ironically – but not surprisingly -- the Israeli elections will be greatly affected by the Palestinian Legislative Council elections at the end of January. Today there was more voting underway in the West Bank in Fateh primaries, but it is becoming clear that the final Fateh list of candidates will be drawn up to suit the 'younger generation,' whose leader is clearly Marwan Barghohuti, serving five life sentences in an Israeli prison after being convicted of orchestrating several terror attacks in the Jerusalem area in the first year of the intifada. Despite Likud contender Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom's promise that Barghouti will never be released from prison, there's more and more talk about reaching some sort of deal with the Palestinians that would free him without Israel losing face completely. That can only happen, of course, after the PLC elections, which now seem likely to result in Barghouti's election as the most popular politician in the West Bank. It's significant that Israel does not prevent him from meeting with key political allies – and potential rivals in the future - such as Jibril Rajoub, Mohammad Dahlan and Farez Kadura.

There was a flurry of somewhat tendentious reporting this morning on Israel Radio about how wanted terrorists are managing to cross into Gaza through the Palestinian-Egyptian border crossing at Rafah. Likud MK Yuval Steinitz, the head of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, went on the air with an 'I told you so' message about how Israel cannot trust the Egyptians or Palestinians and how Israel should never have given up control over any border crossing into Palestinian areas. But attentive listeners could find in the reports that the sources for the report appeared to be unnamed 'military sources,' and that the sum total of terrorists 'flooding Gaza from Egypt,' as Steinitz described it, was ten. The U.S. will send an envoy to keep an eye on the Rafah crossing, at Israel's request.

In another development, Israel conducted a reportedly successful test of its anti-ballistic missile system. The reports in the media drew a connection between the test and the Iranian missile program, which presumably is meant to carry nuclear warheads if and when Iran succeeds at building a bomb.

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