Terror through the electoral prism, Tuesday, December 06, 2005

The victims of yesterday's suicide bombing in Netanya were being buried today as the press analyzed the impact of the terror attack on the election campaign, knowing full well that there's not much more Israel can do to put an end to the terror attacks as long as the Palestinians don't also take action against the Islamic Jihad.

There were plenty of predictable rhetorical reactions to the terror attack, with even Amir Peretz, the dovish new leader of Labor promising that if Labor forms the next government it will be 'tougher than anyone' against terror.

But there's a feeling that the public doesn't believe politicians who promise they have the solution to the terror problem. The days when Binyamin Netanyahu would rush to the scene of a bus bombing to announce the government was responsible for the deaths and he would put a halt to terror, seem to have passed. Indeed, as Ben Kaspit wrote this morning in Maariv, the only Israeli politician who could possibly gain from terror attacks nowadays is Ariel Sharon. It's difficult to accuse Sharon of being lax on terror. Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz obviously cannot campaign for the Likud leadership on the grounds he'll change defense policy. And Netanyahu's credibility is so damaged that even if, as is now expected after Uzi Landau dropped out of the race, Netanyahu wins the Likud leadership, repeating his old slogans about how he knows how to fight terror better than the prime minister doesn't really work in Israel when the prime minister is Sharon.

So there's tough rhetoric about cracking down on the 'terrorist infrastructure,' but the army and Shin Bet both know that there's no simple easy solution, especially since the Islamic Jihad, responsible for the five suicide bombings inside Israel in 2005, does not care about Palestinian public opinion since it is not running in the Palestinian elections. The Hamas, on the other hand, is very carefully abiding by the tahadiye, the 'lull' in anti-Israeli violence declared soon after Mahmoud Abbas was elected PA president in the wake of Yasser Arafat's death last year.

So, the Israelis imposed a closure on the West Bank, cut off talks with the Palestinians about the 'safe passage' between the West Bank and Gaza, is not going to respect VIP travel permits held by ranking Palestinian officials, preventing them from travel throughout the Palestinian territories, and will slow down the transport of goods and merchandise in and out of Gaza. But those kinds of actions have little to do with stopping terror, and everything to do with easing Israeli frustrations with their inability to completely prevent terror. Besides, those measures rarely last very long, as the international community, despite sympathy for Israel's situation, presses Jerusalem to ease conditions for the Palestinians as the way to isolate the terrorists in Palestinian society.

The problem now is that everything for the next four months in Israel will be seen through the elections prism and government decisions, no matter how principled in conception, will be a reflection of election campaigning. Thus to counter Amir Peretz's insistence that the government's dismantling of the welfare state is the real issue in the campaign, the prime minister says he is considering dropping the 16.5 percent VAT on food. The statement came after he promised there would be no 'election economics.' The prime minister says that canceling the VAT on food will help the poor. But the experts say that it will mostly benefit the rich, who will spend less on their foie gras, caviar and champagne.

More critically, the state appears to be heading into 2006 without a budget, which means that the 2005 budget will be applied starting in January. It also means that new medicines on the market will not be made available to patients in a health system already overburdened by budget cuts over the past five years. In short, much of the news in the coming weeks and months will be faux news – headlines created for the elections and by the elections. And as the reactions to the Netanya bombing showed, even terror will be viewed through the electoral prism.

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