Every man for himself, Wednesday, December 07, 2005

The Hanegbi move, as Labor party politician Matan Vilnai pointed out, was particularly oddly timed – the day after the police leaked to the press that they plan to prosecute Hanegbi for violating a host of laws against political appointments in a ministry. According to police, they have evidence showing Hanegbi, as an Environmental Affairs Minister in Binyamin Netanyahu's government in the mid-90s, was deeply involved in naming Likud party members and their relatives to fictitious jobs.

Netanyahu, by the way, still the front runner in the Likud leadership race, said about the Hanegbi move that 'it has no political significance … and a person should not be held responsible for what they do in times of sorrow.' Meanwhile, Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom, who is trying to portray himself as a hawkish moderate, with a 'civilian' agenda, is in a panic after polls show that his campaign for party leader is going nowhere. Today, he accused 'extremists' of dividing the party – not Sharon, the man who actually did the split.

Yisrael Katz, who was an Hanegbi ally since their student days at the Hebrew University, is 'president of the Likud secretariat,' which administers the party, and is running a campaign to expel anyone suspected of sympathies for Sharon and claims he'll emerge the winer as leader of the Likud. His own campaign slogan for leadership of the party appeared on buses all over Tel Aviv this week, saying, 'The Likud against Sharon and the rest of the Left.'

The latest poll, today in Haaretz, shows that Kadima only gets stronger, while the Likud under a Netanyahu leadership – if he is elected -- has moved up slightly to 12 potential Knesset seats from the 9 seats the polls were showing the Likud would get if elections were held last week. Labor meanwhile seems to have been hurt by the Netanya bombing, falling a few seats from 26 last week in the polls to only 22 this week. But the there's not much consistency to the polls and it's still very early days in the campaign.

The conventional wisdom has been that by the time Election Day rolls around on March 28, the three leading parties – Kadima, Labor and Likud – will more or less all be around the 25 Knesset seat mark. We'll see. The same Haaretz poll today says that a third of the public names social issues as the deciding factor in their vote, 20 percent say security, and slightly less than that cite corruption as the main factor in their vote. Kadima (and Likud, of course) is chock full of politicians under suspicion, investigation, indictment, and in the case of the prime minister's own son, Omri, criminal conviction. It will make for an easy target for Labor's Amir Peretz, who is refusing to travel in the Mercedes provided by the Knesset to the head of the opposition, because the car is too fancy for his taste – and image.

Hanegbi was forced to resign as Public Security Ministry late in 2004, when he was first named as the subject of a police probe. Sharon made him minister in charge of the strategic relationship with the U.S. It wasn't a job from which he could give out jobs, but it upgraded his political standing to someone with diplomatic experience. Today, at his press conference, he said that 'the welfare of the state takes precedence over the welfare of the Likud,' and as a result, he decided to join Sharon's party, which the polls now are showing will win as many seats in the next Knesset as the Likud had in the current House. 'What Sharon will do in the next four years won't be done by any national leader in the next thirty years,' he said.

Meanwhile, the defense establishment appears to have decided to use pinpoint prevention, as they refer to the assassination policy used in the past against Hamas leaders such as Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, to fight the Islamic Jihad, which has conducted five suicide bombings in Israel this year, including two at the Netanya mall hit this week. Islamic Jihad leaders in Gaza, the West Bank and even in Damascus are said to have gone underground to hide.

At least until the Palestinian Legislative Council elections on January 25, Israel is constrained by international pressure not to obstruct the Palestinian political process. So, barring some unforeseen major 'mega-terror attack' that changes the strategic balance, there are no expectations for major military moves in the West Bank other than stepped up manhunts for wanted and suspected activists from the rogue Palestinian group that regards itself as the avant garde of the Islamic struggle against the Zionists.

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