Through a window, darkly, Monday, December 12, 2005

Shaul Mofaz’s blatant political opportunism as he fell behind Binyamin Netanyahu in the polls and realized he didn’t have the money – and perhaps the guts – to stick it out in the race for the Likud leadership, so he jumped to Ariel Sharon’s Kadima party, seemed to sicken the mood of the Israeli political press this morning. There was something as blatantly symbolic about the way he had to climb through an internal window to get into his own press conference explaining his move.

Say what you will about Mofaz, was the basic line taken ever since he was made Sharon’s defense minister directly out of the army’s top job as chief of staff, ‘he’s a decent guy.’ Yesterday’s move, however, proved to many an Israeli hearing the news that Mofaz proved ‘he’s just like the rest of them,’ meaning the politicians.

But the real problem demonstrated by the Mofaz move is that while Sharon is destroying the Likud, he’s basically created a new party with the same faces from the old Likud. He can call it Kadima, but it is beginning to look like a lot more of the same. Shimon Peres can talk all he wants about resuming talks with the Palestinians, but ‘until they fight terror’ nothing will happen on that front. As for the economy – there’s a lot of talk of compassion nowadays, Anir Peretz made sure of that – but there won’t be much difference between the next government’s policies and the outgoing one.

There is one small ray of light that may be an indication that Sharon has seen some light: He has made the job of campaign coordinator in the Arab community his own job during the coming campaign. That is a breath of fresh air in the way Zionist political parties have treated Arab voters for decades, making Arab-speaking cronies the campaign bosses for the Arab voters.

Of course, his promises to the Arab voters might be as solid as his promise to Mofaz that the defense minister will remain in his job. Sharon has a long memory – and he is still angry that Mofaz did not come into Kadima right on Sharon’s heels. Omri Sharon has it in for Mofaz back from the days when Mofaz was chief of staff, and didn’t promote a Sharon friend. There are even odds right now that Mofaz will be defense minister in the next government, which all the polls agree will be formed by Sharon, whose personal popularity dominates the entire arena. Of course, once he’s gone, and even Sharon won’t last forever, it’s anybody’s guess how the political cards will fall. Kadima’s people could easily go back to where they all came from, whether the Likud, academia, or even Labor.

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