Today's Situation

Six days, Wednesday, March 22, 2006

But the almost daily polling now, with the subtle discrepancies between each poll -- and margins of error that make all the numbers somewhat fudgy -- is really all about the inertia built into the political campaign, and the media’s need to create interest in the campaign, not the result of dramatic shifts in public opinion. At most, the polls are being used by the politicians to do their private calculations about possible coalitions -- and whether they will have enough strength to demand a ‘senior’ portfolio.

There’s a lot of chatter today about Avigdor Lieberman as the real victor of the campaign. He began with fewer than five seats in the polls and is now pulling in 10 seats and more. His campaign strategist, Arthur Finkelstein, is convinced that Lieberman could end the race with 15 seats -- positioning him to merge his Yisrael Beitenu party with the Likud and assuming leadership of the former ruling party.

It’s not clear that would mean Lieberman would end up minister of public security, the ministry he wants to undertake a campaign ‘to clean up’ the judicial system and the law enforcement system in Israel, which he feels has been persecuting him for years. But it is clear that if Kadima keeps slipping, acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert will face difficulties forming a coalition, especially if he decides, as many are predicting, to try to balance his government between Left and Right, between Labor and Yisrael Beitenu. In the Likud, meanwhile, Netanyahu’s failure to lift Likud polling has opened a breach between him and the number two in the party, former foreign minister Silvan Shalom. Netanyahu announced last week he would not join a Kadima-led government. Shalom announced today that he does not rule out Likud joining a Kadima government. Netanyahu’s latest ploys to win votes have included attacks on the media and the ‘elites,’ as ‘Leftists out to get me,’ and an apology to nearly a million Israelis who were forced by Netanyahu economic policies into the status of ‘working poor,’ meaning people with jobs whose earnings don’t lift them over the poverty line.

Israelis were given a momentary view yesterday of the fragility of the ceasefire with the Palestinians -- and how some Palestinians at least are trying to disrupt, or influence, the elections. A suicide bomber carrying a particularly large bomb was captured in a van carrying illegal workers from the territories to Israel yesterday morning, right off the Jerusalem-Tel Aviv highway, half an hour away from the metropolitan center of the country. The man was in the employ of Islamic Jihad, which was responsible for almost all the terrorist attacks last year inside Israel.

According to Israeli intelligence, Iran is funneling millions of dollars to the Islamic Jihad, which has refused to join the pan-Palestinian ceasefire hammered out in Cairo in August 2004. According to press reports today, there are at least 13 hard information terror alerts in a state of play ahead of the elections. Israeli security forces are on relatively high alert and will remain so through the elections next week. Adding to the tension today was a report that two West Bankers have been charged in a military court with planning a terror attack on behalf of al Qaida, while in Jericho, an Islamic Jihad man was killed by Israeli troops when he resisted arrest.

Meanwhile, in Gaza, Eyptian trucks were carrying humanitarian aid into Gaza through the Kerem Shalom crossing, while as many as two hundred Israeli trucks were delivering similar goods to Gaza via the Karni crossing. Meanwhile, the traffic at the two crossings is one-way into Gaza, not allowing anything out of Gaza. And that has begun to have an impact on Israel’s textile industry which counts on sewing shops in Gaza for the production of clothing.

There was a demonstration yesterday of a few dozen textile company owners in Tel Aviv, demanding that the government take action to enable their companies to survive, whether by enabling Gazans to export the finished products -- or subsidizing Israeli workers who refuse to do the low-paying work as mass production seamstresses.

While Olmert was able to override security concerns, to enable humanitarian aid into Gaza, he has to be careful about an open clash with Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz, who is much less flexible when it comes to security than Olmert proved to be this week when he ordered Karni opened.

In Ramallah, the PLO executive was due to meet, to discuss the Hamas government guidelines as proposed by prime minister-designate Ismail Haniyeh. It was not at all certain that the PLO committee would approve the guidelines, said Israel Radio, because the guidelines do not recognize the authority of the PLO. Indeed, neither Hamas nor Islamic Jihad belong to the PLO, which is headed by PA President Mahmoud Abbas, and at least according to the Oslo accords is the designated body to negotiate peace terms with Israel. The executive committee is expected to send Haniyeh back to the drawing board. But there are no expectations for an outright clash between Hamas and the PLO -- a few more days of ‘ping-pong,’ with Haniyeh making some adjustments to the guidelines and the PLO will approve the Hamas government. Most likely, it will only happen after the Israeli elections, seems to be the conventional wisdom among Israeli commentators on Palestinian affairs.

No political party in Israel is campaigning nowadays on a platform calling for peace negotiations with the Palestinians. The Israeli public’s mood on the eve of these elections is to keep the Palestinians out of sight and out of mind. Indeed, that’s the reasoning behind the separation/security fence/wall, as well as the so-called ‘convergence’ plan, Ehud Olmert’s program for shutting down the settlements on the eastern side of the fence, moving their populations into the so-called ‘large settlement blocs’ at Ariel, Gush Etzion, and Maale Adumim. But Olmert’s plan is entirely contingent on international approval of the new ‘final borders’ he is promising to shape for Israel, and it is not at all clear that such international support will be forthcoming. But that’s all in the future, some time past March 28th, Election Day next week.

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