Today's Situation

Police and politics Wednesday, August 23, 2006

No charges were ever pressed against Weizman, who had the good counsel that made sure he resigned. Kastav continues to deny the allegations against him and continues to deny he had any relationship with the woman who made the charges even though police sources say they have evidence to the contrary. Indeed, Katsav has only himself to blame for his fix -- he prompted a police inquiry when he went to the attorney general with a strange story about a woman who might complain about him and who might have tried to extort something from him.

There are now believed to be at least five candidates to replace Katsav, who if not now, sometime in the near future is expected to resign. The candidates are Kadima MK Shimon Peres (who lost in a secret Knesset ballot to Katsav in 1996), Labor MKs Binyamin Ben-Eliezer and Colette Avital, Likud MK Reuven Rivlin, and former Ashkenazi chief rabbi Yisrael Lau. Peres won't toss his hat officially into the ring unless he is guaranteed victory.

To a large extent the decision is in Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's hands, and it's the last kind of decision that he wants to have to make right now, given the political crisis underway in Israel after Lebanon War II, as it has become known. The protesting reservists are not managing to draw masses, largely because there's no unified message yet -- the protestors can't even agree on whether they are demanding the resignations of Olmert, Peretz and Halutz, and while some insist on a state judicial commission of inquiry, others would be happy with any kind of inquiry to explain why they were sent into battle without enough water or fuel. However, the opposition -- and challengers to the leaderships in both Labor and Kadima -- can smell the blood in the water. Thus, Labor rebels on the Knesset finance committee yesterday blocked a government move to cut NIS 1.8 billion from the budget to help pay for the war, arguing that the across-the-board cut is unnecessary, given some $30 billion in foreign currency reserves, NIS 15 billion in the budget surplus, and a deficit that now appears to be less than one percent of the GDP, far lower than the original goal of the government and Bank of Israel.

Olmert's associates say that he has to get through this month to survive the crisis. He also has to widen his coalition somehow, most likely by finally striking a deal with United Torah Judaism, the Ashkenazi-Haredi party. The Rightist Yisrael Beitenu is demanding as its price for entering the coalition that its leader, Avigdor Lieberman, be given the defense ministry, as if he is any ore experienced than Amir Peretz at national strategizing. Olmert might be ready to pay a lower fee -- minister for trade or industry, for example -- but he is also aware that the anti-Arab Yisrael Beitenu's platform is considered as racist as Le Pen's anti-immigrant platform in France, and with Lieberman in the government, Israel's anyway difficult international position will be only worsened.

As for the presidency, Olmert meanwhile is so far determined to make sure that Rivlin, the voluble Rightist ideologue, does not get the plum but essentially ceremonial post. Rivlin is counting on the Right, the religious (though not necessarily Shas) and a sprinkling of votes from the Left and Arab MKs, who would set aside their political differences with him in favor of personal ties, which Rivlin, to his credit, maintained as a Likud MK and Speaker of the Knesset, across the political spectrum.

Of course, this is all speculation, since Katsav has yet to step down, or, as some MKs are proposing, step aside until the end of the police probe. Meanwhile, the chatter in the current events shows is focused on either why the state even needs a ceremonial president or why the only candidates for the position since the 1980s have been politicians, who rank very low when the public is asked to rank the institutions of the country.

The police at Katsav's door completely overshadowed all the other news today -- the Sinai accident in which at least 10 Israelis (all Arabs) were killed and dozens injured yesterday on the peninsula's coastal road, with the Egyptians, as usual, denying Israeli emergency services from entering Sinai to help evacuate the injured; the international contretemps over Iran's nuclear policy; the ongoing Palestinian failure to form a unity government (though they seem to have put a halt to almost all the Qassam fire in the last week, resurrecting the tahadiye, something barely noticed by the Israeli media); or for that matter, Amnesty International's charge that Israel committed war crimes during Lebanon War II (a separate report from Amnesty about Hizbollah's attacks on Israeli civilians is due later).

The hero of the day was Motti Ashkenazi, the reserve captain who in 1974, right after he was demobilized from the army, went to Jerusalem and started the protest against Golda Meir and Moshe Dayan. He was spotted yesterday at the reservists' protest tent in Jerusalem and immediately became the darling of the press, with most of those interviewing him too young to see the differences between then and now.

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