Today's Situation

Lonely at the top Wednesday, September 20, 2006

Instead, all the attention went to radical Rightist Zvi Handel’s ad hominem attack on Halutz and Halutz’s response. The former Gush Katif leader, who has made no secret of his ambition to see Halutz out of the army because of his role in the evacuation of the settlements of Gaza told the press before the meeting that he would tell Halutz that he can’t bear the sight of Halutz in uniform. Then, inside the meeting, which was supposed to be devoted to a Halutz briefing on the current security situation, Handel repeated the charge. Halutz was quick to respond, saying he would not remove the uniform until it was stripped from him. As for Handel, Halutz said, ‘I’m sure arrangements can be made so our paths don’t cross and you don’t have to see me,’ implying the feelings were mutual.

Peretz, by the way, is being asked wherever he goes if he intends to resign and responds with what seems to be either the self-confidence of a supreme politician who knows what he is doing, or with an utterly oblivious ignorance of how he is being depicted in the press. He has been saying that he intends to remain in office so that when the investigations are over he can ‘lead the restructuring and reformation of the army for the challenges ahead.’

But neither Peretz nor Halutz face what is waiting in store for President Katsav, after a meeting of the leading law enforcement officials in the country -- the attorney general, the state prosecutor, the Jerusalem district attorney, as well as the top police officers conducting the investigations into Katsav’s alleged sexual misconduct. While they did not issue any official statement, press leaks today said that there was a consensus in the meeting that Katsav will face charges, including sexual coercion of subordinates, and possibly rape.

Katsav’s claims that he is the victim of a conspiracy by politicians who don’t want to see him return to the political arena have been scotched by Attorney General Menachem Mazuz, who is shaping up to become the most important political figure in Israel in the coming year. Mazuz has to decide whether Prime Minister Ehud Olmert will be prosecuted on several distinct and separate issues ranging from illegal wholesale political appointments while he was industry minister to yet another mysterious real estate deals that netted Olmert hundreds of thousands in savings and left the seller with strangely inconsistent losses.

With New Year’s beginning at the end of this week, the media is filling with retrospectives of the past year, which has certainly been one of the most tumultuous in Israeli history. Going strictly by the Jewish calendar, the year included Peretz’s surprise victory over Shimon Peres in the Labor party primaries, Ariel Sharon’s decision to smash the ruling Likud party and form Kadima. Polls showed he and his new party would garner upwards of 40 seats in the Knesset, making it as dominant in Israeli politics as Mapai was in the pre-1973 days. But then came Sharon’s stroke, Ehud Olmert’s surprising vault into the premiership, the Hamas election victory in the Palestinian territories, and a much less than anticipated Kadima victory in the Israeli elections two months later, which forced Kadima to partner with Peretz’s Labor. Two months after that, the war with Hizbollah broke out, and now, on the eve of the coming Jewish Year of 5767, the media is full of demands that Olmert, Peretz and Halutz resign for losing a war that is becoming increasingly evident Israel may have won precisely because of its ‘rogue’ use of power when responding to the Lebanese guerilla group’s border incursion and kidnapping of two soldiers.

The one international issue on the platter today is Israel’s campaign to warn the West about Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Sure, there is talk about an Olmert meeting with PA President Mahmoud Abbas after the ‘constructive’ meeting Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni held with Abbas earlier this week. But alongside the lip service to an Israeli-Palestinian rapprochement of some sort is the hard fact that the Israeli, Palestinian and American administrations are all too weak to make the kind of push for political progress that even the Americans seem to now be recognizing might be necessary for the creation of the kind of international coalition to deal with Iran. There is talk about a Madrid style conference that would bring Israel, the Palestinians, Syria and Lebanon -- as well as Egypt, Jordan, perhaps the Saudi Arabians, the U.S., EU and UN to a single table. There is even talk about back channel communications between Israel and Hamas’s radical leader in Damascus, Khaled Mish’al. But there are also reports that the Palestinian national unity government plan has collapsed once again over Hamas resistance to the revived Arab League peace initiative of 2002 (an initiative Israel studiously ignored at the time and has since ignored, even though it is one of the foundations of the roadmap, which Jerusalem always says is the only way forward).

Meanwhile, on the ground, a Negev teenager was wounded this morning by a Qassam rocket and in the West Bank, Israeli troops confiscated what Israel Radio said was tens of millions of shekels in cash from money changers and private banks that allegedly were channeling it for terrorist purposes. If the money is proven not to have been part of a terrorist ‘money train’ it will be returned, said the army.

And with thousands of Thai foreign workers in Israel and thousands of Israeli tourists in Thailand, the military coup in Thailand became this morning one of those rare foreign stories to grab the headlines in both tabloids.

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