Dec 26 1998

"The center does not hold," wrote W.B. Yeats early in the outgoing century and here it's either nowhere to be found or everywhere -- maybe because just like the polls so weirdly showing 70 percent of the Americans like Clinton despite his lies, 70 percent of Israelis (and Palestinians) still want peace, despite Bibi's lies.

One reason for the search for the center is the way nearly 20 years of Likud rule has turned the term "left' into a curse. Curiously, Labor, the so-called socialist party, started making privatization a policy back in the days of Yitzhak Rabin's first premiership, just before the Likud formally brought Milton Friedman, and went through five finance ministers in less than six years, jerking us all around. Left, right -- it stopped meaning anything quite a while ago.

What does matter, however, is compassion. When Bibi attacks his opponents, wherever they are, he basically accuses them of being the Israeli equivalent of "bleeding heart liberals" which is kind of difficult to pin as a label on a general -- any general. Even Mati Peled, who was one of the 13 generals in the Israeli army in June 1967, and within a couple of years was promoting a Palestinian state as the only option, was tough. he had to be, to put up with all the venom that was aimed at him in those years when even suggesting talking with the PLO was considered immoral (and vice versa, if you were a Palestinian).

If they were kids in school, Bibi would be the bully, Barak the adventurer who gets others to join in, and Amnon the natural athlete popular with both the other kids and the teachers. It's clear that at a certain point, Barak and Bibi would clash, and it's just as clear that Amnon would step in to save Barak, if necessary.

Dan Meridor, by the way, the teacher's pet, used to believe that the U.S. owed Israel tens of billions of dollars because Israel blocked the Suez Canal during the Vietnam War, and that it helped the American war effort in Asia. Yes, he is a decent man, but he was brought up in the very odd environment of the revisionist wing of Zionism, which for all the formalistic decency represented by Menachem Begin at his most Polish, also takes pride in its ruthlessness and views the world through a national-centric lens that easily distorts reality.

And that's what must be purged from Israel in this campaign -- the messianic fundamentalist nationalistic supremacism that has imbued Israeli politics since 1967/8, when Moshe Levinger went from Talbiyeh mental institution to the Park Hotel in Hebron, forcing the Israeli government to assume the proposition that God, not the IDF, won the Six Day War.

Everyone wants to say they want Bibi out because he has no center of his own, no beliefs of his own, that he lied to everyone, making him an impossible person to send to a negotiation. I say no. The reason to have him out is because he really believes in "rocks of existence" and worse, that only he knows how to interpret their silent speeches.