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And a new dawn is breaking
By Robert Rosenberg
November 2, 2002
(An Ariga Update Message)

When Ehud Barak defined the odds and beat Bibi in 1999, he went to Rabin Plaza a few hours after the returns showed he had won by a landslide (after starting the race more than 30 percentage points behind Netanyahu), just before dawn, and promised an ecstatic crowd that was shouting "just not Shas" (the ultra-Orthodox Sephardi party) "that "a new dawn has broken over Israel."

Barak had the chance to pick up where Yitzhak Rabin had been stopped -- "making peace as if there was no terrorism and fighting terrorism as if there was no peace process." But Barak didn't listen to his own voters and chose to bring Shas into the coalition, and didn't pick up where Rabin had been stopped, with the Arab parties as part of the coalition.

Barak was said to be the most courageous of Israel's soldiers, but he was a coward when it came to politics -- largely because like most generals who go directly into politics, he thought that an order was enough to get things done, and that he could order not only his party, and the Israeli public, and Arafat, and Bill Clinton, and ultimately, even history itself, to bend to his will. So, when none of those soldiers responded to Barak's orders, he panicked. He walked away from a peace deal with Syria because of 100 meters of Kinneret beachfront the Syrians wanted back (denying us Israelis the chance to drive from Israel to Europe). He never showed maps to Arafat making tangible what he meant by his "generous" ""offer of "everything" at Camp David, which turned out not to be "everything," even thought it was a generous offer.

He also backed down, lest he be charged witch being unpatriotic, when Arik Sharon decided to prove he was more macho than Bibi Netanyahu and decided he would visit the Temple Mount to prove it was Israeli and Israeli alone (despite the existence of a mosque there for the last 1,000 years), and he obeyed the police instead of ordering them to cease their rioting, in October 2000, when Israeli Arabs protested that seven people were shot dead during riots at the Temple Mount that broke out to protest Sharon's visit.

And when Israel and the Palestinians were a hairs breadth away from a deal at Taba, Barak didn't say yes, this is the deal, and go to the public with it in the last days of his election campaign (by which time Sharon was way ahead of him in the polls, so Barak had nothing to lose) and say 'here, we can make peace and end the killing.' Instead he announced that since Taba was never completed, it was null and void, and sold the public the message 'there's no partner.'

The 'new dawn' Barak had promised became first a surrealistic twilight under him, and then a long night of 'national unity,' under Sharon, who sold the lokshen that he was the only person who could bring peace and security just like the lokshen he sold about a limited 40-kilometer operation that turned into an 18-year war.

But the darkness has not so much been Sharon's leadership, as bad as that has been. The darkness has been the 'national unity government' that castrated the opposition, beheaded the peace camp, and turned so much of Israel into the rhinos of Ionesco's play, a herd running directionless, everyone thinking the same.

Now, that will change. A ray of light began to glimmer when the Labor Party, no matter what the reason, pulled out of Sharon's government. It will brighten on November 19, when the Labor will vote Benjamin Ben-Eliezer out of the chairmanship of the party, to be replaced by either Haim Ramon or Amram Mitzna. I prefer Mitzna, who will need Ramon as an attack dog, because Mitzna will bring a fresh voice of decency to Israeli politics, which has been taken over by a cynicism that is difficult to describe without sounding like an evangelist preacher sermonizing about the hell and damnation awaiting sinners. To find out why I prefer Mitzna, click here.

There are those who are worried that Sharon's government will be in thrall to the extreme right. They are right, it will be. Netanyahu might become its international spokesman. Jewish supremacist Benny Elon, the head of the Moledet party which calls for non-Jews to be expelled from county called the new Shaorn government 'the dream team.' In the short term, it will be hellish. In the long term, however, the essential charlatanism of the mystic-nationalist right will become ever more apparent as the Israeli economy disintegrates under the burden of the settlements and the handouts to the ever increasing number of people impoverished by the war government, and the war goes on to protect those settlements, which are the most anti-Zionist movement in the history of the state of Israel.

Remember this -- the polls say over and over again that 70 percent of the Likud's voters (as opposed to its politicians) want the funding of settlement stopped and an end to the subsidies for anyone who claims to be a yeshiva student. That may yet turn out to be the most important number the pollsters reveal until the voters of Israel go to the ballot boxes and the only poll that really matters, takes place.

Robert Rosenberg

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