Friday, Aug 29, 2008
Ariel Sharon's split with the Likud, and the rise of Labor leader Amir Peretz, have turned Israeli politics upside down. Will the new order help bring peace with the Palestinians?
Photo by AP Photo/Kevin Frayer
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon
Nov 22, 2005 | Israel has entered one of the stormiest political seasons in its history, even by the standards of its fractured, tempestuous governing structure. On Monday, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon announced his departure from the ruling Likud Party, returned his membership card and called for an early general election, perhaps in March. Widely described by Jerusalem's political pundits as "an earthquake," Sharon's move is redrawing the country's political map.
In an unprecedented development, Israelis will have to pick their next leadership from among three contending parties: Sharon's new and yet nameless party; Labor, led by newcomer Amir Peretz, Israel's trade union boss; and the incumbent Likud, where no less than seven candidates aspire to head the party, with former premier Binyamin ("Bibi") Netanyahu leading the pack. Recent polls have given the edge to the popular Sharon, but the race has just begun, and Israeli election campaigns are notorious roller coasters, with the new, three-way race creating even more uncertainty.
For Sharon, launching the new party may be the biggest gamble in a lifetime filled with them. Known throughout his career for daring -- and sometimes reckless -- moves, he is facing a considerable challenge. Sharon, who turns 78 next February, has said his goal is to "serve until 2010, and then retire to my farm to ride the horses." Such pastoral retirement, however, so common to American political life, has proved impossible in Israel. None of Sharon's 10 predecessors has left his job peacefully. Two died while in office, and the other eight were forced out by an angry party or public. Moreover, all previous attempts to create a "third party" in Israel, despite high expectations at the start, ended up faring miserably at the polling booth. Even David Ben-Gurion, the Jewish state's legendary founding father and Sharon's old mentor, failed in his attempt to return to power by creating his own party in the mid-'60s.
Monday's announcement was an aftershock of Sharon's disengagement plan, Israel's unilateral pullout of its settlers and forces from the Gaza Strip and the northern West Bank, carried out last summer. The unprecedented removal of 25 Jewish settlements from Palestinian-populated areas tore apart the Likud, which historically supported the "Greater Israel" concept and sponsored the settlement enterprise in the territories occupied after the 1967 war. Using his consummate political skill, Sharon managed to escort his plan through numerous political minefields, winning parliamentary approval last year and then implementing the withdrawal in a dignified, nonviolent way. Nevertheless, he faced a determined group of so-called rebels, 10 to 15 of the Likud's 40-member parliamentary faction, who were enraged at Sharon's betrayal of the party's ideology and vowed to fight him. Forming an opposition within the coalition, the "rebels" turned Sharon's political reality into a nightmare.
As the disengagement timetable reached its final stages, Sharon's political advisors concluded that his party had become an uncontrollable beast. And they predicted that the Likud parliamentary faction in the next elections would be even more right-wing and would reject any further withdrawal in the West Bank. Sharon hesitated. He was torn between his desire, backed by his public pledge, to push through another pullout and establish a Palestinian state, and his political dependence on the Likud's organizational power.
Although Sharon created the Likud Party by uniting a host of smaller right-wing factions following his retirement from the army in 1973, he has always been an outsider in the party. He is a pragmatist and a realist in a movement shaped by ideology. His public support for Palestinian statehood in September 2001, and his subsequent dismantling of the Gaza and a few West Bank settlements, was heresy for party loyalists. But they grudgingly accepted his leadership, given his track record of electoral landslides. Now he has destroyed his own political creation, just as he destroyed the settlements he built in the '70s and '80s.
Sharon's new route was suggested by two veteran politicians, Labor's Haim Ramon and Likud's Ehud Olmert, currently the finance minister. Both disliked in their respective parties, they argued for redrawing Israel's political map according to the new realities created during the five-year war with the Palestinians. Both asserted that Israel's imperative interest was to redraw its borders along demographic lines and to consolidate its shrinking Jewish majority on a smaller territory, even if no peace treaty was finalized with the Palestinians. Ramon coined the name "Big Bang" for a new party, composed of like-minded figures from the political center and united behind Sharon's popular leadership. Olmert and Ramon were among the first to join Sharon's new party on Monday, along with a group of Likud ministers and Knesset members, who were formerly the moderate group within the ruling party.
Throughout the summer, Sharon seriously considered the idea. Visiting New York for the U.N. General Assembly in September, he met potential donors and longtime backers from the American Jewish community. But when Netanyahu called a showdown at the Likud central committee, aiming to force Sharon into an early primary contest, the prime minister narrowly defeated him, and it appeared that Sharon would be able to stay in office until the originally scheduled Election Day in November 2006, and maintain his coalition with the Labor Party. Under Shimon Peres, the 82-year-old vice premier, Labor had turned into a Sharon cheerleading troupe. Once an architect of compromise with the Palestinians and a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Peres came to believe that the public had rejected leftist ideas and that supporting Sharon's moves "from within" was the best way to influence policy. Acquaintances for over 50 years, alternately partners and rivals, Peres and Sharon are the elder statesmen of Israeli politics, who between them have seen and done everything.
Their idyllic partnership was shattered, however, on Nov. 9, when Peres -- who during his long career has lost almost every important political contest -- failed again in the Labor primary. The victory of Peretz, his challenger, marked a turning point in Israeli politics. His advent not only marked a generational change -- Peretz is 29 years younger than the ousted Peres -- but also a new agenda. The Labor Party, which had led and built Israel from its pre-state days until 1977, lost its prominence and in recent years appeared as a dying relic of a glorious past. Its failure to achieve peace with the Palestinians through the Oslo agreements and the ill-fated 2000 Camp David summit, which led to the Palestinian uprising, or intifada, was the final nail in its coffin. With Peretz's victory, the political corpse revived itself almost overnight.
Best known to Israelis for his trademark mustache, Amir Peretz has been a presence in political life for over two decades. In recent years, as the trade union leader, he fought against Netanyahu's Thatcherite policies at the treasury. Arriving from Morocco with his family as a child, Peretz grew up in Sderot, a small "developing town" (a euphemism for poverty and underdevelopment) in the Israeli south several miles from Gaza. But unlike most people with his background, he joined Labor rather than the Likud. And since he first appeared on the political landscape, as the mayor of Sderot in the '80s, Peretz argued that the Likud government's obsession with the settlers in the West Bank and Gaza came at the expense of the poor within Israel proper. Although most of his neighbors ignored his call and kept voting Likud, he rose to national prominence through the trade union federation, the Histadrut, once a pillar of Israel's economy and currently the representative of the unionized public sector.
Immediately after winning the primary, albeit by a small margin, Peretz set out to revolutionize the party and the political system. In less than two weeks, he pulled Labor out of Sharon's coalition -- arguing that such "national unity governments" are anathema for democracy -- and forced Sharon to make up his mind, split the Likud and call an early election. For the first time in five years, Labor appears to be a serious political contender, especially given the breakup of its decades-long rival. This is no small achievement for someone who has just risen from the second tier of the nation's political leadership.
Get Salon in your mailbox!
