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Israeli Elections: What Comes After?

The election campaign winding to a close this week should have been about which party has the best plan to extricate Israel from the current cycle of Palestinian terror and economic decline.
[additional-authors]
January 23, 2003

The election campaign winding to a close this week should
have been about which party has the best plan to extricate Israel from the
current cycle of Palestinian terror and economic decline.

Instead, it focused almost exclusively on sleaze in the
political system and corruption allegations against the leading players,
especially Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

But the core issues aren’t about to go away, and the way the
next government handles the Palestinian dilemma will determine the reality
Israelis will live with for years to come.

Polls show that most of the public seems to prefer Labor
Party Chairman Amram Mitzna’s ideas for separation from the Palestinians as the
key to security and economic regeneration — but they don’t really trust Mitzna
to do it.

With substance largely shunted aside, the campaign has
boiled down to a choice between youth and experience. Mitzna, the political
neophyte, is facing Sharon the seasoned campaigner, who may be tainted by
scandal but who has proven himself capable of steering the state. Given Israel’s
recent experience with novices who swept into office with big ideas but who
accomplished little, voters are leaning toward the Likud Party and Sharon, the
father figure who projects a more reassuring and protective image.

The irony, pundits have noted, is that the public seems to
want a right-of-center prime minister — to carry out left-wing policies.

With the Jan. 28 vote only days away, Sharon, 74, seems
virtually assured of a second term, and pundits already are asking what he
intends to do differently this time around. The word from his inner circle is
that this time Sharon is determined to make peace with the Palestinians. He
wants to go down in history, they say, as an “Israeli de Gaulle” — a general
who, in the twilight of his career, made peace with the people he had spent
most of his life fighting.

Aides say that’s why Sharon so wants Labor in his coalition.
And, they say, that’s why he has set up a team under Dan Meridor that has begun
secret talks with Palestinian leaders — aside from Palestinian Authority
President Yasser Arafat, whom Sharon continues to shun.

Such whispers have right-wingers so worried that settler
leaders like Elyakim Haetzni are calling on the Likud to dump Sharon, “the new
leftist,” and replace him with Benjamin Netanyahu, who is seen as more hawkish.

But there is a rival theory on the left. Despite the fact
that the campaign has been short on substance, left-wing pundits see the new
peace talk from the Sharon camp as a late pitch to voters. The aim, these
skeptics say, is to win over floating centrist voters and, after the election,
entice Labor to join his coalition.

Yet these skeptics argue that Sharon is congenitally
incapable of making peace: He is too attached to the settlements he helped
found, and his truncated vision of Palestinian statehood will find few takers
on the other side, they said.

“Sharon,” one pundit wrote, “is incapable, psychologically
and politically, of even starting negotiations.”

Whether Sharon has adopted peacemaking as a strategy, or whether
he merely talks of it to buy time and make political gains, could prove to be
the most important question in the election aftermath. And Sharon could be put
to the test very soon, depending on events in the Persian Gulf.

Much will depend on what happens after the anticipated
American-led war on Iraq. Top U.S. officials are intimating that one of the
first orders of business in the post-Saddam era will be a serious U.S.-led
attempt to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Deputy Defense Secretary
Paul Wolfowitz suggested that after Iraq, the United States quickly will turn
its attention to curbing Israeli settlement activity. Secretary of State Colin
Powell said the United States intends to push ahead vigorously with a peace
“road map” — which calls for full Palestinian statehood within three years —
being developed by the diplomatic “Quartet” of the United States, United
Nations, European Union and Russia.

In Israel, opinion is divided on how much effort the Bush
administration will be prepared to invest on the Israeli-Palestinian track. On
the left, Danny Yatom, a former Mossad chief and key policy adviser to former
Prime Minister Ehud Barak, is convinced that the United States will achieve its
goals in Iraq and then exploit the favorable regional conditions to force
through an Israeli-Palestinian agreement.

“I think the Americans will be far firmer with the parties
and won’t allow them to drag their feet,” he said, adding, the United States
might even try to impose a solution on the two sides.

On the right, Uzi Arad, a former deputy Mossad chief and top
policy adviser to Netanyahu, argues that the situation is far more complex. The
Americans will have so many other things on their plate in the post-Saddam era
that they will only turn to the Israeli-Palestinian issue if and when they
think the parties are ready, Arad said. In this view, the Bush administration
will put its resources and prestige on the line only “if they identify tangible
chances of success” — and that, Arad noted, could be a long way off.

How Sharon responds to a new American initiative, and
whether the Americans view the situation optimistically, will depend to a great
extent on the coalition Sharon is able to put together.

A narrow coalition with right-wing and religious parties
would effectively prohibit peace moves. And unless Labor relents and joins a
unity government — or Shinui relents and agrees to sit with the fervently
Orthodox — a narrow, right wing-religious coalition is all Sharon would have.

Partly to pave the way for a national unity government, a
handful of Mitzna’s opponents within Labor have been pressing to replace him
with Shimon Peres as the party’s prime ministerial candidate. That comes after
a poll in Monday’s Ma’ariv newspaper predicted that Labor would win another 10
seats — and possibly take the election — if the more experienced Peres were
party leader.

A switch at this late hour is unlikely, especially since
Peres said he backs Mitzna. But pundits see the affair as the first attempt by
other Laborites to erode Mitzna’s standing after the election and chip away at
his refusal to enter a national unity government.

If Labor does go in, Sharon may come through as the
peacemaker his aides say he wants to be. If not, he and Israel may have to wait
until the election after this one — when someone other than Sharon might become
prime minister.

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