Fat fundo, Ariel Sharon looks like he’s headed for re-election in the coming elections. My view is that this is a blight on the Israeli public who have voted this madman into office despite his poor record, controversial policy of encouraging illegal Israeli settlements, and not to mention his past record of butchering civilians.
What a stain on decent jews everywhere that so many Isralis have voted for this beached whale excuse for a politician.
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http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,170-556523,00.html
January 27, 2003
Sharon to pull triumph out of disaster
Commentary by Jeff Barak
THE question hanging over tomorrow’s election in Israel is not who will win but why a scandal-ridden 74-year-old Prime Minister with so little to show for his two years in office looks likely not just to win but to cruise to victory.
Ariel Sharon’s record as Prime Minister is disastrous. On the security front, more Israelis have been killed in terror attacks over the past two years than ever before, while domestically the economy has notched up its worst performance since 1953. Unemployment is over 10 per cent and climbing, and inflation is at 6 per cent. No recovery, economic or diplomatic, is in sight.
On top of that, Mr Sharon is enmeshed in a personal scandal over a £1 million loan he took from a British businessman, Cyril Kern, to pay off election campaign contributions that had been ruled illegal; his two sons have been named in separate scandals involving Mr Sharon’s right-wing Likud Party; and the party itself has been tainted by allegations of bribery during its internal primary campaign.
As Israeli political commentators are fond of saying, in any normal country no such candidate would have a chance of victory. Yet come polling day, Mr Sharon’s return to the Prime Minister’s office seems guaranteed.
The latest opinion polls show Likud winning 31 seats in the 120-seat Knesset, allowing them to establish a 65 or 66-member governing coalition, made up of Likud, the more right-wing National Union and Yisrael B’Aliyah parties, and the country’s three religious parties: Shas, United Torah Judaism and the National Religious Party.
Labour, meanwhile, has sunk in one poll to only 19 seats (from 26 today) and the internal fratricide that has always been a hallmark of Labour Party politics has again risen to the fore, with calls to replace Amram Mitzna, the party leader (who has been in the job for all of four months) with the indefatigable Shimon Peres, who is 79. This call is yet more proof of the short-term memory endemic in Israeli politics: when Mr Peres was Labour’s leader, he lost four successive general elections and a fifth in 1996 after Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination.
Indeed, it seems as if Mr Mitzna has given up hope for this election and is setting out his stall for the next time round, assuming of course, that his Labour colleagues refrain from stabbing him in the back in the meantime. Given that, for most of Mr Sharon’s premiership, Labour held both the defence and foreign portfolios, Labour is denied the normal opposition tactic of attacking the sitting government’s record, and so Mr Mitzna has set out a radical agenda.
He advocates a unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip within a year, and negotiations with Yassir Arafat, the Palestinian Authority leader, from the point at which they were left off in Taba two years ago. If the negotiations fail Mr Mitzna, like Mr Sharon a former Israeli army general, advocates a unilateral withdrawal from the West Bank as well. Unfortunately for the Labour leader, most Israelis see this as out-and-out defeatism, and Labour is down to its core support. The centrist, floating voter is not prepared to reward Mr Arafat for 28 months of terror and prefers to dig in and wait for better days.
Mr Mitzna hammered the nail into his electoral coffin when he announced recently that he would not take Labour into a national unity government under Mr Sharon. This means that the floating voter, who actually does want a national unity government in the face of Palestinian terrorism, as opposed to a narrow, right-wing-religious coalition, has no choice but to vote either for Likud, so as to make Mr Sharon’s leverage as powerful as possible over the smaller, right-wing parties, or to cast their ballot, as a protest vote, for this election’s rising star, Shinui.
Shinui’s main campaign platform is opposition to religious coercion — there is no civil marriage in Israel and Orthodox Judaism has a state monopoly on religious affairs — and lower taxes for the middle classes. Its policies concerning relations with the Palestinians are vague and seem to depend on whichever Shinui member one talks to. Shinui is predicted to jump from six seats in the Knesset to 16, mostly at the expense of Labour.
Mr Sharon, meanwhile, has played the few cards he has superbly. Building on a basic Israeli desire for peace coupled with intense distrust of Mr Arafat, he has continued to insist that when the time is ripe, ie, after Mr Arafat’s disappearance from the scene, he will consider “painful compromises”. In the meantime, any talk of unilateral withdrawal is sheer defeatism. His call for national unity, particularly when Israel faces the uncertain fallout of a possible war in the Gulf, also resonates among an Israeli electorate who instinctively feel that now is a time for rallying around the flag.
As for the scandals, Mr Sharon simply accuses the press and the “left-wing establishment” in Israel of being out to get him, and his supporters are happy to believe him.
