Ariel Sharon, Victorious Centrist
PODHORETZ, JOHN
Ariel Sharon, Victorious Centrist Who woulda thunk it? BY JOHN PODHORETZ Jerusalem THERE'S A SONG that's sung I around the bonfire at every Jewish summer camp called Hinei Ma Tov. Its lyrics are...
...Five years ago, it would have seemed absurd to think that the most controversial man in Israel's political history could ever achieve a landslide of this magnitude...
...Otherwise, the size of Sharon's victory was astounding to his supporters and his foes alike...
...War in Iraq could embolden Yasser Arafat and others to unleash a terror barrage on Israel (not to mention Saddam and his Scuds...
...In other words, Sharon first appeared before his own party and then before the Israeli people in successive campaigns as a believer in Palestinian statehood...
...The problem is that it will be almost impossible to run a government with both Shinui and Shas in it, for obvious reasons...
...We want equal rights for equal duties for all citizens...
...Sharon will then have cause to sing about how happy and pleasant it is for brethren to join in unity...
...Sharon already had his chance to form such a government last fall when the Labor party pulled out of his unity government (in a move so stupid it deserves to be classed with the Paul Wellstone funeral in the annals of self-inflicted political wounds...
...The government he wants to form is a government of the center...
...Opponents like these make ^ft Shinui's Lapid sound almost like an Israeli Ward Connerly...
...tM Only he's denouncing religious ^H instead of race preferences: "We are not against . . . reli-^H gious Jews...
...Still others believe the annexation of the territories taken in the Six Day War of 1967 is necessary because there will never be a time when an Israeli deal with Arab leaders will lead to anything but more Jewish bloodshed...
...Sharon and Likud got twice the votes of its nearest competitor...
...He wants Shinui especially, because Shinui's views on the Palestinians dovetail most closely with his...
...Likud and the Right Bloc together would have an eight-seat advantage, a very comfortable margin by Israeli standards...
...The rightist position is no statehood at all...
...But in truth, the religious parties shinui opposes play a role in Israeli politics more akin to Al sharpton than Ralph Reed...
...Add in the reformist Yisrael b'Aliya party run by Natan Sharansky, and you have 54 seats...
...How better to achieve this aim than by making common cause with his own natural allies in Israel...
...Instead, he repeated them on several occasions...
...Nobody else will be singing Hinei Ma To'v along with him, but that's Israel for you...
...Last week, Shinui rose and Shas fell...
...The danger will create emergency conditions under which all major parties will be invited to join the government as a display of unity...
...No matter their feelings about Sharon, they will have to accept...
...Thus, Sharon's ambitions are leading him to court not the rejectionist Right, but the dovish Left...
...The views of the European intelligentsia are entirely congruent with those of the most radical elements in the Muslim world on the subject of Israel's prime minister...
...For saying this, Sharon was immediately attacked within Likud by his chief rival, former prime minister Bibi Netanyahu...
...Some on the Israeli right believe Israel's sovereignty over the West Bank and Gaza is ordained by God...
...From the earliest days of Israel, they have demanded and received preferential treatment for their constituents from the government, including exemption from military service...
...The identity is North African...
...Ifl As if In the Israeli elections last week, voters had to choose from H 16 parties...
...But the rhetorical broadsides John Podhoretz is a columnist for the New York Post and a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...Sharon's single failure in this election was his inability to bring more Shas voters to his side...
...The once-cohesive Israeli H Left has fractured into four parties While you could call the ™ political debate refreshingly combative and freewheeling, that's just a polite way of saying slanderous...
...Israel is still a nation at war, and may soon face its greatest threat in decades...
...He will not cede the entire West Bank to the Palestinians...
...First, he believed he could strengthen Likud's position...
...Its lyrics are taken from Psalm 133: "Behold how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell in unity...
...There's one problem with this portrait of Sharon: Aside from its libelous and anti-Semitic overtones, it gets the man entirely wrong...
...But Shinui and Likud together have only 52 seats...
...Its 1996 campaign slogan was "shas: It's not a platform, it's an identity...
...He is not an unconditional supporter of the idea...
...This is what you might call the centrist position on statehood...
...We are against the exploitation of religion for money and power...
...Others believe a "Greater Israel" is the logical fulfillment of the Zionist dream—that it's the manifest destiny of the Jewish people to establish dominion over all the land west of the Jordan River...
...Outside of Israel, the reality still seems inconceivable...
...There are H Arab Israeli parties...
...One member of a haredi party declared that Tommy Lapid, the head of the aggressively secular party shinui, "wants to turn us all into ash...
...This would be repulsively rough if it were said about anybody...
...Rav Ovadia said the victims of the Holocaust were recipients of God's justice...
...He compared leftist politician Yos-^H si Sarid to Haman, the Hitler-^H hke figure in the Book of Esther...
...In a country with 4.7 H million eligible voters, those H parties slice the ideological and M demographic pie astonishingly H thin...
...Should they annoy each other too greatly, one will pull out and the government will fall...
...The easiest way for him to fight off Bibi would have been to go back on his words about a Palestinian state...
...Its representation in the Knesset soared from 6 to 15 seats...
...He is doing everything he can to compel the Labor party, which is a shell of its former self at a mere 19 seats, to join with him again in a unity government...
...Such a government would unite Sharon's Likud with everybody in Israel who opposes the creation of a Palestinian state...
...Anti-Semites think Jews form a monolithic conspiracy...
...Shas lost 6 of its 17 seats, and would have lost more were it not for a crass and complicated vote-buying scandal that beset Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's Likud party...
...Their hatred of Sharon borders on the pathological—perhaps because they understand that he may be on the verge of usurping their signature issue and entering the history books as the Israeli prime minister who brought about the creation of a Palestinian state...
...He will not move on it until Yasser Arafat is deposed and until there are democratic reforms in the Palestinian Authority...
...And he will not give up an inch of Jerusalem...
...shinui's strong showing was one of the many surprises of this surprising election...
...exchanged between Lapid and the haredim are so frequent that the story was considered nothing special here...
...Two parties H rose out of the emigration from H the Soviet Union in the early H 1990s...
...After all, his enemies believe Sharon's goal in life is the destruction of Palestinian aspirations...
...He will not permit the new state to have a military...
...Thus, the sharpton-like statement of shas campaign manager Itzik sudri in the Jerusalem Post before the election: "Only a strong and powerful shas can curb the blatant white aggression...
...Forget Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong Il: If you had to name the most reviled leader in the world today, the winner hands-down would be Ariel Sharon...
...Sharon needs another 7 at minimum to form a government...
...He wishes to subjugate Palestinians, to steal their land, to humiliate them and, for good measure, eliminate them from the face of the earth...
...Rav Ovadia, as he's known, is now nothing more or less than the Louis Farrakhan of Israel—only he casts the Ashkenazi Jews of European origin in the role of "white devil...
...The black-nationalist analogy becomes even clearer in the case of the shas party, whose appeal is explicitly tied both to religious and ethnic resentment...
...Second, he believed that the electoral results would serve as a referendum on his conduct as prime minister—and on his startling acknowledgment last year that a Palestinian state was inevitable and was something he could live with...
...Sharon gambled that his views on this matter reflected Israeli public opinion more profoundly than any other view, and he gambled correctly...
...There are several parties for haredim, the ultra-religious H Jews known colloquially in Eng- H lish as "black hats...
...The demonic Sharon of European and Muslim fantasy would go for such an ingathering of the right in a heartbeat...
...American conservatives, who have fought anti-religious bigotry on the part of the press and the elites for decades, might be inclined to think shinui is an Israeli version of People for the American Way...
...The leftist position is statehood almost without conditions...
...considering that Lapid is a Holocaust survivor, it was beyond imagining...
...Maybe Jews love the song so much because they know so little unity in reality...
...He chose new elections instead, for two reasons...
...Sharon is a Nazi, a genocidal maniac, a war criminal of limitless culpability...
...Overall, the election results have given him the option of forming a new parliamentary majority with parties of the Right alone...
...The other religious parties pose a similar coalition problem...
...shas voters tend to be darker-skinned Jews of North African descent who feel that they are treated like second-class citizens by lighter-skinned Jews of European descent...
...shas is under the control of Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, who was once the chief Sephardic rabbi of Israel...
...Sharon found himself in a surprisingly difficult battle to maintain his chairmanship of the party...
...Sharon could simply have added a right-wing party called National Union to the mix to keep his government going a few months ago...
...Most of the leaders of Labor don't want to join his government...
...Sharon has it within his power to create a government that would only heighten Europe's lurid fantasies about him...
...Likud received 400,000 more votes than it had in parliamentary elections four years ago, and doubled the number of seats it will hold in the Knesset from 19 to 38...
Vol. 8 • February 2003 • No. 21
