|
Israel Decides: Netanyahu rising By Martin Sieff 2/14/2003 UPI Senior News Analyst From the International Desk 2/14/2003 WASHINGTON, Feb. 14 (UPI) -- (UPI looks at Israeli politics after Ariel Sharon's January landslide victory. This is the fifth of six parts.) For a man who was whipped only two months ago in his bid to regain the leadership of Israel's ruling Likud Party, Foreign Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is smiling a lot these days. And he has very good reason to. The bad news for Netanyahu, Israel's prime minister from 1996 to 1999, is that when he went up against current Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in their party's leadership contest in December, he was hammered into a 16-point defeat, 57 percent to 41 percent. The good news for him is that within a week of that apparent humiliation, he had regained all the ground he had lost within the party, and then some. For when the Likud Central Committee of 3,000 members voted the following week on who should be on its list of candidates for Knesset, or parliamentary seats, Sharon's key allies like Jerusalem Mayor Ehud Olmert and Defense Minister and former Army Chief of Staff Shaul Mofaz both placed humiliatingly far down the list. Netanyahu loyalists led by Transport Minister Tzachi Hanegbi did far better, corralling 10 out of the top 30 places on the list. And that success is now reflected in the composition of the new Knesset, where Likud won a dominant 38 seats, its best showing in well over a decade. Netanyahu is now watching his step. Likud Party insiders say he has abandoned his policy of last year when he sniped at the septuagenarian prime minister repeatedly and is now bending over backward to do his bidding. The sources also said that tough, experienced, cynical old Sharon was amused by this reversal and prepared to work with Netanyahu, but still looked likely to try to raise up other figures to counter his popularity within the party. Netanyahu has, however, already far outstripped the two rivals Sharon previously backed against him in the party. And he looks to be in a strong position to equally outplay their successors. After his thrashing in the Central Committee voting, Jerusalem Mayor Olmert looks likely to finally have to face the fact that his undoubted clout in Israel's capital has never translated into a wider power base that could make him a credible national leader. And unless Defense Minister Mofaz manages to pull some literal military miracles out of his hat, he looks unlikely to be able to challenge Netanyahu, either. Mofaz's performance as both chief of staff and defense minister has been solid and impressive. But he is not charismatic and is a newcomer to politics in general and to the Likud. And he has shown no sign of any talent at wooing the party grass-roots, something that Netanyahu has always been gifted at doing. Now Sharon is seeking to recruit former Soviet dissident hero Natan Sharansky into the Likud ranks, and he is likely to be more of a crowd-pleaser there than either Mofaz or Olmert. But like Mofaz, he is a newcomer to the party, and his own Yisrael B'Aliya bloc did very badly in the January elections, losing half its Knesset seats, and dropping from four to two. Also, the man who emerged from January's election as the undoubted "czar" of Israel's 700,000 ethnic Russians was Avigdor Lieberman with his National Union bloc, and Lieberman, unlike Sharansky, is a close political ally of Netanyahu's. The brilliant, articulate and photogenic Netanyahu had an unrivaled hold of the affection of Likud Party members through the late 1980s and the entire '90s decade. His inability to show loyalty to Sharon in a time of full-scale terrorist onslaught and effective war over the past two and half years hurt him badly. But he is now clearly on the rebound. Netanyahu should not be ruled out as long as he lives. He has fought back from adversity before and can do so again. And while he failed to halt or even significantly slow the slide of concessions to Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority in the late 1990s, he was -- along with Sharon -- a prescient and consistent critic of the terrorist horrors that ceding control of the West Bank and Gaza to Arafat's Palestinian Authority would lead to before that, in the halcyon early days of the Oslo Peace Process. Indeed, with Sharon publicly now reiterating his acceptance of the principle of an independent Palestinian state and courting Israel's defeated Labor Party for a new grand collation government, Netanyahu -- who fiercely rejects both policies -- is arguably far more in touch with grass-roots feeling in the Likud than the prime minister himself is. This is where the very magnitude of Sharon's victory last month could come back to haunt him. For Likud's Knesset dominance is so great, that even if the party at some point were to reject Sharon and embrace Netanyahu, moving farther to the right, its parliamentary dominance would not be imperiled. Likud and its religious and right-wing allies command at least 62 seats of the 120-seat Knesset and could certainly rule in the face of center-left opposition. In fact, Sharon still looks in a commanding position with Likud hard-liners toeing his line, rather than he theirs. But whether he likes it or not, his old rival Netanyahu, 20 years younger, is riding high again and nipping at his heels. |
The Case Agianst Israel's Enemies by Alan Dershowitz 
Coming from England and particularly from the BBC, MUST BE SEEN VIDEO! ANOTHER MUST SEE VIDEO |