Impulsive Bibi

By DHinMI

Some politicians just have a knack for making the principled stand a little later than just about anyone who was actually acting on principle.  For example, there's this guy:

Israeli Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu resigned in protest on Sunday as the cabinet approved the first phase of evacuations from settlements in the occupied Gaza Strip.

The resignation of Netanyahu, Sharon's main rival in the right-wing Likud party, sent local markets reeling and showed the depth of division in the cabinet over the plan for "disengagement" from conflict with the Palestinians.

But the departure of the highest-ranking minister yet to go over the pullout was too late to prevent approval for the forced evacuations of settlers, due to start after Aug. 15.

The cabinet voted by 17 to five to back the first phase of the initiative -- removal of the settlements of Kfar Darom, Netzarim and Morag, isolated enclaves where resistance is likely to be among the strongest.

Netanyahu said his resignation letter counted as a vote against the pullout plan and told reporters that the plan would harm Israeli security and could intensify Palestinian attacks.

"I did not expect my leaving the government would stop the unilateral move," he said. "I understand the ambition to leave Gaza. I can't be part of a move that I believe is wrong, a move that will endanger security and divide the people"...

Netanyahu, 55, himself a former prime minister, is widely expected to challenge Sharon's leadership at some stage after the pullout and could benefit from the support of opponents of the Gaza pullout. Sharon is 77.

Palestinians welcome the Gaza withdrawal but suspect that Sharon will use it to tighten Israel's hold on much bigger West Bank settlements. Fewer than 4 percent of the 240,000 settlers will be affected by the plan.

There seems to be little doubt that this is all a move to wrest control of the Likud party from Sharon:

"He's trying to set himself up as an alternative leader in Likud to Sharon, to take over Likud fairly soon and then make it to the prime minister's office," Leslie Susser said. "His reading is that there will be terrorism after the withdrawal and he can then say 'I told you this would happen and I am the most suitable person to lead because I have political insight'.

"But if the withdrawal works well and good things come of it, he will have made a big miscalculation."

Some analysts suggest that Netanyahu timed his resignation in order to cover all possibilities.  But covering all possibilities doesn't usually attract passionate support:

Analysts believe that by staying in the cabinet until now, Mr Netanyahu has ensured that Israel will withdraw from the settlements, and by resigning can claim he opposed the plan if it backfires in the future.

They point out that he was careful to frame his rejection of the withdrawal in an ambiguous way, attacking its unilateral nature rather than the plan itself. "There is a way to achieve peace and security, but a unilateral withdrawal under fire and with nothing in return is certainly not the way," he wrote.

He called the disengagement "an irresponsible step which will endanger Israel's security, split the people, institute the principle of return to the 1967 borders, and in the future, endanger Jerusalem as well."

In Israel, Mr Netanyahu, with his US education and fluent English, is seen as an articulate advocate of Israel's interests in the international arena, but polls suggest voters do not trust him. Before the cabinet meeting, Shaul Mofaz, the defence minister, attacked Mr Netanyahu for his inconsistency on disengagement.

"You cannot dither in the wind every morning anew and say 'My opinion's changed and now it's different'," he said.

A spokesman for Yesha, the settlers council, described Mr Netanyahu's resignation as "commendable", but other prominent rightwing members saw it as opportunistic.

Israel Harel, a founder of the settler movement, said Mr Netanyahu's resignation was too late to assist the anti-disengagement camp.

"This is not the act of a real leader. If he wanted to bring about change he had to resign a long time ago," he said.

The Bibi-friendly Jerusalem Post didn't call him cynical, but it's easy to draw that implication from their editorial on the resignation:

Similarly, Netanyahu's resignation at least partially resolved the impossible contradiction in his own position. As this newspaper has pointed out, a key swing bloc of Likud ministers, most prominent among them Netanyahu, could perhaps have brought down the government and torpedoed the disengagement plan. While of course legal and far from politically unprecedented, there was something problematic about a government that was sustained by ministers who bitterly opposed its adopted raison d'etre.

Netanyahu's move, however, while resolving some contradictions, has created new ones. All of the arguments Netanyahu made Sunday could have and were made many months ago when he, perhaps more than anyone, might have stopped disengagement in its tracks. What does he mean "it's become clear?" Has something changed, or something unexpected happened?

When we asked Netanyahu in an interview in May why he voted for disengagement in the critical first reading of the plan in the fall, he explained, "We were voting on preparations... Most of the Likud's primary voters voted against it. That couldn't stop it. I think there is a majority of the people right now who want it, and that's why it's going through... The key in a democracy is that the loser accepts the result, not the winner. Since I am a democrat, I have to accept the will of the majority of the Knesset even though I don't like it. If you want to change that, change the Knesset."

This does not really explain why he voted yes then and no, with his feet, now...

The much less Bibi-friendly Haaretz was much harsher in their assessments of Netanyahu's moves and motives:

Taking to the stump, by turns presidential and emotional, he was unsparing in praise. He had been right about Oslo, he said. He had been right about the Palestinians, right about handing them guns, right about the pullout. He had been right about the economy, right about growth and economic reform.

But had he been right about the resignation?

After a landslide defeat in 1999 elections, he had entrusted the leadership of the Likud to Ariel Sharon in what the outgoing prime minister saw as a caretaker role. But the has-been Sharon was to rise to power, offering Netanyahu the apparent poison pill of the treasury portfolio.

Netanyahu, for his part, gambled on an economic policy as politically risky as Sharon's disengagement, his free-market policies appearing to strike at the very strata of society that had been his power base in the Likud.

Now he has embarked on a new gamble. Netanyahu believes he can ride his residual strength within the Likud, coupled with the party hawks' antipathy to Sharon, to the party chairmanship.

In the end, according to this devastaing analysis in Haaretz, this resignation was, like everything concerning Netanyahu, about little more than Benjamin Netanyahu:

If he had remained in the government while running an ongoing public struggle, vilifying and undermining the disengagement plan after its approval in the government and Knesset, then he would have to account for his actions. As of 4 P.M. Monday he is free, without any collective ministerial responsibility.

Once again he is in the warm embrace of the extreme right, the Yesha Council go-getters, the Liebermans and Hendels who won't hesitate to trample him the minute he dares to disobey them. For the moment, he will radicalize his criticism of the disengagement, and will wait for the right time to officially announce his candidacy for leadership of the Likud Party. If he hadn't wanted to compete against Ariel Sharon, he wouldn't have resigned. But it was the family pressure exerted by his father, brother and wife that made Netanyahu decide.

At the same time, he saw the political noose was tightening: Sharon hinted that compassion was missing from the budget; Ehud Olmert said after the pullout the agenda would focus on social issues; Shaul Mofaz excoriated him exceptionally severely on Channel 2 on Saturday night.

Netanyahu understood that a heavy hand, that of the prime minister, was behind all these strikes. He understood that the day after the disengagement Sharon's real agenda will be to go after him, clip his wings, humiliate him at every opportunity, push him out. But Netanyahu said he would not give them the pleasure.

He decided to go under his conditions, when he wanted. The question is what came first: the public ethics or the political interest. Netanyahu is not a level-headed, calculating politician. He has proved this time and again over the last few years. Now too, it's not clear whether he thought his move all the way through. He's likely to find himself in the political desert for some time, with none of his fellow ministers feeling like joining him. Indeed, his resignation is forcing other ministers who oppose the disengagement into the arms of Sharon, who is to have supportive meetings Sunday with most of the ministers, as well as with coalition chairman Gideon Sa'ar.

The bigger gamble Netanyahu is taking is linked to the disengagement. If the pullout fails and is accompanied by tragic events that culminate in a wave of terror and Qassam rocket attacks on Ashkelon, Netanyahu will become an alternative. If the opposite occurs and the disengagement becomes a success story, his resignation will be considered another failed risk like when he gave up a sure victory against Sharon in the December 2000 primaries and like ultimatum night, October 26, 2004.

Netanyahu may win leadership of the Likud, but in the general elections the public will remember the old, fiery Bibi, and look for someone else. On Sunday night, in discussions after the press conference in which he announced his resignation, Netanyahu repeatedly said his departure would not halt the disengagement.

Does he hope other ministers will follow in his footsteps? "I didn't consult with any of them," he said, and with some pleasure, added: "They were in shock." What was the major lesson you learned from the ultimatum affair, Netanyahu was asked a few months ago, after retracting his threat to resign. If you need to shoot, shoot, don't speak, he said in good American English. On Sunday, he shot, and only then did he speak.

It's a real statement about how screwed up Israel's politics are these days that a cabinet resignation that puts more power in the hands of Ariel Sharon should be such as clear improvement, that progressives and those hoping for peace between Israelies and Palestinians should be heartened that Sharon may be on the verge of dispatching a rival. 

Or, rather, if the Gaza pullout is a success, that Sharon's rival may have just dispatched himself. 

Comments

[DHinMI]

One of the things I find amazing about Israeli politics is how little the personal corruption of Sharon and Netanyahu seems to effect their political fortunes. Maybe somebody who knows more about Israeli politics can explain it to me. Is the influence of the Russian mobsters that great that being personally dirty to the degree those guys are just doesn't matter?

[Patrick]

There are more than a few tantilizing comparisons to be made between Likud and their supporters and our Republicans that their supporters: The policy-free self-serving attitudes of the party elites, the rampant graft, the fundamentalists pulling the strings and a base that doesn't give a shit if the party leaders run the economy into the ground and ruin the basis of quality of life for average Israelis as long as they keep pummeling the Palestinians.

As to the author's question about why corruption doesn't seem to be so important in Israeli politics, I think it's for two main reasons (I'm in the process of writing a time series paper on Israeli electoral politics, BTW, so I probably only know enough to be dangerous!): The nature of coalition governments in Israel and the nature of the voting system.

The current Likud-led coalition (a winning coalition must have at least 61 seats in the Knesset) is Likud and three orthodox parties, the NRP (National Religious Party), NU (National Union) and Shas. I don't think that the NRP, NU and Shas care if Ariel Sharon started sleeping with men as long as he kept cracking the whip on the Palestinians.

I'm surprised that Likud's partners have allowed Sharon to move forward with the Gaza pullout without busting up his coalition; what clues you into to just how they pulled this off is the insistence on expanding settlements in the West Bank. To the orthodox in the NRP, NU and Shas, the West Bank is the dealbreaker because it is the historic land of Judea and Samaria which the Jewish fundies think is theirs because the Big Man said so in the Torah.

Basically, Sharon bribed the folks to his right by offering more of the West Bank for a Gaza pullout. Gaza's an arid dump anyway, but it allows Sharon to look like a big peacemaker to give Palestinians back their own land.

Settlements and keeping the Palestinians under the boot are what matter in this current coalition, not Sharon's nepotism or the crookedness of his government. Those things are tolerated as long as he continues to be Arik Sharon, Ass Kicker of Palestinians.

On the second point, the Israeli voting system encourages a great deal of corruption in all political camps because it's so chaotic. Looking at the primary system, party primaries are not held on the same day across the country as is the case here in the U.S. Voters vote for party lists in some cases, not individual politicians. Some parties have direct election of representatives in their primaries. Most of the religious parties have their representatives appointed by a spiritual leader. In some of the parties, party institutions elect their candidates.

It all makes for an environment that is ripe for corruption.

[jonnybutter]

There are more than a few tantilizing comparisons to be made between Likud and their supporters and our Republicans [and] their supporters

Exactly what I was thinking, Patrick! The signal former leftist C. Hitchens has justified his conversion to some sort of conservatism partially by chiding American Democrats' 'choosing the lesser of two evils' in American pres. elections. Like (alas) any nasty, self-dealing polemicist, he made a fair point in an unfair way. The upshot is the grotesque perception that Sharon, Bush, Frist, etc. are 'bulwarks' against extremism. Gag me with a spoon, man!

Thanks for your interesting comment.

[4jkb4ia]

Patrick makes a good point about "security issues" being paramount. The religious parties are even more corrupt than the nonreligious ones since it is understood that they are in politics to get money for their schools and other institutions. I have been less than inspired by the candidates put up by Labor since Barak.
Good post, DHinMI. I thought this was important or something because good soldier Bibi has shown readiness to quit--the political class is not united. But this has no political advantage for Bibi.

[emptypockets]

Or, rather, if the Gaza pullout is a success, that Sharon's rival may have just dispatched himself.

I'm not well-informed here: what will be the measure of the pullout's success?

[DHinMI]

'pockets: good question, and something that should probably be defined. In terms of diplomacy and the long-term interests, that's a tough question. In terms of what it will mean to Netanyahu's political fortunes, I think it's there in that final clip, from Haaretz:

The bigger gamble Netanyahu is taking is linked to the disengagement. If the pullout fails and is accompanied by tragic events that culminate in a wave of terror and Qassam rocket attacks on Ashkelon, Netanyahu will become an alternative.

As far as short-term politics, if there isn't massive problems with the extraction of the settlers that reflect poorly on the government--and massive problems could reflect better on the government than on the settlers--or "a wave of terror and Qassam rocket attacks on Ashkelon," then it will be deemed a short-term success, and Netanyahu will have screwed himself.

[emptypockets]

Granted, a wave of terror would be judged "not success." But I'm not sure the absence of "massive problems" would be judged success (I don't know either way). It seems that the goal of the pullout is ultimately to decrease the regular terror attacks, and ease hostilities -- and it is seen as something of an (albeit thorny) olive branch Israel is extending, is that right? If the pullout is completed peacefully, and is followed by continued hostility and attacks -- that is, status quo -- will that be success?

I think the short-term/long-term distinction you're making is astute. When are the next elections?

[4jkb4ia]

Per NYT elections are to be called in November 2006, but waiting until this date is not likely.

[4jkb4ia]

Per Haaretz failure to pass a budget could cause elections to be called in six months.

[DHinMI]

The budget almost brought down the Likud governement last time around. Sharon stay in control only because he got propped up with the votes of Labor, Meretz and (iirc) the Arab parties.

[tom]

both of these Terrorists and Mass murderers should have been hung long time ago.