Who Will Govern Israel After Ehud Olmert?
Hopes that Israel would dominate the Middle East with the alliance of the pro-Israel Bush administration have been dashed. The disaster in Iraq, the Hezbullah resistance in Lebanon last August, and Hamas' Palestinian victory all result from the US-Israeli militaristic - and lack of diplomatic - policies of the last six years, says Patrick Seale.
Ever since the fiasco of last summer’s war in Lebanon, Israel’s beleaguered prime minister, Ehud Olmert, has been living on borrowed time. His leadership has been fatally tarnished and his popularity is at rock bottom. The Winograd Commission condemned him severely for the hasty and flawed decisions that led to war. He must surely soon be driven from office.
Yet, he has managed to hang on, and last week survived three no-confidence votes in the Knesset, protected by the comfortable majority -- 78 seats out of 120 -- his party Kadima has in the Knesset. But, in spite of this favourable, but highly temporary, parliamentary situation, the polls show that more than two-thirds of Israelis want Olmert to vacate the prime minister’s office and go home.
Kadima (‘Forward’) is itself an artificial construction created by Ariel Sharon after Israel’s disengagement from Gaza in 2005 and held together by the old warrior’s personal charisma. Had Sharon not suffered a stroke, Olmert would not have become party leader and the Lebanon war might never have been waged.
Now the Kadima-Labour coalition, which has so far kept Olmert in power, is in danger of failing apart. If Labour leaves the coalition, the whole edifice will collapse. Meanwhile, Labour is in the throes of a vicious power struggle, the right-wing Likud under Benyamin Netanyahu is dreaming of a comeback, while Kadima is threatened with dismemberment.
The paradox is that never has Israel been in greater need of a leader committed to peace but rarely has its fractured and chaotic politics seemed less likely to produce a leader able to define a clear way forward.
If truth be told, Israelis today are thinking more about war than about peace -- a tragic consequence of the brainwashing they have suffered over several decades. Ever since the foundation of the state under the first prime minister, David Ben Gurion, Israelis have been brought up to believe that they could dominate the entire Middle East region by military force.
In the absence of serious Arab or international resistance, there was no reason why expansion into Palestinian territories could not continue unchecked. Once Egypt was removed from the Arab equation after the 1973 war, further peace with the Arabs was judged unnecessary. The Levant could be manipulated and subdued, by war if necessary as in 1982. Sharon used to boast that Israel’s sphere of influence extended as far as an F-15 could fly.
The next stage was to smash Iraq and destroy the Iraqi army, the only Arab force which, after the Iran-Iraq war, seemed to pose a potential threat. This was accomplished by the United States on the vigorous prompting of Washington’s pro-Israeli neo-conservatives. With the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, Israel strategic situation had never looked better.
But America’s problems in Iraq, the war in Lebanon, and the victory of Hamas at the Palestinian elections have all combined to challenge these certitudes, causing considerable psychological shock. Israelis have been traumatised by Hizbullah’s ability to shower Israel’s home territory with missiles and fight its once-invincible army to a standstill. They find it incomprehensible that Israel, with all its military might, has not been able to suppress the pinpricks of the home-made Qassam rockets launched from Gaza into Israel’s Negev settlements.
At the same time, the destruction of Iraq has led to the rise of Iran as a regional power, seemingly bent on acquiring nuclear weapons -- or at least mastering the ability to do so -- thereby threatening to neutralise Israel’s forty-year nuclear monopoly and limit its freedom to bash its neighbours at will.
Worse still, from Israel’s point of view, America’s grave difficulties in Iraq have caused influential voices to be raised in the United States criticising the affect of the Jewish Lobby and of pro-Israeli officials on America’s Middle East policy, and casting doubt on the benefit of the United States' identification with Israel.
Suddenly, Israel’s unchallenged strategic superiority has begun to turn into something like a strategic nightmare.
To most independent observers, the obvious lesson to be drawn from these developments is that Israel’s long-term security could best be assured by peace with its neighbours rather than by force. For their part, Arab leaders have understood this. Wanting to spare the region further turmoil and to tame the wave of radicalism which is as dangerous to them as it is to Israel, they have revived their 2002 peace initiative, offering Israel peace and normal relations will all 22 members of the Arab League, if it withdraws to its 1967 borders and allows the Palestinians to establish their own independent state.
Astonishingly, Israel’s leaders seem too obtuse, too stuck in yesterday’s thinking, to grasp the hand extended to them. Instead of exploring the possibilities of peace, most Israel’s leaders, and even potential leaders, talk of the need for war. The call to arms is heard more often than the language of peace -- to restore Israel’s deterrent capability; to clean out Hizballah from Lebanon and Hamas from Gaza; to teach the Arabs a lesson and other such dangerous absurdities.
A striking example of this mentality may be found in an interview which Amir Peretz, Labour Party leader and defence minister in Olmert’s cabinet, gave on May 6 to the Israeli daily, Haaretz. Because of his poor showing in the disastrous Lebanon war, Peretz is almost certain to lose his post. But, to justify his own conduct during the war, he has made some wounding revelations about his colleagues, some of whom have already resigned, like chief of staff Dan Halutz.
Peretz revealed that, in top-level discussions during the Lebanon war, Halutz, a former air force chief and fervent advocate of air power, wanted to destroy Beirut’s international airport, "cause damage in the billions" -- which he succeeded in doing -- and "darken Lebanon" by knocking out its power stations.
Equally rash, Mossad chief Meir Dagan recommended attacking Syria to draw it into the war and destroy it. Peretz claims that he -- the little Moroccan from Sderot, the former trade union leader lacking all military experience -- was able to stand up to these warmongers and persuade them to direct their fire instead against Hizbullah’s long-range Fajr missiles.
Crude belligerence by high-level Israelis such as Halutz and Dagan is evidently a product of Israel’s traditional mindset, which favours force above all else. But it is also undoubtedly the result of the catastrophic six-year alliance between Israel and President George W. Bush’s administration, dominated by pro-Israeli neo-conservatives.
Together, they have wreaked havoc on the Middle East. Iraq has been shattered, Lebanon crippled and the Palestinian territories -- besieged, terrorized and starved -- reduced to explosive desperation.
A vast zone of human misery affecting millions of people -- a zone of joblessness, displacement, abysmal poverty, colossal material destruction, physical mutilation and death -- has been created stretching from Baghdad to South Lebanon to Gaza. It is one of the great crimes of our times. It will surely not go unpunished, because never have the United States and Israel been so reviled by their victims. One need look no further for the causes of the wave of Islamic radicalism -- whether Sunni or Shi‘i -- now sweeping the region.
Vice-President Dick Cheney, a principal architect of this devastation, is this week undertaking a six-day tour of Iraq, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan and Egypt. No doubt, he will attempt to play on the fears of a resurgent Iran felt by many leaders of these countries. But if these leaders had any guts they would cut the courtesies and the florid welcomes, and instead make clear to Cheney the enormity of what he and his neo-con colleagues have done.
Do the Arabs, one wonders, really need American protection? And against whom? They will never get it against Israel, as Lebanon discovered to its cost last summer. Against Iran then? Iran is as threatened as they are, perhaps even more so.
As I have often argued, the Arabs and Iran should reassure each other with a mutual security pact. Saudi Arabia, which has already take the lead in establishing a dialogue with Tehran and has criticised America’s occupation of Iraq as illegitimate, is well-placed to negotiate such a pact with Tehran on behalf of itself and its Arab Gulf neighbours.
A security pact of this sort would make armed intervention by outside powers unwelcome and unnecessary, and would help draw the poison from the Sunni-Shi‘i conflict, now ravaging Iraq and threatening to spill over into the wider region.
Meanwhile, in Israel, attention is focussed on who will manage to oust Amir Peretz from both the Defence Ministry and the leadership of the Labour Party. The leading contenders are Ehud Barak, Israel’s prime minister in 1999-2000, and his rival Ami Ayalon, ex-head of Shin Beth and ex-commander of the Israeli Navy.
Prompted by former U.S. President Bill Clinton, Barak came close to a deal in 2000 with both the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and the late Syrian President Hafiz al-Asad, but he lacked the courage or the vision to conclude with either one of them. His friends say he may have learned from his mistakes and could be the only Israel leader able to convince the Israeli public that it is time to make peace -- and to pay the price of peace by withdrawing from the Golan and the Palestinian territories.
Barak has announced that he intends to challenge Peretz for the leadership of the Labour party -- and for the Defence Ministry -- at the Labour Party primaries on 28 May. If he were to win, he has said that he would call early elections, which could transform the Israeli political scene. Peretz has indicated that he intends to fight off this challenge, perhaps in alliance with Ami Ayalon. If they are successful, Peretz would remain party leader while Ayalon would take over the Defence Ministry.
Inside Kadima party, Olmert is threatened by his foreign minister, Tsipi Livni, although she seems to lack the confidence to make a bid for the top job. She called on Olmert to resign but then failed to leave the government and rally her supporters. Instead she has preferred to stay in Olmert’s cabinet, as if waiting for him to sack her. This has attracted accusations of cowardice.
The veteran Shimon Peres, now well into his eighties but with political ambition still intact, might himself attempt to take Olmert’s place, if only to stop Livni. But, if he fails to make it as prime minister, Peres may have a chance to replace the disgraced Moshe Katsav as President of Israel.
Benyamin Netanyahu, the old hawk, waits in the wings for his moment to come. If he can attract back to Likud a substantial number of Kadima MKs, he could become prime minister of a rightwing coalition without facing elections. Alternatively, if Barak manages once again to become Labour Party leader, the next Israeli elections could see a contest between Barak and Netanyahu -- a replay of their 1999 battle, which Barak won.
The scene on all fronts is confused and unpromising. Meanwhile, desperate refugees continue to pour out of Iraq, Lebanese politicians continue to squabble as their country sinks into chaos, while the Palestinians -- tragic orphans of the region -- continue to suffer, barely noticed by a cruelly indifferent world.
Patrick Seale is a leading British writer on the Middle East, and the author of The Struggle for Syria; also, Asad of Syria: The Struggle for the Middle East; and Abu Nidal: A Gun for Hire. |
