"How the mighty have fallen." Ehud Olmert to Prison

This week former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was sentenced to six years in prison for taking bribes from property developers in the Holyland Development scandal when he was mayor of Jerusalem before becoming prime minister. He will be the first former prime minister in Israeli history to go to prison. Olmert served for ten years as Jerusalem's mayor, from 1993 to 2003, before becoming a minister in Ariel Sharon's second government. When Sharon broke away from the Likud in late 2005 to form Kadima Olmert went with him as his number two. Sharon then suffered a massive stroke two months later in early January 2006, which put him into a coma from which he never recovered, and Olmert became head of Kadima and then prime minister following elections in March 2006. Olmert only served as Kadima leader for 2.5 years until late 2008 when he was forced to give way to Tzipi Livni, his foreign minister, because he was under indictment for corruption. Tzipi Livni failed to form a new government and elections were called for early 2009. These resulted in Kadima winning one more seat than the Likud but going into opposition because of its inability to form a coalition government. Olmert then retired from politics.

Olmert began politics as an ambitious young political activist in the Herut Party. When Shmuel Tamir challenged Begin's leadership of the party and was suspended he split off to form the Free Center party in early 1967. Olmert went with him and at age 28 was elected to the Knesset on December 31, 1973 at age 28--the youngest ever MK. He began his career as an anti-corruption campaigner. But as mayor of Jerusalem, following the 28-year tenure of internationally-renowned Mayor Teddy Kollek of Rafi/Labor, he developed a reputation as one of the more corrupt figures in Israeli politics eating in fancy restaurants, smoking expensive cigars, and wearing tailor-made suits.

Ariel "Arik" Sharon, 1928-2014

Ariel 'Arik' Sharon, 1928-2014: Hardliner Who Ended Otherwise

By Thomas G. Mitchell and Ralph Seliger

After almost exactly eight years in a coma, the former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon finally succumbed on Jan. 11, 2014.  He was known for bold, even reckless moves, both as a career military officer and as a politician.  Reviled by the Left as a hawk and worse, for most of his life, he ended up seen as a traitor by the extreme Right, while considered a moderate and potential peacemaker by many others. Over decades, he championed Israel's extensive settlement of the West Bank and Gaza Strip (viewed by most of the world as illegal and counterproductive to peace), but also stunned the world by unilaterally evacuating settlers and soldiers from Gaza and part of the West Bank in August 2005.

Yakhimovich admits that her stand cost Labor Party seats

972 blogger Israeli journalist Noam Sheizaf had a short item about Israeli Labor Party leader Shelli Yakhimovich telling party activists that her refusal to campaign on the Palestinian issue (or the diplomatic issue as she puts it) cost the party four seats in the January 22, 2013 election. She assigned these four as two to Meretz and two to Tzipi Livni's haTnua (the Movement) party. Why did she make this admission and is it true?

The Israeli Election: A Preview

Israel goes to the polls on January 22. Everyone has already conceded that Prime Minister Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu will be heading the next government. His Likud Beitenu (Union: Our Home) party is forecast to receive between 34 and 38 seats out of 120 in the Knesset. Next largest will be the centrist Labor Party with 16 to 18 seats--up from 13 in 2009. Third will be the Jewish Home (haBeit haYehudi) party with 13-14 seats- (Hebrew link) --this will be a record for the old National Religious Party, which normally received anywhere from four to ten seats in each election since the 1950s. For another forecast in English see here. The Kadima party, founded by Ariel Sharon as a splinted from the Likud in November 2005, is likely to only receive two seats despite being the largest party after the 2009 election with 28 seats. Most of its voters are said to be either returning to the Likud after seven years, returning to Labor after three years, or going to former Kadima leader Tzipi Livni's haTnua (the Movement) party that is projected to receive seven seats. Overall the Right is projected to receive about 53 seats and the Center-Left about ten seats less than that. Daniel Levy, an analyst affiliated with a number of European and American think tanks as their resident Israel expert, has a very good article organized around the concept of Israel's "four tribes" or electoral blocs.

There are many explanations for this move to the right.  But the important thing is the effect that it will have on the policy of the Israeli government. Netanyahu is likely to form another rightist coalition with one of the Center parties in the coalition, such as Yesh Atid (There is a Future), as a legitimizing party in the small role that Labor has periodically filled (after 2001, after 2009 etc.) An attempt to form a Center bloc with Yesh Atid, Labor, and haTnua blew up last week when Tzipi Livni issued a statement about a meeting that the three party leaders held and then the other two contradicted her.  This will make it easy for Netanyahu to play the three parties off against one another after the election. The most interesting figure in this election cycle has been Naftali Bennett, leader of the Jewish Home party, portrayed in this New Yorker article by David Remnick.  Here is an article that ran on Sunday January 20--two days before the election--in The Times of Israel on the Likud's post-election coalition options.

A return to 1965? Is this the year of the blocs in Israel?

It was announced this weekend that the two main parties of the Israeli Right, the Likud and Israel Beitenu (Israel is Our Home) have formed a joint list to run in the Israeli election on January 22, 2013. The new list is named Likud Beitenu (Likud is Our Home). Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will head the list and Israel Beitenu leader Avigdor Lieberman will be the number two man on the list and will have his pick of ministries after the coalition is formed: foreign minister, defense minister, or finance minister. Last night the Likud by a large majority approved the merger, without Netanyahu having revealed the number of seats that each party would receive on the joint list. To see Netanyahu's acceptance speech (in Hebrew) go here.

The immediate reaction on the Center-Left was one of shock. Everyone in Israel was pretty much resigned to Netanyahu continuing as prime minister after the election, but the thought that the merger might become permanent and leave Lieberman as Netanyahu's successor as the new party leader has people in shock. Many in Israel claim that Lieberman's role model is not any of the figures on the secular Right such as Ze'ev Jabotinsky, Menahem Begin, or Yitzhak Shamir but rather Vladimir Putin, the semi-democratic and semi-authoritarian leader of Russia. Leiberman immigrated to Israel from Moldova--Soviet Romania--in 1978 at age 20. After serving in the army, he worked as a bouncer and entered politics as an aide to Netanyahu during the latter's first term as prime minister. He then left the Likud to found his own party of Russian immigrants to compete with Natan Sharansky's Israel B'Aliya (Israel on the Rise/Israel in Immigration) party. Lieberman has taken his party through a series of mergers and splits on the Right as he searched for a winning formula. This formula was eventually to attack Israel's Arab minority as disloyal and demand a loyalty oath.

Is Shaul Mofaz for Real?

Last week the Partners for a Progressive Israel (formerly Meretz USA) blog reposted a NY Times Profile of new Kadima leader Shaul Mofaz, who decisively defeated Tzipi Livni the former leader in the leadership primary at the end of March. Mofaz appeared much more dovish than one would expect for a former West Bank settler and former Likud defense minister.

Mofaz appeared to be attempting to paper over the disagreements between himself and Livni before the election. Whether this is because he wants to lead a Center party that is sincerely in favor of a two-state solution or merely wants to increase the value of his stock before he enters into merger or coalition negotiations with Netanyahu is anyone's guess. 

Tzipi Livni: The Latest Great Western Hope

Tzipi Livni was best friends forever with Secretary of State Condi Rice during the second Bush term and appeared on many lists of influential women. Tzipi Livni, the former leader of Kadima, was the latest but not the last of a string of Great Western Hopes in Israel who are more loved in America and Europe than in their own country. They are polyglot and erudite men and woman known for their reasonableness and learning. They explain Israel to the world and attempt to explain the world to Israel. All have been foreign ministers at one time or another and two have been prime ministers and a third--Livni--nearly became prime minister.

Shaul Mofaz decisively beats Tzipi Livni in Kadima Primary

At about midnight Israel time this morning with about 90 percent of the vote returned, challenger Shaul Mofaz had beaten incumbent leader Tzipi Livni of the Kadima Party in Israel by a margin of 62 to 38 percent--the same margin by which Richard Nixon defeated George McGovern in 1972. There was a turnout of about 45 percent for the internal election indicating that many who had voted for the party in 2009 had abandoned it. Mofaz, who emigrated from Iran as a boy in the 1950s served as chief of staff of the IDF and then as Likud defense minister under Ariel Sharon. Initially when Sharon bolted the Likud to form Kadima, Mofaz remained behind in the Likud but then was persuaded by Sharon to follow. Tzipi Livni, who served as Kadima foreign minister under Ehud Olmert from 2006 to 2008 before becoming party leader, has not indicated what she will do now. Mofaz called on her to remain in the party. But many have speculated that she will either withdraw from politics entirely or form a new party with Ehud Barak's Atzmaut (Independence) faction.  This is because both Kadima and Atzmaut are parties without developed ideologies. Both Mofaz and the media were very hard on Livni for failing to form a governing coalition in late 2008, which forced elections, and then for refusing to join Netanyahu's ruling coalition. There was also speculation that Mofaz might return to the Likud if he lost his second bid for the party leadership.

J Street, Post-Zionism and the Two-State Solution

This weekend J Street, the liberal Zionist pro-peace lobby, will be holding its third conference since its founding in 2008. In 2009 it attracted 1500 people to its first conference, this expanded to over 2,000 at its second conference last year, and it is expected to have over 2500 attendees for its third conference. This has worried the Zionist Right in America, aligned behind the dominant Likud Party and the other parties of the ruling coalition. They have been very inventive in the ways they attack it, which mainly amounts to guilt by association and obfuscation.  But J Street may not be much of a threat to their Greater Israel project.

Kadima: The Problems

This weekend, Ha'Aretz ran an interview with Kadima and opposition leader Tzipi Livni that revealed many of the problems present in the party. What it reveals is a party with no defining or uniting ideology and a party leader so scared of losing her leadership position that she is unwilling to defend any vision for the party. She was afraid to denounce undemocratic initiatives that threatened the basic foundations of democracy in Israel. And according to the interviewer polls indicate that if elections were held today, half of the party's 2009 voters would vote for other parties. This would make Kadima a medium-sized party comparable in size to Avigdor Leibermann's Israel Beitenu party or to Labor. And there is clear fear that if she loses the leadership and former Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz becomes party leader that he will return the party to the Likud after breaking it up. Mofaz emerges from the interview as the typical Israeli general politician--interested in holding a ministry in the government whatever its ideology and makeup, not interested in ideology and with no real vision, in other words a security technocrat.

Kadima: Last Hope for the Two-State Solution?

Kadima has announced that it will hold primary elections for leader on March 27--about eight weeks from now--in anticipation of an Israeli general election in late 2012 or early 2013. Kadima is the centrist party that supporters of the two-state solution have pinned their hopes on since it was founded in November 2005. Since the June 1992 election that brought Rabin to power, Labor and Meretz have both lost three-fourths of their Knesset representation. But the creation of Kadima, the largest party in the Knesset by one seat, leaves the hope that there is a party that can replace Labor and serve as an anchor for a center-left peace coalition as an alternative to the Right.

Is Sharon (Politically) Dead?

On February 26, 2012 Ariel "Arik" Sharon will be 84, although it is very unlikely that he will celebrate his birthday. This is because he has been in a coma, probably brain dead as well, since January 6, 2006. He will probably die without ever having regained consciousness.

But imagine, for argument's sake, that tomorrow he were successfully revived and like many elderly people who suffer strokes he would be able to recover cognitive function eventually. This would at minimum probably take a year before he could speak without slurring his words and think and function at a high level. And it might be possible--even likely--that while in a coma he had developed some sort of dementia. It is doubtful that voters or party functionaries would trust someone of that age with the premiership. When Sharon suffered his stroke and was subsequently permanently relieved of the premiership he was 77-78, older than any previous occupier of his office. Previously the oldest premier at retirement had been David Ben-Gurion, the first and third prime minister who retired in June 1963 at age 76.5. So no Israeli prime minister has crossed the 80-year-old barrier and none is likely to ever do so--particularly someone who has suffered a severe stroke.  Between Ben-Gurion and Sharon Golda Meir had retired at age 76 in 1974 and Shimon Peres at age 73 in 1996.

Why Kadima Can't Replace Labor as Peace Party

Here are five quick reasons why Kadima cannot replace the Labor Party as the backbone of the Israeli peace camp:

1) It is led by a leader, Tzipi Livni, who has confessed that she doesn't like politics and feels that politics is like a sewer. Here is Ha'Aretz's take on that revelation.

2) Tzipi Livni barely beat out Shaul Mofaz for the leadership of the party in 2008. Mofaz has in order three ambitions: a) take over as Kadima party leader; b) replace Barak as defense minister--his old job; 3) replace Netanyahu as leader of the Right.

3) In order to nearly keep its same strength in the 2009 election as in 2006, Kadima had to cannibalize Labor and Meretz. This has left it incapable of leading a coalition on its own.

4) Kadima has no core principles or ideology--it was founded as a party of convenience like the Center Party and the DMC before it. It has avoided their fates simply because it was much more successful at the polls the first time out because of Sharon, who is permanently gone.

5) Kadima's potential Palestinian peace partner is Fatah, which is as conflicted as  Kadima.

Motives are much less important than actions

Those who are liberals, particularly those from the religious Left or from the "chattering classes" (as Margaret Thatcher used to refer to them) worry much about pure hearts in politicians.  Real politicians, however, worry much more about the ability to deliver.  Historians of American abolitionists from the 1960s to the present have sung the praises of William Lloyd Garrison and his followers because their political sentiments are politically correct today. But that meant that because of the very great changes in racial attitudes between their time and ours, their sentiments were very politically incorrect then. Garrison and his brand of abolitionists remained unpopular until the start of the Civil War.  Their rivals, the Liberty men of the tiny abolitionist Liberty Party were equally as unpopular and only averaged about two percent of the vote during the eight-year lifetime of the party. But the Liberty men at least had the correct impulse to use the ballot box in their cause. The more pragmatic among them, namely Salmon P. Chase, engineered a merger between the Liberty men and splinter groups from the two main parties, the Whigs and the Democrats. Then the professional politicians took over. The moralists within the Liberty Party revived that party rather than merger with the sinners and accomplish something. They were left on the ash heap of history.

In the Middle East the liberals have often felt disappointed by the politicians they have had to rely upon in the peace process. Although most belonged to Ratz or Mapam in the 1970s and 1980s and Meretz in the 1990s, they had to rely on the Labor Party to work as their vehicle. During the 1980s they had to rely upon Shimon Peres, a former hawk and very ambitious and weak politician, and Yitzhak Rabin, a pragmatic hawk until he died. In 1978 Menahem Begin, then prime minister suggested in the Knesset that Peres had become a dove because Rabin was blocking his way to the party leadership and he needed the doves to get around Rabin. President Mitterand of France started his political career on the Right in the Fourth Republic where he became one of the most talented politicians. In the Fifth Republic he suddenly moved to the Left and joined the Socialists. What happened--was it a miraculous conversion? No, he simply decided that he could not compete with Charles de Gaulle for the presidency from the Right. In 1981 he was elected the third president of the Fifth Republic and served for two full terms. Peres was never quite as lucky.

Peres and Rabin competed for twenty years during a period in which the Likud became and stayed the dominant party. Peres had to settle for the lesser prizes of senior ministries: defense minister (1974-77), foreign minister (1986-88) and finance minister (1988-90). Only from mid-1984 until October 1986 was he prime minister in a rotation scheme in a national unity government. He again served as prime minister in 1995-96 for six months following Rabin's murder.

It wasn't until 1993 that Labor could be persuaded to accept the PLO as their negotiating partner for peace rather than Jordan. This was despite Jordan having renounced its roled in 1988. Then in the 1990s liberal doves had to settle for a peace process between Rabin on the Israeli side and Arafat on the Palestinian side. The man who had as defense minister given the order to break the bones of Palestinian rioters in 1988 and the arch-terrorist responsible for the Munich massacre and other atrocities. It was not until January 2005 that the Palestinians chose a leader that most Israelis could stomach, if not exactly admire. And they had to settle for Arik Sharon, the butcher of Beirut, carrying out the withdrawal from Gaza later that year.

No wonder that many liberals were willing to give the benefit of the doubt to Bibi Netanyahu and hope that he had reformed since his first premiership in the late 1990s. In American history anti-slavery liberals faced a similar dilemma. Stephen A. Douglas in December 1857 had split the Democrats by opposing President James Buchanan in calling for new elections in Kansas before statehood was granted. Douglas was the champion of the 1850s version of pro-choice--he believed that local whites should determine whether or not a territory should be free or slave. Anti-slavery Republicans on the East Coast wanted  to give Douglas  a free shot at reelecction because of the trouble he could cause among the Democrats. The leader of their party in Illinois, Abraham Lincoln, wanted to run a vigorous campaign for the state legislature and be elected by that body as the U.S. senator from Illinois. Lincoln gave his famous "house divided" speech and argued that a live dog was better than a dead lion. Douglas was the dead lion because any feeling for the slave as a human being was dead in his heart. Lincoln modestly placed himself in the role of the live dog.

David Remnick of the New Yorker magazine has argued that Netanyahu is the equivalent of the dead lion, without actually using that metaphor. Today for liberals in Israel the equivalent of William Seward in the 1850s and Lincoln in the 1860s is Tzipi Livni of Kadima. She may be flawed but she is the best that they are going to get for some time. Now she just has to convince Israelis to trust her and to trust the leadership of the Palestinian Authority.