Sharon’s Methods

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One point needs to be made again and again about Prime Minister Sharon’s victory in the Knesset over the opponents of his unilateral withdrawal from Gaza. In what other Middle Eastern country would a nationalistic general and war hero have to submit any sort of controversial plan to the democratic scrutiny of his fissiparous coalition partners – and then to freely elected parliamentary representatives? Certainly, Syria – like Israel – has multiple parties. But there is one small catch: they are all controlled by the government. Syria also holds elections, but no one there seems too worried about tracking the polls in key states or the “gender gap.” Thus, the late Hafez Assad won his last re-election “campaign” in 1999 with 99.9% of the vote and his son, Bashar Assad, triumphed in the succession “contest’ with 97.99% in the following year. In 1999, President Mubarak secured the support of a mere 94% of Egyptians. Earlier this year, the margins of President Bouteflika of Algeria dipped dangerously to 85% of his registered countrymen. Shades of Florida 2000.


By virtue of size alone, Libya’s 2,700 person legislature – known as the General People’s Congress – might be deemed by a visiting Martian to be over 20 times as democratic as Israel’s Knesset. Nonetheless, the role of these parliamentarians in Colonel Moammar Gadhafi’s “republic” has been quaintly described as only “consultative.” Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have all taken Madison’s gentle concerns about the danger of faction a little bit too much to heart and allow for no parties at all. And Yemen takes “accurate reporting” so seriously it recently flogged a journalist. It would not be surprising if Mr. Sharon has had similar fantasies about the press at some point in his career; but then he is only the premier of a western democracy, not a Middle East tyrant. It says much about the declining prestige of representative government in Europe that Israel’s messy republican virtues count for so little among the Continent’s political and cultural elites.


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