Taking the Plunge

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The New York Sun

There’s this lovely moment near the beginning of “Casablanca” where Signor Ferrari (Sidney Greenstreet) offers to buy Rick’s cafe. Rick, played by Humphrey Bogart, dismisses Ferrari’s proposition, responding, “Suppose you run your business and let me run mine.” A few moments later, Ferrari (who has obviously gone over this before, always ending up at the same place), chortles, “My dear Rick, when will you realize that in this world, today, isolationism is no longer a practical policy?”


I thought of that a few weeks ago when Eli Yishai, the head of Israel’s Orthodox/Sephardi party, Shas, announced that Greater Israel was no longer a viable policy. “Talk about holding onto all our settlements was relevant 20 years ago,” he said. “Today it is outdated.” Mr. Yishai may have been angling for an invitation to join Ehud Olmert’s coalition, on the correct (as it turned out) assuming that the new Kadima Party would emerge from Tuesday’s election as with a plurality enabling it to form a government.


In the event, Kadima’s plurality shrank to below 30 Knesset seats, just under 25% of the votes cast. Mr. Olmert will have to concede more than he might have preferred to secure the support of junior coalition partners. Each potential coalition partner makes it harder to secure the support of another potential partner. Mr. Olmert could try for a center-right coalition with the religious parties and Yisrael Beiteinu, the Russian immigrant-based party that has – at least for the duration of this Knesset – eclipsed Likud as the primary party of the right. But such a coalition would be unlikely to support Mr. Olmert’s principle oft-stated goal – to redraw (unilaterally if necessary) Israel’s borders, a move that would involve reprising last summer’s Gaza disengagement – this time in parts of the West Bank.


With Likud reeling from its fall to fifth place in the Knesset, its leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, has suffered an enormous, perhaps fatal, setback. He has made clear his intention to retain control of the party, though he will undoubtedly face a challenge at some point from the Likud number two, Sylvan Shalom, a former foreign minister who has been telling supporters that if Likud fared poorly, he will try to claim the leadership and move Likud into a Kadima coalition. Accompanying their inevitable clash will be heated rhetoric about the best way for Likud to rebuild itself: as a principled party of the Zionist right or as a broad party of the center.


The key number is the combined total of seats won by center and left parties. Kadima, Labor, Yahad (Meretz) and the Arab parties total more than 60, giving them a veto over a coalition of the right. The swing party is Kadima, but if Mr. Olmert is to be taken at his word, he will first reach out to Labor and perhaps Shas for a majority that backs his general policy. Mr. Olmert is unlikely to abandon his position; if so, already disillusioned voters will ask, what was all the fuss about? Why did Mr. Sharon and his supporters break away from Likud and form Kadima?


The great surprise of the election – aside from Yistrael Beiteinu’s strong showing – is the emergence of the Pensioners Party. This is a demographic phenomenon: a significant number of retired Israelis voted to protest what they consider the deleterious effects of government cuts in funds and services. The Pensioners appear to have won seven or eight Knesset seats, rendering them virtually indispensable to any coalition formed over the next few weeks.


The Pensioners are led by Rafi Eitan, who is nicknamed Rafi the Stinker and is a colorful figure with a long intelligence background. He was chief of the Lekem unit, which recruited and ran Jonathan Pollard. It is an irony that Casper Weinberger, who was defense secretary when Pollard committed his crime and gave a devastating damage assessment of Pollard’s spying, died as Israel’s voters were putting Mr. Eitan into a position of power. One wonders what will transpire should Mr. Eitan become a minister and decide to visit Washington; certainly Weinberger will be rolling over in his freshly dug grave.


It was strange to see Israel go through this election without Ariel Sharon, who shaped its contours and altered the landscape of Israel’s political discourse. France’s Gaullists had years before the general retired. Kadima had a couple of months. Mr. Sharon’s fate puts me in a mind of leaders who bring their followers to the precipice of great change and then charge them with making the plunge by themselves.


The American socialist leader Eugene Victor Debs demurred when he was introduced at a presidential election rally as the American Moses who would lead the workers into the promised land of socialism. But even Moses did not lead the Jews into the Promised Land. The way Debs put it was this: “I don’t want you to follow me or anything else. If you are looking for a Moses to lead you out of the … wilderness, you will stay right where you are. I would not lead you into this promised land if I could, because if I could lead you in, someone else could lead you out.”



Mr. Twersky is a contributing editor of The New York Sun.


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