Thursday, Jul 24, 2008
His election as Israel's prime minister was expected, but it's too soon to tell how he will steer Middle East relations.
Feb 7, 2001 | In a clear-cut special election that will warrant no lawsuits, no recounts, no interpretations of chads, an overwhelming 62.5 percent of voters elected Ariel Sharon, the veteran hawk, as prime minister.
The result, predicted for weeks now by Israeli pollsters, surprised no one. More intriguing was the success and scale of Sharon's political comeback. Sharon's victory comes 18 years after an Israeli government investigation found Sharon indirectly responsible for the Sabra and Shatila massacre, in which hundreds of Palestinian refugees were killed in Lebanon, and forced his removal as defense minister, crushing his political ambitions.
Also stunning was Ehud Barak's snap decision to step down from the leadership of the left-wing Labor Party. Barak, a would-be peacemaker but hapless politician who charged on a perilous diplomatic path without preparing the Israeli public for the necessary concessions or taking into account Palestinian objections, first defended his record: "We removed not only the masks from the face of our rival but also the veils of illusion from ourselves," he said in his concession speech.
Then, taking responsibility for Sharon's knockout victory, Barak announced to the astonishment of his aides and audience that he intended to leave political life for a while. In this, he followed the example of his predecessor, Benjamin Netanyahu, who resigned as head of the right-wing Likud Party on the night of his electoral defeat in May 1999 in order to better prepare for his political comeback. "We have lost the battle, but we will win the war," promised Barak. "In time we will return because our path is the only path, the path of truth, and in the end the truth will triumph," he concluded.
Sharon's victory and Barak's brisk exit heralded the start of a heated political season in Israel. Sharon now has 45 days to establish a working government, based on an alliance between small right-wing parties or in a coalition with the left. The left, disoriented by Barak's defeat, will seek to elect a new party chairman while settling personal scores. Meanwhile the Knesset, Israel's fractious parliament in which Likud and Labor -- the two major players -- control only a third of the seats, must adopt a 2001 budget by March 31. Failure to establish a government or pass the budget within legal deadlines would trigger new elections. No wonder, then, that Israelis showed so little enthusiasm for Tuesday's race. Voter turnout was meager, falling to a record low of about 59 percent.
"I don't want to vote and I don't care," announced Ruthi David, a primary school teacher in a purple tank top and sequin-studded sunglasses who was strolling down Shenkin Street, Tel Aviv's answer to Miami's South Beach, on Tuesday. "I voted for Barak last time but I was disappointed by his attitude and his politics so I won't support him again. Anyway, the government will fall in less than a year," said David, 24.
Since the 1992 adoption of a direct election law, Israel has elected members of the Knesset and the prime minister in separate elections. As a result, political life has become increasingly volatile and governments short-lived.
The unprecedented abstention rate was partly the result of a widely observed Arab boycott. Although Israel's Arab minority handed Barak 95 percent of its votes 21 months ago, more than 80 percent of Arab voters stayed home this time around. By avoiding the polls, they voiced their frustration with Israeli politics and their anger at Barak, a prime minister who first ignored them and then allowed his police forces to turn guns against them, killing 13 young Israeli Arabs in last fall's riots, including 17-year-old Asel Asleh, an Arab-Israeli peace activist.
But in a country where Arab voices rarely matter, Israeli pundits the day after the elections were mainly busy analyzing Sharon's victory: The electorate has spoken -- but what did it mean to say?
On the face of it, Sharon's mandate is clear: He was elected to restore Israel's peace and security in the wake of four-month-long clashes between Palestinians and Israelis. (Ironically, the violence that has killed so far more than 360 Palestinians and over 50 Israeli Jews began at the end of September, after Sharon paid a controversial visit to a Jerusalem shrine.) Repeating his campaign mantra, Sharon announced in his victory speech at a convention center in Tel Aviv Tuesday that his government would "work to restore security to citizens of Israel and achieve true peace and stability in the region."
Tuesday's vote, however, was as much a repudiation of Barak's aloof and erratic style of governing as a vote in favor of Sharon. "Even a broom would beat Barak," Limor Livnat, a right-wing Labor Knesset member, pithily observed. Moreover, the misgivings voiced both on the left and on the right showed that many Sharon voters were unsure of what kind of policy package they would be getting.
Throughout the electoral campaign, Barak's team tried to paint a vote for Sharon as a vote for war, digging up his warmongering past, predicting that gas masks and rolling tanks would make an appearance the day after a Sharon victory and even mailing fake draft orders to tens of thousands of Israelis to bring them to their senses. "Don't forget it's important to vote," droned a recorded woman's voice from a megaphone mounted on a slow-moving car in Tel Aviv, traditionally a bastion of left-wing sentiment. "It's a choice between war and peace."
But at a time when roadside shootings, suicide bombs and sniper attacks have become regular occurrences, Barak's message did not stick. For many Israelis, the country was already at war, and a comprehensive peace deal giving armed Palestinians more West Bank land and a slice of Jerusalem suddenly appeared a distant -- and possibly very dangerous -- dream. In the minds of most Israelis, the race then was not about Sharon's past as an adventurist general and the possibility of a future regional war, but about the failure of the Oslo peace process championed by Barak.
Even Israelis who were prepared to follow Barak in his bold steps toward peace last summer found his diplomatic efforts difficult to accept by the fall -- when the Palestinians launched an uprising -- and downright scandalous after Israeli soldiers were lynched by a Palestinian mob and Israeli civilians started dropping dead on a weekly basis.
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