Bigger men than Ariel Sharon have fallen for less than this. They fell for much less than the national imbroglio that ensnares Israel, largely on account of Sharon's policies. Does it really suffice to pin all responsibility for the crisis on gangs of Palestinian terrorists and a frail Mahmoud Abbas, while absolving Israel's prime minister?
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Quite possibly, Ehud Barak got a bit carried away by his own rhetoric this week when he said in a private conversation that Sharon and the Likud's strategy of "playing around" in the diplomatic arena "threatens the Zionist enterprise on a historical level." Nonetheless, taking a broad view of the matter, Barak's comment is not necessarily a hyperbole. No less threatening to Israel than external events is the fact that something very bad has happened to its own political framework and response mechanisms: the notion that the failed leader ought to pack up and go home is not part of the public discourse.
Like a serialized exhibition of horrors, the heap of his blunders and failures, along with suspicions of wrongdoing, is exposed repeatedly to millions of readers and viewers in the country. There is no need to revisit this ugly pile for Sharon to be asked to draw political conclusions about his own future. But like no other prime minister before him, Sharon has insulated himself against challenges to his post. The Likud chides him only for his political moderation. Without breaking a sweat, he refutes his detractors, securing constant impunity from that charge.
Yet, as invariably happens in politics, rivals are sneaking up on him from his own camp. Benjamin Netanyahu would be delighted to see him collapse. And nobody should be so foolish as to choose voluntarily a rival like Ehud Olmert, a political viper whose bite never comes a second too early.
No Likud leader has ever faced such a pathetic opposition. Shimon Peres said this week that he didn't think that Labor's goal was to be an opposition party: His statement constitutes one of the most comical, verbal flip-flops to be found in Peres's rich repertoire. Nor has Israel ever witnessed a ruling family whose two sons act with such feckless liberty; and one of them delves so deeply into affairs of the state that, in a shocking parallel to political dynamics in the Middle East or Latin America, his name is mentioned here and there as a possible future successor. Mention of that eventuality is not satiric exaggeration: Haaretz's political correspondent wrote recently about the Sharon family's intention to groom MK Omri Sharon for the prime minister's post, but not before prime minister Olmert - in a kind of non-comic relief - will prepare him for the role.
Shards from this political picture - a portrait that has taken shape during one of the country's gravest national crises - dangle invitingly today above the desks of those well versed in power plays and intrigue. Why? Because even Sharon's most adamant supporters wager that he and his family could discombobulate as ticking political time-bombs in police investigations. A decision as to whether indictments are to be filed against Sharon's sons will have to be reached before Attorney General Elyakim Rubinstein resigns in mid-January, en route to a covetted seat on the Supreme Court.
Even if a distinction is to be biblically drawn between the sour fruit (allegedly) eaten by his sons and the father's blunt teeth, within a few months Sharon is liable to be patriarch of a family suspected of criminal offenses. At that point, the tentacles will come out, even from the Likud party. Should Sharon's promise to bring about peace and security vanish from the field of vision of even its die-hard believers, it would be the beginning of Sharon's political end.
Raison d'etat, the good of the state, is not an unacceptable mandate for high legal calculations. However, despite all his promises, and all the time that has gone by, the prime minister has not delivered any of that good to the state. Will Rubinstein, on his way to the loftiest bench, dare to repeat the reply he gave last month to professors Yaron Ezrahi and Mordechai Kremnitzer, who demanded that conclusions be drawn regarding Sharon? "We live in the world of deceit," said the attorney general, in cagey sophistry.
Not only the death trail stalked by fanatic Palestinian organizations, but also the prime minister's ways contribute to Israel's catastrophic plight, to blood shed of the innocent. One need not rely on the banal, oft misinterpreted quotation from Chaim Nahman Bialik's verse - "Satan has not yet created vengeance against a small child's blood" - to demand that a leader be responsible for the cost of his policy. Two years of a national tailspin suffice to tell him that he ought to go
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