By <a href="mailto:eldar@haaretz.co.il" class="tUbl2">Akiva Eldar</a>
Recent polls are telling us that one out of every three eligible voters plans to place the fate of his country in the hands of a 78-year-old Jew whose intentions are so amorphous that if there are any people who know where he intends to lead the country (including the man himself), they could fit inside a telephone booth. Ministers who consider themselves his associates knew less than nothing about his plan to withdraw from the Gaza Strip without offering anything in exchange. If Ariel Sharon had asked the national security adviser, Giora Eiland, for a working paper analyzing the unilateral process, the prime minister would likely have done things differently, if at all. But Eiland - like most ministers, all the heads of the security establishment and the Foreign Ministry's senior officials - only heard about that plan for the first time in the Herzliya speech.
Barring any sensational surprises in the coming years, the State of Israel will operate, as it has in the past, without proper administrative work or orderly decision-making processes. As with the disengagement plan of 2005, the Camp David negations of July 2000 and the Oslo Accords of September 1993 were also the brainchildren of the prime ministers at the time and a handful of others. Eiland, who has closely accompanied the last three prime ministers (Benjamin Netanyahu, Ehud Barak and Sharon) says Israeli governments have "no integrative staff group to run the affairs of state."
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ational Security Council (NSC) chairman Eiland vigorously requests that his comments not be interpreted as a personal criticism of Sharon, but as dissatisfaction with the general situation. "Sharon tends to listen and doesn't tear down criticism," he says. "He relates appropriately to positions that differ from his own, and occasionally is even convinced [by them]." It's important for Eiland to say that major security issues like the nuclear race, the Syrian threat and the fight against terror are dealt with in an appropriately systemic way. But everything changes in relation to politically explosive topics - first and foremost, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which has already toppled five prime ministers.
Finding an heir Prof. Yehezkel Dror, a 2005 Israel Prize winner and a world-renowned researcher of statesmanship and policy-making, agrees that Israel cannot allow itself to make bad decisions. In his book "The Capacity to Govern," he points to a global tendency to concentrate power in the hands of a single leader and sees this trend as having a negative influence on the quality of democratic governments.
In a conversation in his office in the Jewish People Policy Planning Institute, established by the Jewish Agency, Dror cautions that in the present case, only fools will be comforted to know that misery loves company. "There is no democratic country that faces such critical problems as the ones the State of Israel faces," he says, adding that he is not referring specifically to foreign affairs and security issues, but to challenges such as designing the face of Israeli society as a Jewish, democratic country. Dror notes that the heightened influence of presidents and heads of state in Israel and elsewhere in the world demands that the voter's margin of error be as limited as possible, and that the danger of electing an inappropriate candidate be reduced. He proposes, for example, that every candidate be questioned at length on television, to allow professionals to remove the layers of makeup that political cosmeticians apply to the faces of their clients.
In Dror's new book, "Epistle to an Israeli Jewish-Zionist Leader," he writes that "it is necessary to lower the average age of leaders of all kinds, including senior political staffers." The veteran political scientist notes that he knows quite a few foolish young people and brilliant old people, but he believes that the young have a better chance of understanding the changing world. Elsewhere in the book, Dror recommends to the Israeli leader that "when you feel that your strength has ebbed, or your doctors tell you that your health and the medication you take are liable to affect your activity level, you must leave your post while making an effort to pass it on to a worthy leader, whether permanently or for the period of time necessary to rehabilitate your strength and ability."
Later on, Dror urges the leader to do all he can to pass the job on to his successor in an orderly fashion, presenting all the information and explaining all the activities he is involved in. The same applies if your 'heir' fought you and got your job despite your opposition,' he writes.
Dror is concerned that Sharon will not rush to appoint an heir. "First of all, people don't like to think about death, and second of all, a great No. 2 is liable to be a competitor." He says David Ben-Gurion was the first and last Israeli prime minister to train a young leadership. It's difficult to exaggerate the importance of a deputy on the caliber of No. 1, he continues, especially when the leader has long passed the retirement age. Former U.S. vice president Al Gore was on the level of ex-president Bill Clinton; as vice president, George H.W. Bush was an administration official who was more experienced than then-president Ronald Reagan. Dror is worried that if something happens to Sharon, the new MKs will oppose early elections and "will decide who will take the prime minister's place by doing 'Eeny, meeny, miney, mo.'"
No 'border zone' Eiland, for his part, says that politicians have avoided dealing with small problems, even if they know that neglecting them could turn them into national problems. "As long as the problem is small, they have difficulty recruiting the political support in order to pay the price involved in dealing with it, and prefer to wait for a crisis situation until they make the right decisions," he says.
Since Eiland was appointed to his post two years ago, he notes, the prime minister has enjoyed no more than one week of political tranquility. Eiland compares him to someone who must make crucial decisions while perched precariously on a soccer ball, and trying to avoid falling off.
According to Eiland, who has headed the planning and operations departments in the Israel Defense Forces, the chief of staff wouldn't consider making critical decisions without asking the respective administrative bodies to present an array of alternatives, along with the price tag for each. In the army, after the senior command decides, there are staffers who monitor the implementation of the decision, and there is someone who chooses between two commanders' differing interpretations of the decision. Eiland reveals that these three important factors - providing alternatives, monitoring and bridging - are alien to the civilian leadership.
Eiland utterly rejects the argument that the many advisers surrounding the prime minister would be able to make up for what is missing. Despite their access to the prime minister and the trusting relationships among them, he says, the tools at the disposal of Sharon's political adviser, intelligence adviser and military secretary, and the scope of their staff work, are at most on the level of a regiment commander's bureau. By contrast, the NSC has the ability to carry out comprehensive staff work, but it has only partial and insufficient access to the leadership, says Eiland.
An additional difficulty stems from the absence of a 'border zone' between those advisers and the NSC, he points out: "It's not clear who's responsible for what, and the entire system between me and the advisers is built on personal relationships. Tomorrow someone could arrive at the bureau and there would be no chemistry between us."
One of the diagnoses Eiland suggests for this illness is related specifically to the security and political background of Israeli prime ministers. "When an American president comes from the governor's office in Arkansas or Texas, the initial assumption is that the military arena and the foreign affairs issue are alien to him and that he has to learn and consult," he says. "We assume, however, that if someone is elected prime minister, it's a sign that he's the greatest expert on foreign affairs and security. This paradigm, that he knows everything, exerts pressure on him, too, to make decisions without consulting. After all, as we said, he knows everything."
As someone who conducted the negotiations with the United Nations ahead of the withdrawal from Lebanon and was involved in talks preceding the Mitchell, Tenet and Zinni reports, Eiland has an interesting perspective on the Israeli leadership. "The decision-makers here prefer the bottom line to a proper process of preparation for negotiations - including examining the basic assumptions, defining your interests and mapping out those of the rival parties, formulating minimal objectives and determining the negotiation tactics."
Eiland does not ignore the advantage of speed, intuition and discretion, as compared to the lack of an orderly process that requires involving many people and is accompanied by the danger of leaks. He is also familiar with politicians' concerns that a wide-ranging discussion is likely to lead to conclusions different from those stemming from their beliefs or plans. However, in the final analysis, he is bothered that bodies like the NSC, which can supply good results in a reasonable amount of time and with the minimum amount of leaks, are not utilized as much as they could be.
'The emissary' Ephraim Halevy, Eiland's predecessor at the NSC and the former head of the Mossad espionage agency, has difficulty hiding his regrets over the abandonment of the foundations of Israel's security policy and strategy, for which he blames people he calls "the prime minister's emissaries," hinting at attorney Dov Weissglas. Halevy singles out two far-reaching decisions made during Sharon's term of office. One is an offhand change made in the historic position that Israel does not place its security in the hands of foreigners - especially not in the hands of Europeans and, more particularly, in those of the Arabs (other than in the framework of peace arrangements and interim accords such as those concerning the multinational force in the Sinai and the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon.
And here, says Halevy, almost overnight, the prime minister has changed his policy of obstinately refusing to give Egypt any task relating to Israel's security. At Israel's request, the Egyptians are not just serving as a buffer force, but have the everyday job of assuring a certain layer of Israel's security, and European monitors have been given the authority to decide who enters Gaza.
"Suddenly, things are all mixed up," says Halevy. "Has there been a change in our security outlook? Who decided that from now on, security would be assured by external forces as well? All this was done in improvised negotiations of the moment for temporary goals, between some emissary and the [U.S.] secretary of state, without examining the broader ramifications for the long term, in negotiations between the secretary of state and some emissary whose name I don't want to mention."
The second topic that raises Halevy's blood pressure is the road map plan. He recalls that at the end of May 2003, Sharon canceled his trip to the United States because of a terror attack, sending 'the emissary' in his place. Two days later, the prime minister announced the acceptance of the road map. That weekend, the ministers got a copy of the plan faxed to their homes; the next day the document was brought before the government for approval.
'The emissary, who was asked how the Americans reacted to our position, said the secretary of state's body language was positive," says Halevy. "He was sitting across from a professional team including the head of the NSC, the head of the Mossad, the IDF chief of staff and the head of the Shin Bet security service - but none of the ministers asked them to analyze the document. Tzipi Livni was the only one who bothered to delve into it."
Halevy says the prime minister is nothing other than a "first among equals." He attributes the intensity of this centralization to the absence of a serious internal debate with defense ministers on the level of Yitzhak Rabin and Moshe Arens, and the existence of ministers who observe from the side as others alter Israel's security doctrine and impose political plans
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