There is no way to avoid saying the harshest things about what is happening before the very eyes of the country's leadership. The term "political maneuver," which is meant to describe ugly behavior that is still within the boundaries of the legitimate, is not suited to this case. Don't call it "spin," either. Because what is rotating on the skewer today is no less than the fate of the country. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Defense Minister Amir Peretz are playing with it without blinking.
Not even the worst of governments has taken an inexperienced person, never mind his wild opinions, and put him in charge of dealing with what this government sees as unprecedented strategic threats. In the history of the country, there has been no one like Ehud Olmert, who with unbridled cynicism has placed the needs of a shaky coalition and personal survival considerations above the country's concerns. For months, he has not appointed a welfare minister, but he was in a hurry to give very costly political whore's pay to Yisrael Beiteinu MK Avigdor Lieberman, a person whom, for the sake of his bear hug, the prime minister is prepared to make his deputy, make responding to those threats his responsibility, change the electoral system and spit in the faces of his principal coalition partner - and the Israeli public.
What was it that the deputy prime minister-designate and minister of "formulating Israeli policy in light of the strategic threat to the country" once said? That Israel can act "from Iran to Aswan."
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Olmert did everything so that the investigation of the war would be put into hands that suit him. But the Supreme Court has not said its last word. And it will be working hand in glove with a dangerous prime minister if it allows him to stick to his illegitimate considerations in this matter as well. At the same time, the Olmert-Peretz government is a conducting a cruel war in the Gaza Strip that is exacting hundreds of victims, though it has not been declared a war. Olmert scorns the possibility of any kind of talk with the leaders of the elected Palestinian government. This purposeful neglect has already prevented for many months progress in reaching one of the two goals of the war in Lebanon - the return of the abducted soldiers. What Lieberman has said about the Arabs of Israel and the Palestinians ("I don't believe in coexistence," and many other such things) cast into Hades the chance of talk with any hostile neighbor around.
In his embarrassing, non-thunderous silence, Peretz is accompanying these moves of the prime minister's as though he were a devoted member of a virtual ruling party. To Olmert's arrogant "no" to the Syrian president's proposals for negotiations, the leader of the Labor Party responded with only a few vague mumbles. With regard to the whole difficult issue of bringing Lieberman into the government, whose purpose after all is mainly to gag the Labor Party once and for all, Peretz has reacted like a submissive political puppet. He too has allowed this deplorable move to occur only out of fear for his place and his party's place in the government. If this were not enough, he is bowing his head respectfully before the bringing in of a man who has said that in the case of conflict between a Jewish and Zionist state and the values of democracy, "the value of being Jewish and Zionist is more important to me than all the rest." Indeed, the face of Israeli politics is no longer blemished by all sorts of spin maneuvers. Rather, the most basic values of a proper Israel and of the Declaration of Independence are being cast aside with a crude hand. It would seem that it is no small wonder that all of this could unroll in public, on dirty lubricants, without even a trace of public protest arising.
There is no point in wondering. From its very first day, the Olmert government contributed to this abandonment of Israeli values and interests, while it still enjoyed the usual beginners' credit. It was in this manner that it embarked on the war and conducted it. And thus it calculated its survival moves until now, as its political situation was worsening. Now, with its devious new partner, there isn't anything that is going to stop it. Apart from one move, partial as it might be in the existing circumstances: the exit of the Labor Party from the corrupt alliance that Olmert and Lieberman have made.
What is preventing Peretz from deciding on this step, which seems so obvious? The very same thing that led the prime minister to humiliate him: stark naked personal interest. All of us will eat the results of the Olmert-Lieberman horror show. You will eat them. We will not have long to wait. You will not have long to wait.
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