Sharon Quits Likud Leaving Israeli Politics Reeling

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel has agreed to elections in the next few months after a new Labour leader, a leftish trade unionist named Amir Peretz, won his party’s race for the job. The Likud-Labour coalition has overseen the withdrawal from Gaza, but it is out of steam. New elections will help, but Mr. Sharon decided to take on his right-wing rebels by leaving them to run for office without his leadership. Rather than force them out of the party, he’s setting up his own. Israeli politics will never be the same, and it doesn’t bode well for the peace process.

Under Mr. Peretz, Labour is going to be more focused on the internal situation in Israel. Everyone in America forgets that Israel was founded by socialists, and that for decades, Labour was their party. Mr. Peretz promises to take the party back to its roots. And that means that any attention given to international relations will be seen through that prism. Mainly, Labour will be a peace-at-just-about-any-price party.

The rump of Likud, without the brakes offered by Mr. Sharon, will turn harder to the right than ever. Indeed, many of Israel’s small religious parties will consider joining up, or at least be accommodating when carving up cabinet seats if Likud should carry the day when ballots get counted. It will be a rejectionist party pure and simple.

Which puts Mr. Sharon’s new grouping in the center, not a bad place to be in a proportional representative system like Israel’s, but there are significant drawbacks. Polls suggest Likud will take 20 seats, and Mr. Sharon’s crowd will be good for 28 – meaning an even greater fragmentation of power in the 120-seat Knesset. Parties of the center also get run over by traffic from both directions in Israel. In short, Mr. Sharon’s gamble is a big one.

What one can expect from the elections in February or March is a continued mess in Israeli electoral politics that will ensure moves toward a settlement on the Palestinian issue will be small and hesitant. Since the Palestinian side is weak and divided, the situation will remain in the hands of the hardliners, who only need one or two suicide bombers to scuttle everything. As this journal has said before, there is no peace in the Middle East because no one seems to want it. This just makes betting against peace an even safer bet.


© Copyright 2005 by The Kensington Review, J. Myhre, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent.
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