Haifa — In front of the Armon David (David’s Palace) banquet hall in Hadera last Friday, the morning after a Palestinian shot up a bat mitzvah celebration and killed six guests, the focus of people’s anger seemed to be not on the Arabs, but on the Israeli Left.
Somebody had taped placards across the front of the hall accusing the “Left,” “the media” and the “justice system” of being “collaborators with the enemy” and “enemies of the people.” Nobody was inclined to tear them down, or if they were, they didn’t dare. The loudest of the people venting their anger was a woman yelling about “that Shimon Heres” – “heres” meaning “destruction” in Hebrew. “He’s the real prime minister, they have to get him out of there!” she raged.
This is the right-wing’s consensus position — that Shimon Peres’ presence as foreign minister and the Labor Party’s presence in the national unity government are hamstringing Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. If it weren’t for his need to placate Peres and Labor by restraining his actions against the intifada, Sharon, according to the Right, would open up both barrels, and do like the Americans are doing in Afghanistan. He’d use Israel’s vastly superior firepower to bring the Palestinians to heel, and that would be the end of Israel’s problems.
At Hillel Yaffe hospital, the wounded were lying in their beds, surrounded by family and friends, when Absorption Minister Yuli Edelstein came by to visit. All the injured were from the former Soviet Union, mainly from Georgia, and Edelstein spoke to them in Russian.
“One of the family members asked me the classic question of late — ‘How long is this going to go on?’” Edelstein said. “Since I wasn’t going to lie to him, I told him I don’t know how long it’s going to go on, but what I could promise him was that the government would do the maximum to bring security.”
Edelstein was asked whether the Hadera attack, or the ones that had preceded it, had changed his views in any way. Edelstein, a former Prisoner of Zion, is a hawk (and, among politicians, a candid, honest individual).
He said his views had remained consistent: Yasser Arafat is not a partner for peace, and all Israel can do is hope that his successors will be more pragmatic and trustworthy. Unless and until such successors come to the helm of the Palestinian nation, Israel cannot hope for peace, but rather will have to settle for a “calming of the situation via military means,” he said.
It was suggested that even such a “calming” was nowhere on the horizon. Edelstein said it was possible to achieve by cracking down harder on the Palestinians. He said the “easing” of the closure on the Palestinians in the West Bank after Arafat’s call for a cease-fire on Dec. 16 was a mistake.
“We were warned that as soon as the tanks pulled back there would be more terror attacks,” he said. The thing to do was to clamp down on the Palestinians full force. This would not calm the situation immediately, Edelstein said, but within a reasonable amount of time, it would.
But isn’t it likely that Sharon, who has considerable experience at clamping down on Palestinians, has considered this idea? Edelstein agreed it was.
Then why hasn’t he adopted it?
“Because he has to pay the price of keeping Labor in the national unity government,” Edelstein replied.
So Sharon is following a policy that he knows will lead to increased terror, only to keep the Labor Party in the government? At this point Edelstein became a little less candid. “I can’t say what Sharon knows and what he doesn’t know,” he said. But he repeated that Sharon is restraining himself to preserve the national unity government, and that this restraint is allowing the terror to continue.
The Right’s delusion
Yuli Edelstein is an honest man; he doesn’t have a demagogic bone in his body. But he, like the rest of the Right, is deluding himself on why the intifada is continuing.
If Sharon had the answer to the terror but was declining to use it because he wanted to keep Labor in his coalition, he would be an extraordinarily evil and irrational man. Evil because he would deliberately be allowing Jews to die when he could save them. Irrational because he would be refusing to do the thing — stop the intifada — that would make him a political giant, a savior, a genius, a world-historic figure with no rivals, all to keep Labor in his government.
But Sharon is not evil, at least not with regard to innocent Jews, and he is not irrational. He wants to stop the intifada. Yet even with all Israel’s firepower, he can’t. If he could, he would. And this is impossible for the ideological Right to accept.
The Right believes that overwhelming force is the answer to Israel’s problems with the Palestinians. But when it comes to using overwhelming force against Palestinians, Sharon holds all the patents. And it’s not working. It hasn’t worked for the 10 months he’s been in office. All that’s happened is Israel’s situation has gotten steadily worse.
After the Camp David talks failed and the intifada broke out 16 months ago, the Israeli Left was compelled to admit that its belief in compromise as the route to peace had failed. Now it is the Right’s turn to admit that its belief in unremitting force as the route to security has likewise failed.
Even honest, candid Israelis like Yuli Edelstein haven’t gotten around to admitting this yet. Imagine how long it will take the right-wing “street” and its champions, starting with the prime minister. Until then, expect more of the same, only worse.
Larry Derfner writes about Israeli society for U.S. Jewish newspapers and The Jerusalem Post.
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