Today's Situation

Political grist, Wednesday, March 08, 2006

But by this morning he had his copy and he was outraged. The normally soft-spoken religious kibbutznik had a difficult time hiding his feelings, charging the state comptroller, Judge Micah Lindenstrasse with ignoring the most basic fact of the evacuation of the civilian settlers -- that most in Gaza and some in the northern West Bank refused to cooperate in any way with the government authority established to help them find housing, jobs, schools for their children. ‘This is a political report,’ said Bassi, himself at least formerly a stalwart of the National Religious Party. But ever since he accepted the appointment last year to handle the civilian evacuation he has been ostracized by many of his former religious-nationalist colleagues and friends. Bassi charged that the timing of the release of the report, three weeks before the elections, clearly proves that it was politically motivated. The evacuated settlers, of course, had a different view: as far as they are concerned, the report was not critical enough.

It is a rare charge to make in Israel against a state comptroller, whose report cited a weighty and cumbersome bureaucracy, failures to accurately predict how many rented houses would be needed for the settlers, and insensitivity in dealing with settlers on the day they were evacuated.

Bassi’s interview on Israel Radio was emotional as he pleaded with the interviewer to remember that the vast majority of settlers refused to cooperate with the authorities up to the day the soldiers arrived to remove them. Even now, he noted, there are families who complain to the press about how they are being treated, but refuse to cooperate with the authority Bassi heads, known as Sela for its Hebrew acronym.

Bassi’s charge that the report’s leak was politically motivated was probably naïve, for it is not at all clear who will be helped by such a report -- the settler supporters on the Right have already stripped the Likud of many voters. Yisrael Beitenu and the National Union-NRP bloc have -- in the polls -- about 20 Knesset seats between them, while the Likud has about 15.

The TV ads don’t seem likely to cause any tidal shift in the voting patterns -- that would require a smoking gun of corruption the size of a cannon and not even Omri Sharon’s ‘diaries’ -- working papers in which he lists Likud central committee members and possible jobs for them or their relatives -- are that powerful. At least not yet. But there are three weeks to go, and support for Kadima, with its domineering position in the race, is essentially shallow. Indeed, anecdotal evidence seems to indicate that right now, the reason Kadima is so attractive to Israelis is because ‘everyone is voting for them.’

Interestingly, almost all the commentators agreed this morning that the best of the TV ads was produced by Labor, which took the viewers seriously and made an effort to tell Amir Peretz’s story of rising from rags to power, if not riches. Kadima and Likud used most of their campaign powder the first night of advertising by attacking each other; Kadima attacked Binyamin Netanyahu as panicky and unreliable, while the Likud attacked acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert as someone who spent 40 years in politics and yet nobody can remember what he ever did for the country. Neither Likud, trailing Labor by at least five Knesset seats, nor Kadima, still dominant with 37+ seats, are meanwhile taking Labor seriously -- after all, neither even mentioned Labor in their ads.

Still, there is something mysterious about these elections, which are unprecedented in Israel in the way a new self-declared Centrist party has appeared out of nowhere to grab not only the center of the political map but parts of the Right and Left. Every other centrist party that appeared on the eve of elections either faded by the time the vote came around or broke up within weeks of the elections. Kadima is not yet fading, but there does not seem to be any gravity holding its membership together other than a tautological conviction that together they deserve being the ruling party by virtue of the fact that they are the ruling party. That a third of the electorate has accepted that at face value is not a sign of Olmert’s popularity, but more likely tied to the strange circumstances of Ariel Sharon and Israeli society’s need for some kind of cathartic moment -- a state funeral -- that would once and for all might lay the ‘Sharon legacy’ to rest.

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