With
all being sucked into the quicksand of crises that the government of Prime
Minister Ariel Sharon has only made worse, there is one sinking that can
be considered an achievement of his. He has succeeded in killing the Labor
Party. In fact, he has almost entirely wiped out any internal criticism of
him. In “Israeli” newspeak, this crushing of the political system
is called unity. At no period of unity gevernment campfires has Labor been
so pitiful. And never before has a former ruling party joined a chorus of
silence like this one, made up of most of the opposition factors in society.
Academia has fallen asleep. Peace Now, once an overflowing fount, has turned
into a puddle. The media? Benjamin Netanyahu, wizard of the small screen,
was their punching bag; Sharon has them wrapped around his little
finger.
The
one-man opposition within the government has become pathetic. Every time
Foreign Minister Shimon Peres drops a hollow hint that he might resign, it
sounds like he's crying wolf. Yesterday evening, his party's central committee
was supposed to have reached some sort of ruling between two shadows of leaders
on the question of who had cheated and how much at the primaries ballot
boxes.
National
politics has become a caricature of itself, and this picture has to change.
No intifada can justify it any longer. Certainly not when the Labor Party,
from its lowest depths, is helping Sharon scotch any diplomatic
move.
There
is no western nation where the minimum format of struggle for the government
has been eroded to this extent. The health of “Israeli” democracy
has been badly affected by the occupation ever since it began. Gradually,
after the rise and fall of Yitzhak Rabin, it turned out that the illness
of this shrunken party is a serious failure of leadership. It is not just
that the alternative of Knesset Speaker Avraham "Avrum" Burg or Defense Minister
Benjamin "Fuad" Ben-Eliezer is a Hobson's choice that kills the
appetite.
Around
them, a number of candidates - better or worse - have flamed out. Ehud Barak
is the most frustrating case. The expectations from the successful native-born
“Israeli” hero tumbled into an embarrassing fiasco of government.
Even Shlomo Ben-Ami, a man with qualities that afforded him a high political
level, is now trailing behind. From this low perch, he is proposing the Labor
Party quit the government. This will happen only when Ben-Ami takes wing
into the leadership, or when he himself quits the party of Sharon's petty
clerks.
The
only opposition that is threatening the prime minister is called Netanyahu,
and at his side in the public opinion surveys marches the failure who succeeded
him.
These
political shallow waters are a symptom of a national decline. And if only
for this reason, the resignation of some of the best people in the Labor
Party is needed, followed by their shifting to a new center-left bloc. Yossi
Beilin is denying that he has been holding talks about this with opposition
leader Yossi Sarid (Meretz). But Beilin has nothing more to look for in a
party that keeps plummeting like the rope after Sharon's bucket toward no
peace agreement, a guttering economy and onward perhaps toward a governing
mentality of fake and populist unity that lies to a fearful people. This
is an ugly formula that has given rise to some of the worst governing formats
in modern
history.
All
this should also be seen as a threat by those, a current and fairly firm
majority, who do not believe in the chances of a peace agreement. This is
because the process of despairing any agreement with the Palestinians has
been accompanied by a flabby giving up on all the rest of the main national
issues. The top level of academia has stopped participating in the public
game. Grave terror attacks are putting to sleep the little oppositional fervor
that remains in the “Israeli” intelligentsia. Gush Shalom, a determined
but small group, is the only extra-parliamentary element that is waging any
real oppositional struggle. Even the two most important poets in
“Israel”, Natan Zach and Dalia Rabikovitch, are talking about the
paralysis in creativity that has descended upon them because of the rock-bottom
level of national
discourse.
The
resignation of Beilin and some of his colleagues would not be an earth-shaking
event. But it would at least resemble throwing a pebble into the stagnant
waters of a swamp. If it turns out that Beilin - one of the boldest and most
creative people in the Labor Party - is also incapable of doing this, let
him sit there and keep his mouth shut while his inventor, Shimon Peres, continues
to lend his hand to the death of “Israeli”
politics.