Arik - The Life Of Ariel Sharon (75 page)

Ruby Rivlin, Sharon’s faithful follower from the wilderness years, now his minister of communications and political fixer, urged the prime minister to make do with the abstentions. After all, in victory, magnanimity. “Let’s talk about something else,” Sharon growled. “Something nice.” The lobby correspondents complied, regaling him with the latest political gossip. Gradually, he leaned back and relaxed, silently ingesting the little nuggets of useful information.

More than previous prime ministers, Sharon kept coming to the Knesset dining room. He would come to eat hearty schnitzel lunches in his slow and fastidious way, to enjoy an off-the-record laugh with the correspondents, usually at a rival’s expense, to radiate confidence at times of crisis. “He would carefully empty two sachets of sweetener into his soup,”
Yossi Verter of
Haaretz
recalls, “and that was the signal for us to start swapping tidbits of gossip. He would listen avidly but discreetly kept his own counsel, confining himself to a noncommittal ‘Really?’ or ‘What do you say?’ to keep jogging us along.”

That day late in May, when he banned
Shas’s vicarious wheedling from his table talk, was a seminal moment in Sharon’s prime ministership. For all his determination, frequently stated, to maintain his coalition until the end of the Knesset term in November 2003, he signaled now that he would not be pushed around by any of the partners, even if that meant early elections. Netanyahu had contended that governing would be impossible at the head of such a small ruling party—Likud’s paltry nineteen seats—and such a fractured and fractious Knesset. Sharon was out to prove him wrong and then to beat him in the inexorable next round of their unending duel, whenever it took place.

With the intifada and the economic crisis to contend with, that was a tall order at best. Sharon seemed to make things worse for himself by deliberately antagonizing his right-wing allies, including the right wing of his own party. But he was already building a base of public support that would transcend party politics.

The cracks in the Likud ominously widened. Party rules required a meeting of the central committee at least every six months. By early May, Sharon had run out of excuses and postponements. The invitations went out, and he braced himself for a lambasting. It was even worse than he had feared. “You have undermined the nation’s security,” Netanyahu hurled at him. “Without any democratic process whatever—not in the party, not in the cabinet, not in the Knesset, and above all not in a general election—you have undermined, with your uncalled-for statements, a pillar of our movement’s policy and a
foundation of our national security. Suddenly the position of the Left supporting a
Palestinian state, the position of Sarid and Peres, has become the official policy of the government of Israel.” Netanyahu demanded an unequivocal resolution by the central committee rejecting this policy.

The meeting ended in a stinging defeat for Sharon. He left the hall before the result was announced, aware that he was about to be publicly trounced. But despite losing the vote, Sharon had in fact won: Netanyahu had overreached himself. Far from becoming a lame-duck prime minister, spurned by his own party, as Netanyahu’s aides were busily spinning the night’s events, Sharon had emerged with his stature enhanced, a national leader who put the nation’s interest before narrow party advantage. His mandate to continue his policies rested now not on the widely reviled Likud central committee but on the whole electorate.

At the Likud faction meeting in the Knesset the next day “the smell of last night’s bad blood hovered in the air,” Verter reported. But Sharon, refreshed and relaxed, launched into his statement, looking straight into the television cameras. “I would like to make something clear. The considerations that guide me, that affect my decision making, are solely considerations of state … I respect the members of the central committee; but [raising his voice] the responsibility is mine. Two-thirds of the public voted for me, with the intention that I take decisions. And I am taking decisions. In order to achieve security and peace, I must act firmly, sensibly, and patiently. And nothing will sidetrack me from my fixed course, certainly not internal political considerations and personal gambits.”
¹

It was in this newly assertive mood that Sharon found himself challenged by Shas over the government’s tough economic measures. The malaise was deep. The vast and growing ultra-Orthodox, or
haredi,
sector that Shas represented, where the men studied and the women had babies year after year, was becoming a deadweight that the productive part of the economy could no longer carry. In the Arab sector, too, families were large and
unemployment rates high, as women generally did not work. Over the previous decade or so, as the
haredi
sector grew in numbers and with it the power of the
haredi
parties, welfare transfer payments had mushroomed to a whopping 13 percent of
GDP.

A shift of emphasis from the settlements to the poor, which Barak had begun to instigate during his short term, sufficed to postpone the day of reckoning so long as the economy hummed along. But the bursting of the
Nasdaq bubble in 2000 and the worldwide recession
that followed grievously affected the high-tech sector that had become the locomotive pulling Israel toward prosperity. Dozens of Israeli companies registered on the Nasdaq exchange in
New York were laid low, and thousands of their high-flying employees in Israel found themselves at the labor exchange.

The intifada compounded Israel’s economic woes. While its competitors began climbing out of the crisis, Israel found it hard to attract new investments and harder still to persuade potential investors to come and visit its research laboratories and production lines when buses were blowing up on its streets. More angst for Sharon and his finance minister,
Silvan Shalom, came from the governor of the Bank of Israel, a dour economist named David Klein, who insisted on keeping interest rates high throughout 2001 as a bulwark against inflation. In December 2001, he agreed to a 2 percent cut in return for Sharon’s and Shalom’s solemn promises to tighten the nation’s belt.

The government’s revenues from
taxation, moreover, were shrinking fast as the economy contracted. From September 2001 to April 2002,
GDP shrank by 5 percent.
Unemployment topped 11 percent. As the deficit grew, a serious collapse of confidence threatened in both domestic and overseas markets. Increasingly, the Finance Ministry found it hard to raise money abroad. Forced to pay more in interest on its bonds, Israel was having to funnel ever more of its resources into servicing its debts. Governor Klein, in a demonstration of his own doubts about the government’s capacity to discipline itself, began raising interest rates again, in leaps. In a brief six weeks during April and May he doubled them, from 4.5 percent to 9 percent.

No sooner had the 2002 austerity package been pushed through the Knesset than the Finance Ministry mandarins began planning another round of even deeper cuts, to be incorporated into the state budget for 2003. Government spending would be pruned by another massive nine billion shekels: three billion from defense, despite the intifada; three billion from welfare, despite the political fallout; and another three billion in across-the-board cuts in all the other government departments. The plan was especially aggressive toward unemployment benefits. Criteria for recipients would be severely tightened, and the payments themselves would be reduced.
^a

On October 28, 2002, Sharon was back in the Knesset dining room, doing another of his tough and confident performances. This time the party he was not going to be pushed around by was Labor. The man who would have to eat humble pie was his old army comrade, now his corpulent and pliant defense minister, Binyamin “Fuad” Ben-Eliezer. He insisted that Labor MKs vote in favor of the 2003 budget, which was to have its first reading in the house two days later. At cabinet the day before, he had laid it out with brutal clarity. “Whoever doesn’t vote for the budget won’t be able to remain in the government.”

Henry Kissinger famously once observed that Israel’s foreign policy is essentially an extension of its domestic politics. That is similarly the case with its economic policy. Sharon’s first government eventually fell over economic policy, but the economic arguments in cabinet were always colored by the ideological divide. “Money for the poor—or money for the settlements?” was Labor’s simplistic but compelling slogan.

The stakes could hardly be higher—for both men. Sharon knew, despite his bluster, that if he lost Labor, his government was unlikely to survive. And an election would mean, first, a Likud Party leadership primary against Netanyahu—still a daunting prospect. He was far ahead of his perennial rival in nationwide opinion polls. But the nation didn’t vote in the Likud primary; only party members did. And among many of them Bibi was still the preferred leader.

Ben-Eliezer was already in the thick of his own party’s primary, fending off a vigorous challenge from the bright new star in Labor’s firmament, Haifa’s mayor,
Amram Mitzna. The pundits had expected
Ben-Eliezer to pick a fight with Sharon toward the year’s end, preferably over socioeconomic policy rather than defense, where Sharon was strongest. He had to shore up Labor’s distinctive political identity in advance of the general elections the next year.
^b
They all warned that Labor would be crushed if it tried to fight the election from inside Sharon’s coalition.

Now, because of the Labor leadership contest, Ben-Eliezer’s need to rebel and bolt had become even more pressing. Both Mitzna and the third candidate, Haim Ramon, were demanding that Labor secede at once and accusing Ben-Eliezer of kowtowing to Sharon. At a stormy session of Labor’s central committee just hours after Sharon’s blunt caution at cabinet, Ben-Eliezer outdid the other two in counterattacking the prime minister. “Don’t preach to me about responsibility and national unity,” he bellowed, apostrophizing Sharon. “What kind of unity is it when the majority of the population keeps having to give more and more and a small minority with political power always manages to get more and more?”

The “small minority” were, of course, the settlers. Ben-Eliezer had deftly conflated Labor’s limp resistance to the budget’s sledgehammer blows at the welfare state with the party’s comfortably familiar (and equally ineffectual) opposition to the settlements, at least the farther-flung ones. He had managed to boil down the dispute to one sound bite: move $145 million from the settlements to the hard-hit “development towns” in the south of the country—and say so. The sum was almost paltry in a budget of $57 billion. Sharon could have moved it easily. The hard part for the prime minister was to do so publicly, and thereby acknowledge that the settlements were a drain on the national purse and specifically that they soaked up money that would otherwise have been available to help poor voters get through the hard times. Whatever he himself might already have been contemplating privately for the farther-flung settlements, Sharon had to hang tough over every last one of them, in view of his struggle with Netanyahu and the party hard-liners. He could not give Ben-Eliezer the words he wanted.

Despite Labor’s secession, the 2003 budget passed on first reading with a majority of 67, which gave Sharon brief grounds for hope that he might be able to keep going. He tried to woo the hard-line National Union–Yisrael Beiteinu, but that party’s leader,
Avigdor Lieberman, was withering in debunking his blandishments. “I hear the prime minister saying that first thing after the election he will try to re-create
the unity government, that he will prefer
Shimon Peres and
Amram Mitzna to us. What do you think we are, chewing gum to be used and then spat out?”
²

Lieberman’s logic was impeccable. Sharon had been emphasizing, publicly and privately, his firm commitment both to the two-state solution, which President Bush had publicly adopted in his June 24 speech as his “vision,” and to the “
road map” diplomacy that Washington was evolving with its allies to bring this solution about.
^c
But these policies were precisely what Lieberman and his party opposed.

They were also opposed by Netanyahu, to whom Sharon now offered the Foreign Ministry. This was a brilliant move as Netanyahu would be hard put to reject this call to arms, especially at so fraught a moment in national and international affairs with the Palestinian intifada still raging and the Americans preparing to launch their attack on Iraq soon. If he accepted, that might persuade Lieberman to set aside his own objections and join, too. That would give the government another year in office, with Netanyahu effectively neutralized in the “golden cage” of the Foreign Ministry. If, on the other hand, Netanyahu refused, and thus hastened the government’s demise, he would be seen in the party as churlish and in the country at large as extremist. On the face of it, it was a win-win prospect for Sharon.

Netanyahu finally slipped out of Sharon’s hammerlock, and applied an awkward one of his own, by announcing that he would accept the proffered Foreign Ministry—but only if the prime minister agreed to hold early elections. The Likud could double its strength, Netanyahu asserted, pointing to the polls.

With Lieberman unbending, Sharon was anyway moving toward the same conclusion. On the evening of November 4, the prime minister assembled his advisers at his
Tel Aviv office. Most urged him to go for elections. It would be demeaning, they argued, for him to scratch around for splinter factions or lone MKs to woo in order to rebuild a parliamentary majority. And to try to push the budget through its second and third readings without a majority would be even more distasteful: it would mean endless wheeling and dealing with parties large and small.

What swung him around in the end, according to a participant, were polling figures provided by the in-house pollster,
Kalman Gayer. Gayer’s figures tracked the inevitable showdown between Sharon and Netanyahu for the leadership of the Likud. Sharon was eight points ahead. “Couldn’t be better,” Gayer proclaimed. Sharon pondered quietly.
“Gentlemen,” he finally declared at 1:30 a.m. “I’m going to the president!” He would ask for elections in ninety days, as the law provided. By the time his various rivals had awoken to what was at hand, the deed would have been done. No time for anyone to try to head him off.