Sharon reclaims Shas and rebukes
Mofaz, but currency continues to slide
Israel’s mass-circulation tabloids appear with almost identical front pages, with the
attempts to stop the continued slide of the shekel against the dollar as the lead story.
Maariv quotes Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s declaration “I believe in the
shekel” in its banner headline, while Yediot Ahronot’s predicts “Another
interest rate hike soon.”
Dominating the front pages too are photographs of the latest victims of militant attacks
three religious seminary students killed by a Palestinian gunman at the settlement of
Itamar in the West Bank, and the victims of the suicide bombing at a Petah Tikvah cafe
earlier this week.
Also featured in both newspapers is the impending return of the Shas Party to the ruling
coalition, a week after being dismissed by Sharon, in the wake of a pledge to support the
government emergency economic program from now on.
Maariv and Yediot Ahronot both highlight a spat between Sharon and the Israeli
military’s chief of staff, Lieutenant General Shaul Mofaz, over the latter’s
remark at a Cabinet meeting that Israel should expel Palestinian President Yasser Arafat
and Sharon’s telling Mofaz bluntly not to meddle in political matters and to stick to
running the army.
In an editorial headlined “In the shadow of a volcano,” Yediot Ahronot’s
Sever Plotzker strikes a melancholic note. He writes that “Israeli society tries to
function as a normal society, to pretend that we are just another Western country, where a
lot happens but there is no war. But there is a war, and it overshadows everything. We
live in the shadow of an active volcano of terror, and as hard as we try, we cannot ignore
it. It erupts every day and every night. The explosions shake every home. We’ve
stopped counting the dead. And we never even began counting the wounded. One never gets
used to it, however hard one tries to repress it. The sirens of the ambulances won’t
let us get on with our jobs and lives as if nothing has happened. ‘Another
attack?’ we ask. ‘Where? How many killed?’”
Despite all the apparent diversions, Plotzker says, “it’s only ostensibly that
we get excited about the World Cup, plan our summer vacations, follow the antics of Shas
or the latest high-society divorce. Under the surface, there’s a feeling of
uncertainty, anxiety and fear. The lighted fuse and the ticking time-bomb of the next
terrorist outrage are always with us, wherever we go, whatever we do. Normality is just a
brief gap between the black thunderclouds. Abnormality, the existential horror of survival
under the volcano of fanatical terrorism, has become our reality.”
No more cheerful than Plotzker is Maariv columnist Yael Paz-Melamed, bewailing the
government’s failure to build a physical barrier to separate the Palestinian and
Israeli areas. “The citizen-soldiers who left their homes several weeks ago under
emergency call up orders are serving as a human fence, instead of the one that should have
been built ages ago to protect us from the assailants. But nothing changes here: instead
of policy, there’s shooting from the hip; instead of farsighted vision, there’s
putting out brush fires and shoddy improvisation.”
Writing that a decision in principle has been taken to set up the barrier, Paz-Melamed
gloomily predicts: “Before anything is done about it, a lot more blood will be shed
and much more emergency call up papers issued. That’s the easy way out, it
doesn’t rile the settlers and the right-wingers, to whom the idea of dividing the
land with a fence is abhorrent, and it doesn’t demand hard decisions on policy. The
vagueness lives on, and it is nothing more than a fog covering the great nothing.
There’s no plan, no horizon, no light at the end of tunnel, only the emergency call
up papers.”
Both newspapers carry double-page spreads on the clash between Sharon and Mofaz, whom
Maariv says told the Cabinet that “it would be a historic error not to expel
Arafat.”
Mofaz and Shin Bet chief Avi Dichter are reported to have urged the government to send the
army into the Palestinian areas and remain there “until the job is done.” Maariv
says Labor Party leader and Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer rejected the
recommendation, and said that the present policy of pinpoint operations followed by
immediate withdrawal would continue.
Yediot Ahronot carries two news analyses on the subject. Under the headline, “Sharon
Shows Who’s Boss,” political analyst Shimon Schiffer says that “the prime
minister, who himself as an army officer gave the politicians a lot of grief, has decided
that it is time to put a stop to what he sees as military meddling in politics and
contempt for civilian decision-makers. What’s more, Sharon knows that there are
international constraints that preclude expelling the Palestinian leader. You don’t
have to be the chief of staff to realize that the United States would not back such a move
even a private can see that.”
Yediot Ahronot commentator Ofer Shelah sees the latest clash as “another illustration
of the belligerent line taken by the army since the fighting began, which has to a large
extent shaped the attitude of the politicians and the public as well. They portray Arafat
as a satanic demon, with absolute control and responsibility for all the terror. They
assert that there is no partner on the other side for a political settlement or even a
cease-fire and that only if we stay in the territories for an extended time will the
attacks be blocked. The inescapable conclusion of this outlook is that Arafat must be
ousted and complete reoccupation carried out.
“Sharon never opposed this line he even encouraged it. And he used the
demonization of Arafat for his own purposes. Like his predecessors, he never set up
barriers between the civilian decision-making process and the army, to build up a
conceptual alternative and restore … balance … His anger at Mofaz is therefore
hypocrisy. Only weeks ago, he himself was proposing the expulsion of Arafat. Now it
doesn’t suit him politically or internationally, so Mofaz gets it in the neck.”
Shelah notes that “Mofaz is now in the last month of his term as chief of staff and
Sharon’s strictures are like water off a duck’s back to him. Mofaz’s
interest now is two-fold: establishing his credentials as a right-winger in order to ease
his way into politics and elicit attractive offers, but even more important to him is to
establish the principle that it is a resolute and aggressive (military) that determines
Israeli reality. In his four-year term Mofaz has served under three prime ministers and
five defense ministers. He knows the army is stronger than all of them.
“Mofaz wants to complete and bolster the grip of the army over Israel’s way of
looking at things, with the support and encouragement of the civilian prime ministers and
defense ministers who are supposed to be laying down the line for the military,”
Shelah concludes. Copyright © The
Daily Star |
