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March 9, 2001/Adar 14, 5761, Vol. 53, No.23
Government depends on Sharon-Peres chemistry
DAVID LANDAU
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
JERUSALEM - Ariel Sharon's national unity government, which was sworn in the evening of March 7, will rely on two key factors for stability and longevity.
One is a close and harmonious relationship between Likud Prime Minister Sharon and Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, the senior Labor Party minister in the Cabinet.
The other is the continued absence of realistic prospects for negotiations with the Palestinians toward a final peace agreement.
Less tangibly, the unity government will need a great deal of luck, that unpredictable commodity that outgoing Prime Minister Ehud Barak so lacked during his stormy 21 months in office.
To say that Sharon, 73, and Peres, 77, have a long history together is an understatement. Both have been there since Creation - that is, the creation of the State of Israel 53 years ago.
The young Peres was an aide to founding father and first Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, and quickly rose in the 1950s to become director general of the Defense Ministry. There, Peres - the standard-bearer of today's peace camp - was intimately involved in developing Israel's nuclear potential.
Sharon, a dashing infantry officer, served in Israel's 1948 War of Independence. In the 1950s, he gained fame and notoriety as the founder of Unit 101, an elite commando crew.
In those days, Menachem Begin's Herut Party - which later became the core of the center-right Likud bloc - was a powerless opposition. Politics were dominated by Ben-Gurion's Mapai Party, forerunner of today's Labor.
Rising stars like Peres and Sharon naturally saw themselves as proteges of the "Old Man," as Ben-Gurion was called.
Sharon's unity government, with almost 30 ministers and another half-dozen deputy ministers, will be unwieldy at best, unworkable at worst.
The Labor component, moreover, is beset by internal conflict. Several of the defeated and dispirited party's leaders - Yossi Beilin, Avraham Burg and Shlomo Ben-Ami - oppose unity under Sharon and have opted to stay out of the Cabinet. As the party's leadership battle unfolds in coming months, the ideological and personal fissures between pro- and anti-unity groups likely will widen.
Any sense in Labor that Peres is being sidestepped or marginalized will exacerbate internal party tensions and strengthen the hands of those calling for Labor to leave the alliance. The government's survival will best be served by Sharon sustaining the understanding that he and Peres together comprise an informal inner Cabinet where key decisions are thrashed out.
That was the recipe for the success of the unity governments that ruled Israel from 1984 to 1990 under prime ministers Peres and Yitzhak Shamir.
Ultimately, the longevity of the 1980s coalitions rested on an absence of progress in the peace process.
Under Barak, Labor lost the election chiefly because of the collapse of peace negotiations with Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat and the eruption of Palestinian violence.
The alliance-of-convenience with the Likud is predicated, in effect, on the impossibility of reviving those talks. Laborites roundly blame Arafat for that; many have come to believe that as long as he is power there will be no further thrust toward peace.
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