Haaretz
Cheshvan 19, 5765
Regardless of the
incumbent president, Republican or Democrat, neo-con or bleeding-heart,
born-again or scandal-stained, Israel's unspoken guiding principle remains
the same: Keep your enemies close, and your re-elected allies
closer.
At work was the maxim that a first-term president acts so
as to cement his place in the White House, while a second-term president
acts to cement his place in history.
At first blush, the principle
- which implies that a history-conscious chief executive could resort to
vigorous if elegant twisting of Israeli arms in order to wring concessions
aimed at Arab approval of peace accords - would seem to mitigate against
Israeli support for George Bush.
Stated differently, is George
Bush likely to put pressure on Israel in a second term?
Probably.
Why, then, is Ariel Sharon smiling?
Analysts
agreed Wednesday that a new Bush administration would, indeed, drop the
hammer on Israel, but not enough to put a significant cramp in Sharon's
policy style.
Asked outright if Sharon was likely to have awoken
with a smile when he was told that Bush would likely emerge the winner,
analysts were unequivocal
"Without a doubt," said commentator Ben
Caspit, in Tel Aviv Wednesday. "You could hear the sighs of relief
resounding from Jerusalem all the way here, without a cellular phone,
without a microphone.
"I'm not certain that he's right in smiling
that smile, but the assumption is that 'We know Bush, and Bush, at least
in his basic instinct as religious, as an evangelical, leans in our
direction."
This, Caspit added, despite factors that may act to the
contrary, among them "the fact that this is a second term, despite the
catastrophic last visit to Washington of 'Dubi (Formaldehyde) Weisglass.
Last month Weisglass angered and embarassed U.S, officials, when
he told Haaretz in an interview: "Effectively, this whole package called
the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed
indefinitely from our agenda. And all this with authority and permission.
All with a presidential blessing and the ratification of both houses of
Congress."
"The disengagement is actually formaldehyde," Weisglass
said. "It supplies the amount of formaldehyde that is necessary so there
will not be a political process with the Palestinians."
In the
coming months, the administration may also attempt to curry lost favor
with the Muslim world "on our backs," Caspit told Army Radio.
All
this notwithstanding, he concluded "the the sigh of relief from Jerusalem
is a very strong one."
In fact, observes Haaretz analyst Akiva
Eldar, the relief that Sharon feels derives from a number of
sources.
First there is the sense that Sharon has been spared a
flurry of visits from spirits of Washington past, in particular Dennis
Ross and Martin Indyk, who filled key roles during the Oslo
years.
"Sharon also can sigh in relief over the circumstance that
the 'threat' that Abu Mazen [former Palestinian prime minister Mahmoud
Abbas] is not going to replace Yasser Arafat, is also apparently not going
to take place."
Accordingly, two of Sharon's principle "assets"
remain innplace in the event of a Bush victory, Eldar says. The first is
Bush himself, "who accepts Sharon's views on unilateralism and that there
is no Palestinian partner for peacemaking.
"Then there is the 'No
Partner' himself, Arafat, who is staying on the scene.
In sum,
Eldar concludes, "This is one of the happiest days of Sharon's whole
life."
In an election that flew in the face of many guiding
principles, the prime minister made little secret of his affinity to Bush,
who has publicly gone to great lengths in efforts to back Sharon's
policies.
Senior Israeli diplomats, stepping gingerly throughout
the campaign, took pains to state that both candidates would support
Israel with equal conviction and equal ferver.
A Foreign Ministry
report cited by Israeli media accounts, meanwhile, gave a diametrically
different spin to the equivalence argumnent.
The thrust of the
report was summed up in a Maariv newspaper headline, which appeared
Wednesday as the first election returns were streaming in from the United
States: "In any case, Israel will be the loser."
The report was
quoted as saying that no matter who won the election, the next
administration would pressure on Israel, in Kerry's case, to forge a
united front with Europe over the Middle East. In the case of Bush, the
aim of the White House would be solving woes in Iraq and throughout the
Arab world, at Israel's diplomatic expense.
Israeli fears over a
possible escalation in pressure, and a resulting narrowing of manevering
space, were little allayed by the response Wednesday of U.S. Ambassador to
Israel Daniel Kurtzer, when asked if the new administration was likely to
pressure Israel.
"The word pressure does not figure in my
vocabulary, and I don't assume that it's going to be part of the next
president's vocabulary," Kurtzer said.
"We have issues that are on
our mind. Prime Minister Sharon knows that, and he's made commitments that
he has told us that he intends to fulfil, and I think that's the important
part at this juncture."
The Bush administration has made
unprecedented efforts to demonstrate backing for Sharon policies, often to
the dismay of Palestinians, who earlier this year were rocked by new Bush
formulations indicating that West Bank blocs might be made permanently
part of Israel, and that Palestinian refugees would be denied their
oft-expressed dream of returning to former homes within Israel.
At
the same time, corps of administration emissaries have quietly pressed
Israeli officials for action on such commitments as dismantling illegal
West Bank settlement outposts and easing military restrictions on the
daily lives of Palestinian civilians.
"Clearly there's a lot of
work still to be done," Kurtzer said. "There's a lot of work here in
Israel.The Knesset is meeting today on aspects of disengagement. There's
unfinished business with respect to the letter that Dov Weisglass sent to
Dr. Rice, and we'll continue our efforts in this."
The Knesset was
to vote later on Wednesday on the first reading of the Evacuation and
Compensation Bill, which would set out legal and financial details of the
prime minister's plan for a withdrawal from 21 Gaza Strip settlements and
four in the West Bank.
Sharon is expected to prevail on the first
reading, but the bill, seen as crucial to the success of the disengagement
plan, faces two further parliamentary votes before it becomes
law.
Prior to the expected vote on the disengagement bill, Finance
Minister Silvan Shalom said that factors such as the personal chemistry
between Bush and Sharon - who came to power within weeks of each other in
2001 - could be overriding factors even in the context of American
expectations of the Sharon government.
Shalom conceded that "It's
generally common to say that a president elected to a first term
immediately begins thinking about being elected to a second term. By
contrast, a second-term president immediately wants to know how he will be
inscribed on the pages of history books in the U.S. and the
world.
In the case of Bush and Sharon, however, "There's no
question that the chemistry has been very great, as has President Bush's
friendship. This is something that no one can take from him. His standing
alongside Israel has been a very, very clear stance."
In any event,
said Itamar Rabinovich, an ex-Israeli ambassador to Washington and a
former senior peace negotiator, the expectation that a second-term
president would go full bore in search of a historical legacy, is far from
realistic.
"There is no such thing as a 'pure' second term, four
years free of political worries for the president. Two years from now,
there will be elections again, for Congress, the Senate and governors,
there's a need to preserve majorities in both houses.
"No president
can truly feel himself exempt from political constraints, even in a second
term.