As Israeli Political Scene Shifts Toward His Opponents, Netanyahu May Choose Dangerous Election Move

By Victor Ostrovsky

On Jan. 25, incumbent Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu retained the leadership of his Likud Party in a short and sweet primary election battle against former Israeli Ambassador to the U.N. and Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Arens. This will probably be Netanyahu’s last easy victory in a hotly contested and confusing campaign leading up to Israel’s May 17 national election.

Netanyahu had just publicly fired, on national television, Israeli Minister of Defense Yitzhak Mordechai, who had been in the midst of negotiating his place at the head of a newly formed middle-of-the-road political party. Formally known as the Centrist Party, Israeli journalists have already dubbed it “right lite,” or “the tree top movement,” since it started with an abundance of leaders but a dearth of grass roots supporters.

Netanyahu’s zeal to show forcefulness catapulted Mordecai to the top of the new centrist heap. It also deprived the prime minister of one of his most useful tools, the racial card, just as he was getting ready to launch a characteristically dirty campaign. Retired Brigadier General Mordechai, who was born in the Kurdish area of northern Iraq, may take with him from the Likud Party the votes of a large number of the Sephardi Jews, who came to Israel from Middle Eastern countries and who feel shut out of a political system dominated by Ashkenazi Jews with ethnic roots in Eastern Europe.

Nor can Netanyahu denigrate Mordechai’s ability to protect Israeli security, since he was the man chosen by Netanyahu himself to do just that in his own cabinet. Since all this leaves very little domestic maneuverability for Netanyahu, it makes the prime minister a very dangerous man internationally.

In his bid to hold onto power, Netanyahu has returned to his core supporters, the extreme right. Playing to that audience, at a rally of his supporters in Kiryat Shemonah on the border with Lebanon, Netanyahu asked if there were any members of the left present. When the audience assured him with cheers that they were all right-wingers, Netanyahu dramatically stripped off his bulletproof vest, saying with a wolfish smile, “Then I guess I have nothing to be worried about.”

His supporters broke into a frenzy of cheers, shouting “Bibi, king of Israel.” His security detail, embarrassed by the reciprocal dramatics, retreated through the roars to the rear of the auditorium. However, this is the same Netanyahu whose inflamatory rhetoric, in the opinion of many middle-of-the-road Israelis, created the climate for the assassination of the late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. But now it is Netanyahu who by implication points to the peace camp in Israel as the source of violence and physical danger to him and his supporters.

The right is going to pay the price in the upcoming election.

In this writer’s opinion the truth of the matter is much simpler. The fact that all of the members of his right-wing audience were facing him was reason enough for him to feel confident. He would only have to worry if some of them were behind him, because the kind of people who support Netanyahu only shoot others in the back.

In this election, however, Netanyahu may shrink his Likud Party from one of the country’s two major groupings back to the size of its historic Herut Party core, which barely exceeded a single-digit showing in the 120-seat Knesset. Even in the primary election Netanyahu has just won, only 30 percent of Likud members showed up to vote.

Netanyahu claims his followers were so sure of his victory they felt no need to turn out. I beg to differ. I believe that the 70 percent of Likud members who did not show up have for the most part become free agents in the new Israeli political playing field.

Consider the fact that Ze’ev (Benny) Begin, hard-liner son of the late Likud Prime Minister Menachem Begin, has formed a new right-wing party, which calls itself Herut. It probably will attract most of the extreme right-wingers. And consider that the new centrist party also consists of three Likud stars, Mordechai, Netanyahu’s former finance minister Dan Meridor, son of an early Herut militant, and Tel Aviv Mayor Ronni Milo, not to mention the extremely popular recently retired chief of staff, Ammon Lifkin-Shahak.

There are many in the Labor Party who are worried about this new Centrist Party because it reminds them of the Dash Party, which was created in 1977 by a popular retired chief of staff, Gen. Yigael Yadin, and which snatched the victory in that election from the Labor Party and handed it to Menachem Begin, bringing the Likud extremists to power for the first time in Israel.

The Role of the Center

The facts are somewhat different this time around. It is the right that is going to pay the price in the upcoming election, because the new party will be draining voters from the Likud and also from some of the moderate religious parties such as the Sephardi-based Shas Party, most of whose supporters would prefer a Sephardi prime minister to just having political clout in a governing coalition.

All of the above is clear to Netanyahu, but he will not go away without a fight. So what has he left in his political arsenal?

He is well aware of the fear in the Israeli defense establishment that he might try a foolhardy escapade in Lebanon, or a dramatic aerial strike or assassination attempt against some Arab leader like Saddam Hussain, to reignite the nationalist fervor upon which he built his political base. When he fired Mordechai there was even a momentary fear that Netanyahu would take the post for himself and then run amok.

The prime minister, however, was not going to fall into that trap. So at first he offered the position to Ariel Sharon, who invaded Lebanon when he held the same post in 1982. Sharon turned it down, just as he was expected to do. So then Netanyahu offered it to Arens, just as Arens was ready to try a long-shot grab for the Likud leadership in the primaries.

This gesture dulled Arens’s appetite for a dirty campaign. Now, with Arens as minister of defense, everybody will be lulled into a false sense of security. In fact, however, Arens, as the anti-Camp David, anti-Oslo hard-liner who found and made Netanyahu what he is today, is likely to work very closely with Netanyahu to carry out whatever scheme they think is necessary to get Netanyahu re-elected.

As it is Netanyahu’s way to draw a rabbit out of a hat at the last minute, it would not surprise me if a report I have heard from a reliable source is true and that Netanyahu is involved in a secret and hasty deal-making effort with the Syrians. Netanyahu’s offer would be the Israeli return of all of the Golan Heights in exchange for peace with Syria. Such an agreement would allow him to withdraw Israeli forces from Lebanon and isolate the Palestinian question from the rest of the Arab world, both of which would be highly popular moves with Israeli voters.

If Netanyahu produces such a deal, he will force the Israeli opposition to vote with him as he has just passed a law requiring approval by a simple majority of Knesset votes for any land-for-peace settlement involving the Golan. There is no opposition group in Israel that could be caught voting against a peace deal with Syria, and Netanyahu has little to lose since the Israeli settlers in the Golan are secular Jews and not part of the largely religious Jewish settlement movement in the West Bank.

My source said that the sticking points in Netanyahu’s talks with the Syrians are related to the time table. Netanyahu wants to drag out the Israeli withdrawals over a five-year period, during which time Israel would lease from Syria the lands it had not yet returned. The Syrians, my source says, want it all in a 12-month period, but are willing to allow strategic Mount Herman to be controlled by an international force that would oversee compliance with the peace agreement by both sides.

We will have to wait and see whether the Syrians would go along with this election-saving strategy selected by Binyamin Netanyahu. If not, he might choose something less significant, but far more spectacular, and definitely more dangerous, to Middle Eastern stability.

Victor Ostrovsky, a former Mossad case officer, has written two books about his experiences, By Way of Deception: The Making and Unmaking of a Mossad Officer and The Other Side of Deception: A Rogue Agent Exposes the Mossad’s Secret Agenda .