TruthNews Commentary, December 5, 2002

Contrary to popular opinion, the collapse of Israel’s national "unity" government is not a disaster. The national unity government, formed after Ariel Sharon’s election as prime minister nearly two years ago, has proven incapable of making decisions about anything. Following each Palestinian terrorist attack, the government has responded by bombing empty buildings and reoccupying a few Palestinian-run towns. After several weeks of bad press, the Israeli army has then been withdrawn and the whole dreary cycle has repeated itself.

Someone once defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Based on this definition, the Israeli government is insane. However, this could be said of most governments, including our own. Because of competing interests within governments, government decisions often appear inconsistent and schizophrenic. Only one-man dictatorships can avoid this sort of inconsistency, but since the dictators are usually insane, they usually aren’t any more consistent than democracies. As one wag put it, democracy is the worst form of government there is, except for all the other.

What’s made the Israeli government appear even more insane than most other governments is the attempt to meld the left-wing and right-wing together into a national unity government and expecting a coherent policy to emerge. Oslo architect Shimon Peres has vigorously defended his Nobel prize partner Yasser Arafat while Sharon attempted to undermine Arafat. Even a simple decision like building a fence to keep the terrorists away from the major population centers was delayed for over a year by bickering within the government. The right wing doesn’t want to give up Israel’s claim to the disputed territories and feared that the fence would be seen as a de facto border between Israel and a Palestinian state. They pointed out that a fence could not protect against rockets or mortars and could be circumvented by tunneling or over flying. True enough, but why make things easy for the terrorists? The left-wing, led by Peres, argued against any fence that deviated from the "green line" (the 1948 cease-fire line between Israel and Jordan), because they feared that the right wing would try to make a land-grab with the fence. The compromise approach was to do nothing. So the net result was that, while the roads were closed, the fields were open. The Palestinian suicide bombers could simply walk through a field from Jenin, hop on a bus, and blow it up (or ride it to Jerusalem and then blow up a restaurant).

Both the left and right have proposed what could be viable solutions to the problem. The right proposes to kick Arafat and his gang of thieves out and resume direct control of the disputed territories. The left proposes unilateral separation -- Israel would withdraw from the Palestinian areas, wall them off, and let the Palestinians stew in their own depravity. But neither side has had the parliamentary strength to implement these solutions, and instead half-measures and inaction have resulted.

This problem has an analogy in mathematics. If you want the square root of the number 1, there are two possible solutions: minus one and plus one. You can use either solution and end up with the desired result. But if you compromise between the two solutions, you end up with an average "solution" of zero. You can square zero all day, and you won’t get a result of one.

The problem with Israel’s national unity government was that they kept compromising at the zero "solution." Sometimes, following a particularly murderous attack, Sharon would respond boldly with a 0.2 solution (which when squared results in 0.04, not very close to 1). Sometimes, under pressure from Powell and Peres, the government would swing to a -0.2 solution (which also gives a result of 0.04). But by not going all the way to either the +1 or -1 solution, the unity government merely prolonged Israel’s agony.

Now, the unity government has collapsed, and new elections will be held in January. The Labor party candidate, Amram Mitzna, has embraced the unilateral withdrawal option. Sharon last week defeated his chief rival for the Likud party leadership, Benjamin Netanyahu, who, in his last incarnation as Prime Minister, spoke loudly and carried a small stick. Currently, the Likud party is leading by a wide margin in the polls, but the numbers tend to tighten up as elections draw nearer. But whatever the outcome of the election, the ruling party is likely to have a much better working majority than they do now. Currently, Sharon’s Likud party holds only 19 of the 120 Knesset seats, while the Labor party holds 26. Even the two parties together don’t have enough seats to form a majority coalition and had to rely on several other smaller parties to form the national unity government. But election laws have changed since the last elections in 1999. Direct election of the prime minister has been done away with, so if the people want Sharon as the Prime Minister, they have to vote for Likud. Under the old system, which was used in the last two elections, the people voted separately for prime minister and party. This led to increasing fragmentation of the vote and reduced representation of even the major parties in the Knesset.

The Likud will be unlikely to get a majority of the seats in the Knesset (no party has ever done that), but they should be able to increase their numbers enough that Sharon will be able to govern in a coalition with a few other center or right parties. The question is, what will he do with this majority? Will he boldly implement the +1 solution by kicking Arafat out and resuming direct control of the territories? Or will he timidly stick to the 0.2 solution and try merely to insert a more pliable candidate into the leadership of the Palestinian Authority? Under the influence of Peres, Sharon has already blown President Bush’s open invitation to get rid of Arafat. Hopefully, he won’t blow his next opportunity.