The Morning After Pill
Gershon Baskin
Monday, May 03, 2004 Arik Sharon must have woken up this morning with the thought: if only they had invented a pill that would make all of my mistakes of yesterday go away! In reading this morning papers, Sharon will find, for the first time in Israel’s history that almost no one is offering any advice and real analysis. The papers in Israel and around the world this morning are almost completely devoid of any real sound analytical understanding of what happened in Israel yesterday and what will happen next. The sense of confusion has left even the senior Likud Ministers dumbfounded for words. A political earthquake has befallen on Israel and although it seems that the earthquake was completely predictable, there is nevertheless a sense of after shock and nervousness regarding what comes next.
“Sharon experts” cannot seem to find the words to explain how the greatest Israeli political tactician could have made such a large error in supporting the internal Likud poll on his most important and boldest political initiative ever. “Anti-Sharon experts” will undoubtedly raise the conspiracy theories and say that Sharon’s real intention from the outset was to demonstrate to the Americans that it is simply impossible to remove settlements, even in the heart of 1.3 million Palestinians.
The whole idea of the Likud poll, called a demonstration of Israel’s democracy, seemed to me to be one of the greatest blows to Israeli democracy. I know of no other example in democratic countries where 193,190 members of a political party, even a ruling party, have the right and the ability to determine the most important foreign policy decision of a country that would impact upon the entire region and perhaps the entire world. In the end, 51.6% of the Likud members used that right with 60% of them voting against Sharon’s disengagement plan, leaving their own Prime Minister with a vote of no confidence. In other words, about 1.3% of Israelis participated in the vote meaning that less than 1% of Israelis voted against Sharon’s plan. One percent of Israelis may have determined the fate of the State of Israel for years to come. Only in the former communist so-called “Democratic republics” (or China, North Korea and Cuba of today) and in ancient Athens did so few people have so much power to determine the lives and fates of so many others.
Sharon does have a number of options for him to choose from – none of them are good. Knowing that nearly 60% of the Israeli Jewish population supports the disengagement plan, Sharon could propose to bring the decision to a real referendum of the Israeli public. There are several problems here, one of them is that Israel has no legal structure for a referendum and it would require legislation. It is not clear at all that Sharon would be able to pass a law for referenda in the Knesset. If such a law is tabled, there is no doubt that there will be an extremely heated debate on what majority would be required for such a referendum to be valid and binding. There will definitely be those in the Knesset who will wish to de-legitimize the rights of Israel’s Palestinian Arab citizens, more than 1 million, to be part of the democratic determination of Israel’s future vis-à-vis the Palestinians. This public debate will most likely cause additional damage to the extremely shaky and unstable relations between Jewish and Arab Israelis.
http://www.ipcri.org/files/pill.html
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