The Party’s Over for Netanyahu

A cartoon in the daily Haaretz newspaper this week shows a jetliner bearing the name of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu preparing to land on a bumpy, perilous-looking runway. The uneven surface turns out to be the fractured name of his own Likud Party.

Indeed, immediately after Netanyahu’s return from Britain and the United States, where he was greeted coolly by Jewish community leaders and snubbed by the Clinton administration, the Israeli leader had to work overtime to put down a rebellion within Likud that some feared might lead to a split.

It is unlikely to be his last challenge.

Senior Likud politicians, including several current and former ministers, are publicly furious over recent moves by Netanyahu and key allies to strengthen the prime minister’s hold on the conservative party. Taking advantage of his absence, they reportedly considered a variety of plans aimed at isolating or even toppling him.

By week’s end, the mutiny appeared to be losing steam, with Netanyahu back in the country and holding a frenetic series of meetings to shore up support. But political observers said the rebels are biding their time, waiting for the next opportunity to attack a prime minister who suddenly looks more vulnerable than before.

“In coming days and weeks, we will witness an ever more tempestuous political climate,” columnist Hemi Shalev wrote in the Maariv daily. “Netanyahu might survive attempts to oust him in Knesset no-confidence votes but . . . it will be hard for him to function when everyone around him wants his head.”

Political analysts said the rebellion fizzled for reasons ranging from its leaders’ reported inability to decide which of them should head a breakaway Likud faction to Netanyahu’s skill at whipping his errant party members back into line.

But even in failure, it underlined Netanyahu’s growing travails at home and abroad, several analysts said. “He’s got very little credibility with anyone these days--the Palestinians, the Americans, the Jordanians, the opposition. He’s always angering somebody, and now the list includes his own party,” said Reuven Hazan, a Hebrew University political science professor.

Netanyahu acknowledged the problems during a one-day visit to Los Angeles this week. “I think it is no secret that some members of the coalition don’t particularly love me,” he told reporters Monday. “What propels them is their personal ambition.”

The current crisis was provoked by a tumultuous Likud convention last week in which key Netanyahu aides pushed through a proposal to abolish the party’s primaries. The plan gives the power to choose candidates for the Israeli parliament, known as the Knesset, to the Likud central committee, which is controlled by Netanyahu loyalists.

Senior party members, who could find themselves left off the party’s list of candidates in the next elections, were said to be especially angered by Netanyahu’s public statements that he opposed bringing the plan to a vote, even as his chief of staff, Avigdor Lieberman, worked to push it through.

The strong-arm tactics at the convention were only the latest actions by Netanyahu and Lieberman that have angered senior politicians within the party. Likud Cabinet ministers, including Communications Minister Limor Livnat, have long complained that they are frozen out of any significant decision-making.

In an interview with the daily Yediot Aharonot, Tel Aviv Mayor Roni Milo, a frequent critic of the prime minister, revealed the secret discussions on ways to oust or isolate Netanyahu.

According to Milo, several senior Likud members, including Livnat, former Finance Minister Dan Meridor, former Science Minister Zeev Begin and Jerusalem Mayor Ehud Olmert, were considering a plan to split the party but apparently without forcing new elections for prime minister or parliament.

Hazan and other analysts said Milo’s revelations of the scheme, which forced several actual or potential rebels to disassociate themselves from it, may have spelled its end, at least for now.

Netanyahu announced Thursday that he will appoint a committee to look into “irregularities” at the convention and will ask for a nonbinding party referendum on how to hold elections in the future. He also has dropped broad hints that he may consider a national unity government with the opposition Labor Party, which were widely viewed as veiled threats to Likud ministers to return to the party fold or risk being left out.