Netanyahu Points Israel Toward Early Elections

Ending weeks of speculation, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday set the stage for early elections as support for his beleaguered government evaporated.

News of early elections may please Netanyahu’s opponents, but the slow and troubled pursuit of peace with the Palestinians will suffer. The holding of elections effectively freezes the U.S.-brokered Wye Plantation peace accord indefinitely.

Speaking to a meeting of his Likud Party in Tel Aviv on Wednesday night, Netanyahu said he will call elections unless the Israeli parliament Monday backs the way he is handling the peace plan, including his decision to suspend troop withdrawals from the West Bank. Opposition parliament members immediately said they will not give him that support.

“We’re going to elections,” Ehud Barak, head of the opposition Labor Party, declared on Israeli television.

Calling elections would mean the end of Netanyahu’s 2 1/2-year-old government, which has had extremely difficult dealings with the Palestinians and sometimes with the U.S. as well. He is expected to run again for the premiership in what promises to be a fiercely contested race.

Netanyahu already faces a no-confidence vote Monday that he is likely to lose, and Wednesday’s announcement appeared aimed at preempting any such embarrassing defeat.

Earlier Wednesday, Netanyahu’s government formally announced that it will not complete the next phase of troop withdrawal from the West Bank as required by the Wye Plantation accord. The deadline had been Friday, and Netanyahu this week ignored pleas that President Clinton made during his visit to the region to meet that date.

The Israelis and Palestinians accuse each other of violating the accord.

Palestinians say the Israeli leadership is using elections as a pretext to stop the agreement. Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat and his government will meet Friday to plan their response.

Since signing the Wye accord in October, Netanyahu has been under attack from his core right-wing constituency because he was giving away land, and from the left-wing opposition because he was dragging his heels about doing it.

In the last few weeks, Netanyahu’s government has begun to hemorrhage. On Tuesday, his finance minister quit acrimoniously, and his defense minister, Yitzhak Mordechai, scheduled an announcement for today, apparently to urge that the government be dissolved in preparation for new elections.

Struggling to salvage the coalition, Netanyahu first courted a moderate former foreign minister, then attempted to woo the hard right. He floated the idea of forming a “national unity government” by inviting opposition politicians into his Cabinet, an offer that was implicit again in Wednesday’s proposal.

All his efforts were rebuffed, and the momentum for dumping the government and holding elections has risen steadily. Many of Netanyahu’s closest associates are now demanding a change.

“The era of games has ended,” Netanyahu’s trade minister, Natan Sharansky, said Wednesday. “It is preferable to go to elections.”

“There are no other options at the moment,” said Meir Shitrit, the head of Netanyahu’s coalition in parliament.

There are several scenarios looming. Netanyahu would need the support of 61 members of the 120-seat parliament, or Knesset, to survive the scheduled no-confidence vote. In the likely event he does not survive, he would be forced to call elections within 60 days. In addition to the no-confidence vote, an early election bill is before the Knesset. If that passes, elections would be held within six months. Speculation has focused on the spring.

Analysts say Netanyahu probably would fare better in earlier elections because he could take advantage of disarray in the opposition.

However the next few days play out, the growing consensus here is that Netanyahu’s government is not long for this world. As one analyst put it, the government is like Harry in the old Hitchcock movie, “The Trouble with Harry”--Harry is dead, but no one knows how to dispose of the body.

Elections had been scheduled for 2000.

Netanyahu is a skilled political survivor and has managed to skirt doom before.

However, his aides say that having to scramble incessantly to put together votes in his fragmented coalition, and in a Knesset where he held a razor-thin majority, finally took its toll. It made him beholden to small, fringe parties and to ultra-Orthodox factions.

“Having a small majority is always shaky,” Netanyahu advisor David Bar-Illan said. “He was fed up wasting time running after every Knesset member. When you depend on very few people, they are in a position to extort all the time.”

Bar-Illan said Israel would freeze the peace process if elections are called because “such fateful moves” as giving away land cannot occur during an electoral campaign.

Next May is the end of the peace process started by the landmark Oslo agreements, and Arafat has said he intends to declare an independent Palestinian state then.

Netanyahu seized on that timing when he spoke Wednesday night in what sounded more like a speech opening an electoral campaign.

“We stand at the threshold of the [final] agreements between us and the Palestinians,” he said. “One cannot overstate the importance of the issues at hand . . . issues which determine our existence here, as well as the quality of this existence. We have a clear policy that I have been leading consistently since we were elected into government . . . exactly what we promised our voters.”