Netanyahu’s Last-Ditch Efforts Don’t Pay Off This Time Around

For a few brief minutes, it looked as if the man known as a great survivor of Israel’s political battles might pull it off once more.

Just before the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, capped a stormy debate with an overwhelming vote for early elections, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu waged a last, dramatic effort to save his crumbling coalition. He asked lawmakers for 72 hours to explore ways to form a government of “national unity” with the opposition Labor Party.

It didn’t work. Labor leader Ehud Barak rejected the eleventh-hour appeal and said he doubted Netanyahu’s sincerity. Moments later, the prime minister bowed to the inevitable and voted with a two-thirds majority of legislators to dissolve the parliament and move elections up to the spring, more than a year early. He promised to run again--and win.

For 31 tumultuous months, the Israeli prime minister managed to stay in power by dint of his own formidable political skills and his efforts to be all things to all factions in his fragile coalition. But by Monday, it was clear that his government, torn apart by the recent peace accord with the Palestinians and his own often contradictory positions, could not go on.

“It’s a day when the government decides on its end, and the Knesset decides to dissolve itself,” said Defense Minister Yitzhak Mordechai, a member of Netanyahu’s Likud Party. “It’s, of course, a very sad day.”

From the beginning, Netanyahu’s coalition was all but unworkable, made up of right-wing and religious parties that wanted to halt or drastically slow the peace process and centrist parties that hoped to push it forward. His own position was tough to gauge, being a combination of slow--some said reluctant--progress together with strict new conditions for the Palestinians.

Throughout his tenure, Netanyahu was buffeted by competing demands and interests, which resulted in a zigzag policy that confused adversaries and allies alike. At times, he appeared to be a right-wing ideologue who would never relinquish parts of the biblical Land of Israel, at others, a pragmatic politician who would forge a better, more comprehensive peace with the Palestinians.

He promised to uphold the Oslo land-for-peace accords he inherited from his Labor Party predecessors, but sparked a bitter dispute with the Palestinians and a long freeze in peacemaking with the March 1997 groundbreaking for a new Jewish neighborhood in East Jerusalem.

Signing of Accord Doomed Coalition

His coalition split for good after Oct. 23, when Netanyahu signed the U.S.-brokered Wye accord with Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat. The agreement, which has since been frozen, calls on Israel to transfer more West Bank land to the Palestinians in exchange for Palestinian security commitments. It has been bitterly opposed by government hard-liners.

Israeli commentators and political analysts had considered the early election vote all but certain for the past two weeks.

On Dec. 7, the government appeared to have reached a watershed when Netanyahu made contradictory promises to parties at both ends of the political spectrum. He vowed to the anti-Arab Moledet Party that he would freeze the peace process in exchange for its support, and assured an Israeli Arab party that he would push for progress in the negotiations, in return for its backing. Neither group agreed, although a procedural ploy bought him a two-week respite.

“It’s impossible to promise the right that he won’t continue with the Wye agreement and at the same time tell the Arabs that he’s going ahead with Wye,” columnist Sima Kadmon wrote in the Israeli daily Yediot Aharonot the next day. “The great wizard has lost his charm.”

Yaron Ezrahi, a leading political scientist at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University, said Netanyahu’s tendency to try to please all potential supporters, which had helped ensure his survival, finally caught up with him.

“The Israeli public, and many Israeli politicians, have been through a grueling but instructive process with Netanyahu,” Ezrahi said. “They have become suspicious of the promises he’s made, and by extension the promises that other politicians have made as well.”

But others on Monday noted the positive sides of Netanyahu’s legacy.

Dovish Labor Party legislator Yossi Beilin praised him for being the first Likud leader to preside over the transfer of West Bank land to the Palestinians, which he did in carrying out both the January 1997 Hebron agreement and, recently, the first stage of the Wye accord.

“He gave the legitimacy of the right to the peace process, to the idea of territorial concessions, to the PLO and to Arafat,” said Beilin, an architect of the landmark Oslo agreement, the foundation of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. “We would not have created him, but we can continue from the point where he left off.”

Netanyahu, who was suspicious of Israel’s traditional elites, including the military, the media, university professors and the civil service establishment, also was credited Monday with remaking the nation’s political map.

“His inclusion of the religious parties, immigrant parties and others will probably send a message in the future to politicians to be more pluralistic,” said Joseph Alpher, head of the Jerusalem office of the American Jewish Committee and a veteran political analyst.

Netanyahu Not Seen as a Has-Been

Even before Monday’s vote, Netanyahu had vowed to run again, leaving no doubt that he intends to win. He depicted the election as an opportunity for Israelis to choose between his tough policies toward the Palestinians and the more lenient ones of Labor.

And, given his considerable political talents, no one was counting him out.

Alpher said the developments in parliament will not make Netanyahu the underdog in the elections. “He’s a superb campaigner and tactically brilliant,” Alpher said. “He could easily win again.”