Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu couldn’t have conceived of a better or more heartwarming present on the occasion of the yahrzeit of the last election (which was marked, in case you didn’t notice, on January 22) than the dream visit to Israel by Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his huge entourage. Nor could he have celebrated his entry into his sixth successive year as prime minister (and his ninth, altogether) with a better and more affectionate friend.
It was a four-day diplomatic high. The warm embrace given Harper – “Canada’s first Zionist prime minister,” as he’s known in these parts (or, in the words of MK
Benjamin Netanyahu, “a Likudnik”) – was matched only by the big hug he gave Israel. The applause the visitor received, mainly from the coalition benches, including several standing ovations led by Netanyahu and his grateful ministers, only underlined Israel’s emerging isolation, the cold wind that’s starting to blow this way from the West, and the darkening of the diplomatic and economic clouds that are gathering above us in the event that the negotiations with the Palestinians fail. But, hey, we’ll always have Canadsia.a. Oh, yes, we also have to take the pulse of Microne
A year ago, a rival to Netanyahu seemed to have sprung up, Yair Lapid by name. Garnering a wonderful result in the election of 19 seats for his Yesh Atid party, the charming former TV presenter’s way to the top looked like a sure thing. But today, no one is putting his money on Lapid. The finance minister has developed an image of a politician who has betrayed and disappointed his voters.
So we’re back, politically, to where we were a year ago, with Netanyahu being the only game in town. The prime minister is not particularly liked by the public. He’s not particularly liked in his party. Even after five consecutive years, no one knows what he wants, where he’s headed – peace agreement yes or no, concessions yes or no, breakthrough or no breakthrough. With premiers like Yitzhak Shamir and Menachem Begin, we knew very quickly where we were going. With Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert, we had no doubt. But Netanyahu is an enigma.
At the moment, the center and the left cannot construe Netanyahu’s weakness as good news for them. In fact, their situation is even worse. The Labor Party lost no time in switching leaders, as usual, but its polling numbers have remained static at 16-17 Knesset seats if elections were held today. Yesh Atid is gets 12-13 seats in the polls. Tzipi Livni’s Hatnuah is treading water. Kadima has all but disappeared. Even Meretz’s leap to 10 or 11 seats in the polls has been halted, and the party is back to single-digit results.
In the Likud-right-wing-religious bloc, only the ruling party – more precisely, Likud-Beiteinu – is showing some gains in the surveys. Not because it’s a terrific brand. It’s not. It’s just that there is no one else around. Likud-Beiteinu is getting 32 to 34 seats in the polls, three or so more than it has in the present Knesset. Shas is not benefiting from being in the opposition. Naftali Bennett’s Habayit Hayehudi is doing slightly less well than in previous surveys. In short, the political scene is in a state of stagnation.
On an election eve this is a situation that invites the emergence of a new star, a glittering talent who will rake in the vacant seats that are fluttering around in the center of the political map and crying out for a new home, as though they have learned nothing and forgotten nothing. But we’re not anticipating an election soon, we’ve had one. So it’s best to wait with the forecasts.
A Nobel in alchemy
The media occupation with the race for president of Israel, four-five months ahead of the vote by the Knesset, resembles an attempt to predict the quality and flavor of a dish whose ingredients have not even been gathered in the kitchen yet. In fact, some of them are still on the supermarket shelves. Others will sour and rot before their time comes. But anyone who wanders these days through the political and parliamentary corridors of power, whether metaphorically or physically, cannot possibly ignore the incessant background buzz around the intriguing contest that will produce Israel’s 10th president.
At the moment, the names of 10 self-styled candidates are being bandied about. It’s not worth wasting paper or surfing time over all of them. Two of them have been working at this for a year or two: MK Reuven Rivlin (Likud) and MK Benjamin Ben-Eliezer (Labor).
Minister Silvan Shalom (Likud) entered the field a couple of months ago. According to a number of MKs from various factions, he’s effective when putting out feelers, holding conversations and persuading people. Beside him, behind him and in front of him looms his wife, media figure Judy Shalom Nir Mozes. People who are following her activity say she seems to be busy pushing and pulling.
Former Kadima MK Dalia Itzik is holding meetings with MKs outside the Knesset premises. Next week she will join the 70 MKs who will participate in a busy and intensive trip to the death camps in Poland. She’ll be like the fox in a chicken coop.
For his part, MK Meir Sheetrit (Hatnuah) is discreetly probing his situation vis-a-vis the presidency among his colleagues. Meanwhile, nothing is being heard about Jewish Agency chairman Natan Sharansky, in this regard. In the past there was much serious talk about Likud-Beiteinu running former MK and minister David Levy for president. As of now, his name has not been heard among the ranks of those who will select Shimon Peres' successor, namely the 120 MKs. “To this day he has not approached us and no one has spoken to us on his behalf,” Shas leader MK Aryeh Deri related this week.
Last Friday, Ayala Hasson, who anchor's Channel 1's weekly newsmagazine, introduced a new presidential candidate: Prof. Dan Shechtman, a Nobel laureate in chemistry. “I want to do well by the people,” he said, by way of explanation, even though the president is largely a symbol and the only people he can do well by are prisoners seeking pardons.
Shechtman went on to say that no one is helping to pull the strings on behalf of his candidacy, neither a well-connected strategist nor any political group. There’s no reason not to believe him, though the next day our elected officials already receive emails from some association asking MKs to sign up in support of the professor’s candidacy. (Only someone who collects the signatures from 10 MKs can run.)
In the past few days, Shechtman, working through middlemen, has begun to request meetings with MKs and ministers. The social networks embraced him warmly. We’re fed up with the politicians, the surfers wrote; it’s time for a president who doesn’t have that virus. Let’s see Shechtman persuade 10 politicians, and later 61 more of them, to vote for a guy whose supporters take pride in his being better, more moral and more principled than those who are supposed to vote for him. If he pulls that off, he should get another Nobel. Maybe in alchemy.
All the Internet enthusiasm naturally triggered virtual antibodies among the longer-standing presidential candidates. “Okay, so I am guilty of having served 30 years in the Israel Defense Forces and of having been a minister seven times,” Benjamin Ben-Eliezer grumbled in a private conversation.
Rivlin recalled a similar episode from seven years ago, when he ran against Peres. At that time, the name of Elie Wiesel, a Nobel laureate in literature, cropped up as the de-rigueur anyone-but-a-politician candidate. “Peres came to me, angry,” Rivlin related. “He said: Rubi, my friend, why are we being slandered? What sin did we commit that we are politicians? What is there for us to be ashamed of?”
Here’s a bet, not a very daring one: In the end, a politician will be elected.
Drama within a drama
A thin wall separates the offices of Energy and Water Resources Minister Silvan Shalom and that of former Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin in the new wing of the Knesset building. A thin wall, yes, but also a roaring river of bad blood and roiling resentment between two people who were once good friends but no longer.
Rivlin is deeply immersed in the race for the presidency. Up to his neck. Until the finishing line. Shalom says he is wavering. If the two collect the required number of signatures and register with the Knesset’s secretary, Yardena Meller-Horowitz, we’ll have a drama within a drama: two standout senior candidates, each with a respectable record, from the same faction, which is also the ruling faction. Which of them will the faction choose as its candidate? Will a factional candidate even be chosen, as has always been the case? Will whoever is not chosen by the faction nevertheless run on his own? Beware, the clash of the titans awaits us.
Of all the candidates whose names have been mentioned, there is no doubt that Shalom is gifted with extraordinary political capabilities. Already today, MKs from his faction will draw for you an impressive flowchart showing how a whole bevy of Likud activists stand to move up the ladder, in the government or the Knesset, as part of the so-called butterfly effect that will occur if Shalom is elected president, and leaves the Knesset and his three ministerial portfolios behind. (In addition to water and energy, he’s also minister for regional development and for the development of the Negev and Galilee.) Some say that this chart flows all the way down to the last of the backbenchers, at the bottom of the food chain.
Shalom is telling his interlocutors that he has a better prospect of being elected than Rivlin, because other ministers want to see him go in order to plunder the "inheritance" he will leave and get him out of the way with a view to the next primaries.
Meanwhile, he’s telling right-wingers: “You have to vote for me, because we need a right-wing president with a nationally oriented approach.”
“So, what’s wrong with Rivlin on that score?” they reply.
“There’s nothing wrong with him,” Shalom says, “but he’s unelectable. If we choose him as our candidate, we will be putting Fuad (Ben-Eliezer) in the President’s Residence.”
This coin has another side, too: Shalom’s popularity among the public could soar if he’s elected president, and could also make him a viable candidate for prime minister. Maybe he's the only candidate who’ll be capable of shaking up the current prime minister, who today has no serious rivals, not even on the distant horizon.
And who can promise Netanyahu that the popular future president, Silvan Shalom, will not resign on the eve of the next Knesset elections, after half a term, and run for Likud leader against the current party chief, who in 2017 will have been chairman for 11 years all told, and whom people may be pretty tired of by then? And who wants to bet that this scenario is not on the desk of our suspicious prime minister, who is constantly inventing rivals for himself, a new Brutus every day? And if something like this doesn’t happen three years down the line, it will certainly happen in seven years' time, when the race to become Netanyahu’s successor begins in Likud.
Shalom is telling his interlocutors openly that in contrast to previous presidents, he does not intend to become a pensioner at the age of 62, after a seven-year term. For him, the presidency would be a springboard to the premiership, which at present looks very remote from where he sits. Netanyahu, on the one hand, and, on the other, Gideon Sa’ar and Yisrael Katz and Moshe Ya’alon and Gilad Erdan and Avigdor Lieberman and Shalom's group of loyalists – all of them have to consider very carefully whether they want to hand Shalom the victory.
1
