NO GOOD TIDINGS

Editorial de "Ha´a retz" del 28-11-02

According to all the public opinion surveys of recent days, the Likud rank-and-file is expected to elect Prime Minister Ariel Sharon as leader of the party's list for the 16th Knesset.

The large electoral gap forecast between Sharon and his foreign minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, will, by all accounts, tighten Sharon's grip on the leadership of the Likud for the coming years. Regrettably, however, whether the polls are proved accurate or not, neither candidate for leadership of the Likud offers any good tidings to the Israeli public.

Four years after seeing his government break up before completing its term and the voters expressing widespread dissatisfaction with him, Netanyahu is now asking the Likud membership to give him another chance. He is presenting hard-line political and security policies, topped by opposition to a Palestinian state and the promise of expelling Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat.

With his declarations of the need for an iron fist in the territories, Netanyahu is not offering a political plan that could encourage the Palestinians to end the violence and return to the political track.

Netanyahu wants to convince the public that he has learned the lessons from the mistakes that characterized his term of office as prime minister. But his own election campaign propaganda shows that the lack of credibility that foiled him in the past continues to work against him.

Netanyahu glories in the relatively small number of terrorist attacks and his supposed economic achievements. His campaign, however, is fraudulent because it deliberately ignores the profound differences between the situation then and now. Netanyahu's messages blatantly make it clear that his worldview has turned toward extremism, which would further worsen Israel's security, economic and international circumstances.

Whether because of faulty political vision or the inability to lead politically, Sharon has managed to miss the rare opportunity - granted him by the broad coalition he used to have - to turn the achievements of the military campaign against terrorism into a political fulcrum. While he did generally preserve Israel's vitally-important and correct relations with the United States, aside from some ambiguous statements about his willingness to make "painful concessions" and his support for the establishment of an undefined Palestinian state, Sharon took no significant step toward renewing the political process.

Under his stewardship, Israel went back to running the occupied territories with a heavy and brutal hand against the population, funneling huge amounts of money and resources to maintain the settlements, which, in turn, apply their own political pressure to prevent any political dealings with the Palestinians. Instead of preventing them from doing so, Sharon actually encouraged the settlers to grab more land, in direct contradiction to his seemingly moderate statements. Naturally, under such circumstances, a dangerous economic instability developed - and with it, a severe social crisis.

It is unlikely that in the coming two months of the election campaign, Sharon will be able to present a convincing plan to correct these failures. It's even more doubtful that if the Likud should win the general elections, Sharon will be capable of leading in an essentially different direction, after wasting his first term in office preserving the status quo.