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2 Ex-Mossad man a fit for Sharon's
shoes By Victor Kotsev
TEL AVIV - A new star is about to rise on
the Israeli political horizon. Given the widely
perceived impasse on all fronts, the time may be
just right.
Analysts have long lamented
what they call a "deadlock" in the Israeli
political system. Last year, American think-tank
Stratfor described the situation in the following
way:
Israel has had weak governments for
a generation. These governments are weak because
they are formed by coalitions made up of diverse
and sometimes opposed parties. In part, this is
due to Israel's electoral system, which
increases the likelihood that parties that would
never enter the parliament of other countries do
sit in the Knesset [parliament] with a handful
of members. There are enough of these that the
major parties never come close to a ruling
majority and the coalition government that has
to be created is crippled from the beginning. An
Israeli prime minister spends most of his time
avoiding dealing with important issues, since
his cabinet would fall apart if he did.
[1]
This deadlock is part of what
blocks the peace negotiations,
alongside with the
near-complete lack of consensus and political will
on the Palestinian side and formidable gaps
between what the two sides are prepared to offer.
It also prevents comprehensive solutions to
pressing internal Israeli problems - the monopoly
of the Orthodox religious establishment over
marriage comes to mind, and the ensuing problems
for many Israelis who are not "officially"
recognized as Jewish by this establishment.
Both internally and externally, Israeli
governments have time and again failed to take
bold action in pursuit of a clear long-term
vision, and their approach has often been
described by critics as "putting out fires".
One recent exception stands out, and this
is Ariel Sharon, who defied his own Likud party
(and broke away from it, forming the current main
opposition party Kadima) and forced the unilateral
withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005. This
specific decision continues to create a lot of
controversy in Israel, with its opponents pointing
to Hamas' subsequent takeover of the strip and its
proponents pointing to the international support
it generated; Sharon's courage and ability to
impose his vision, however, are almost universally
admired.
Both Sharon's military career and
his hawkishness on security issues are well known;
besides being regarded as a war hero for his role
in the 1967 and 1973 wars, he was involved in a
number of operations through the years that caused
heavy Palestinian civilian casualties. Even after
he started voicing centrist political ideas, he
remained a tough security man. In 2002, at the
height of the Second Intifada (Palestinian
uprising), he launched Operation Defensive Shield
in which the Israeli army took over a number of
West Bank cities.
The formal occasion for
the start of that intifada was Sharon's visit to
the al-Aqsa mosque compound in 2000. Some time
afterward, certainly by 2003, he changed his heart
about his political views. Though most
Palestinians never trusted him (aside from all
else, he was behind both the early settlement
movement decades ago and the security fence after
the Second Intifada started), he uttered the
fateful words "viable Palestinian state".
Sharon's forceful personality and his
security credentials allowed him to push through
his visions despite stiff domestic opposition. In
2005, he pulled the Israeli army out of Gaza. His
stroke in 2006 and the coma in which he has been
ever since have prevented the more ambitious parts
of his political program from being implemented.
Nobody on the Israeli political scene stepped into
his shoes.
"Had Ariel Sharon not had his
stroke," Stratfor wrote in its analysis from
almost a year ago, "there might have been a strong
leader who could wrestle the Israeli political
system to the ground and impose a settlement. But
at this point, there has not been an Israeli
leader since Menachem Begin [who negotiated the
peace treaty with Egypt in the late 1970s] who
could negotiate with confidence in his position.
[Prime Minister] Benjamin Netanyahu finds himself
caught between the United States and his severely
fractured cabinet by peace talks."
Only
two Israeli prime ministers since Begin have
convincingly defied this political weakness -
Yitzhak Rabin, who signed the Oslo Accords and the
peace treaty with Jordan, and Sharon. Rabin is
dead, assassinated by a right-wing extremist in
1995, and Sharon is permanently incapacitated.
Until recently, there seemed to be no potential
replacement to either of them.
Enter stage
Meir Dagan, the man whom Sharon appointed to lead
the spy agency Mossad in 2002 because he wanted "a
Mossad with a knife between its teeth". According
to most versions of the story, Sharon was
dissatisfied with the softer approach of Dagan's
predecessor, Efraim Halevy, and thus he picked
Dagan, whom he had known and whose toughness he
had admired since the early 1970s.
According to another story, Dagan, a
retired major general who was involved with the
special forces throughout his military career, had
a reputation for "cutting off Palestinians' heads
with a Japanese knife". [2]
As chief of
the Mossad, Dagan certainly lived up to his
reputation. His daring exploits and methodical
planning became legendary, and his term was
extended by three years for "extraordinary
achievements", twice by former prime minister Ehud
Olmert and once by Netanyahu.
Among
countless successful operations attributed to him
are numerous assassinations of Arab terrorists,
including that of Hezbollah terror mastermind Imad
Mughniyeh in a tightly-guarded part of Damascus in
2008. He is also credited with the destruction of
a Syrian nuclear reactor in 2007 and with slowing
down the Iranian nuclear program, in part with the
help of the highly-sophisticated computer worm
Stuxnet.
Dagan emerged from the Mossad
late last year as a national hero of sorts.
Similarly to Sharon, he is reviled and feared both
by Israel's enemies and by his domestic opponents;
similarly to Sharon, at some point in the recent
past he apparently underwent a dramatic political
transformation.
His disagreements with
Netanyahu reportedly started before he left office
- it is likely that the prime minister refused to
extend his term by yet another year precisely
because of this. His opposition to a strike on
Iran is chief among his publicly known
disagreements with the prime minister; some
speculate that with the help of a few other senior
security officials he even managed to block a
concrete plan for an Israeli attack on Iranian
nuclear facilities last year. [3]
It was
not until the past month and a half, however, that
Dagan dropped two big bombshells on the Israeli
political scene. First, he came out publicly with
the statement that an Israeli strike on Iran was
the "stupidest thing I have ever heard", which he
later clarified by saying that the Jewish state
would not withstand "a regional war that it would
not know how to get out of". [4] Then he claimed
that Israel should endorse a version of the Saudi
peace initiative, calling for a resolution of the
conflict on the basis of the 1967 lines.
This put him on a collision course with
Netanyahu, who vehemently opposes the 1967 lines
as a basis for the negotiations and continues to
insist that an attack on Iran should not be ruled
out. "It seems the former Mossad chief has chosen
to position himself on the left of the political
map," Israeli journalist Aviel Magnezi notes. [5]
Dagan, 66, cannot enter politics
immediately - at least not through the front door.
He is bound by a law that requires him to "cool
off" for three years after retiring from the
security establishment. Only then can he run for
the Knesset and become a prime minister.
There is a back door, however: he can be
appointed to a ministerial position by whoever
wins the next election, as an independent expert.
Shaul Mofaz, a former chief of staff of the
Israeli army, used this back door in 2002 when he
was made defense minister by Sharon only months
after retiring from the army; the next elections
in Israel are scheduled for 2013, and if
Netanyahu's right-wing coalition is ousted, there
is no reason why Dagan would not be able to do the
same.
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