Doug Henwood wrote:
> Bryan Atinsky wrote:
>
>> Indeed Sharon had a plan. But it would be ludicrous to call it a
>> "peace plan."
>
>
> How does this unified vision of Sharon's compare with Israeli public
> opinion?
>
> Doug
Today, three separate polls came out with an estimate of 44 seats for Kadima under Olmert, with Peres in the second position in the list. Kadima with 16 seats and Likud 13.
Sharon's ailment has been a boon for Kadima. The other political parties have been quiet 'in respect' for Sharon, putting their election campaigns on hold, every minute the media has been coming out with a new update about whether Sharon wiggled his left toe or his right, and repeating the question of where the peace process will go without Sharon at its head...
In the absence of any counter discourse, the public seems to be eating this up and rallying around Kadima, as a way to show solidarity with 'our' sick leader. (it kinda reminds me of "Bob Roberts")
Does Israeli public opinion align with Sharon's vision?
In the past years, poll after poll showed that the majority of Israelis were willing to give up a great majority of the West Bank settlements and even to some form of political division of Jerusalem. But the majority also buy into the dominant rhetoric that Israel "has no partner." In practice, this means that they believe that unilateral action is the only possible solution.
But, Israelis have a vision mostly about wanting to get on with their lives, retention of the territories and settlements, a continuation of the occupation, are backed because the public believe the rhetoric that these are essential for their security.
The greater Israel Zionist vision is not the overriding cause of their support.
If there was a strong leader who told them that we must evacuate every settlement and divide Jerusalem, it is my belief that they would overwhelmingly support this.
The ideological interests of the politicians are given support by their ability to persuade the population that the policies are in their practical interests.
Bryan
---- Also,
Yitzhak Laor today published an interesting piece in Ha'aretz on the creation of a Sharon mythos and cult of personality:
The Ten Commandments are on the way
By Yitzhak Laor
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/668699.html
Sympathy is awakened in every person at the sight of another person's suffering, unless one's concept about the suffering of others is taken from the legacy of Ariel Sharon. Sympathy is awakened by the diagrams of the brain and the detailed descriptions given by the surgeons on TV. Meanwhile, everyone is jumping aboard the "Altalena": One person weeps on TV remembering the adventure in Qalqilyah, another was with Sharon at Umm Katef, a third at the Suez Canal, and all remained alive, of course, to tell the tale of the glorious victor. Only in Kibiyeh, for some reason, was Sharon on his own, to show you that history has at least one advantage: there are events nobody wants to have participated in, not even in retrospect.
But nothing of the political farce currently playing began with the hemorrhage. For months, the politicians in Israel, particularly the most senior of them, have behaved as if Sharon was Moses on Sinai about to bring down the Ten Commandments. Now they are hoping that if not the Ten Commandments, at least there are a few scraps of paper on which he wrote the list of Kadima candidates for the Knesset. Tzachi Hanegbi in his place, Gideon Ezra in his, and let's not forget Avi Dichter.
In these historic moments watching TV, it is important to take note of the nature of the enthusiasm about Kadima. It's not so much the evacuation of the settlers from Gaza, but the fear of handing the treasury over to the social democrats, which worked as such a success story in this case. Even Shimon Peres agrees. There's nothing like this situation to demonstrate the nature of Israeli democracy. Everything is seemingly determined in live broadcasts from the hospital courtyard.
The new Sharon party is based on the memorialization of the moment, a kind of "Israel's eternity can wait." It is forbidden to talk politics, but a duty to approve the budget (and if Sharon was healthy, the budget should have been approved?) All the participants in this tearjerker must preserve the status quo, starting with Ehud Olmert as the leader. That is Sharon's vision, and in Sharon's vision Sharon is the way, or "the legacy."
This vision is ridiculous. Even the "change in his position" should be read with a little less enthusiasm. The change matched, and not by accident, what Bush needed in the midst of his Iraqi horror. But the "vision" is now in charge in Israel. In the struggle for the future control over Israel, the past has been erased with the help of the current circus, opposite the TV. That's why the politicians and media invented the people weeping at their TV sets. Luckily we have telephones and e-mails to know that things are not really "just like that."
As we said, Sharon's illness is not very different from what happened until now, all through the last year, as memory was gradually erased, for example by scholarly discussions comparing Sharon to Charles de Gaulle. We are forced to grant "forgiveness" for the past in the name of the present, which is supposedly different from the past.
It wasn't after the stroke that the Lebanon War turned into a four-letter word; it wasn't after the stroke that Sabra and Chatilla turned into bothersome annoyances. True, Sharon built settlements and now he has dismantled some of them. Yes, he will do the same thing in the West Bank. What's the "same thing"? The wall? The destruction of the livelihood of tens of thousands more Palestinians? Closing them up in ghettoes like the Gaza Ghetto? Nighttime shellings under the cover of Orwellian language, which the media in its entirety helped build?
Here, this is the most dangerous element in the Sharon cult of personality: turning the present into a "peace process." Politicians and especially everyone who was afraid of the "agenda," that change that burst into the world when Amir Peretz was elected chairman of the Labor Party, took part in this.
In that context, even the discussion of the Sharon legacy has become part of the game. For the sake of that "legacy" people are ready to forget the little ambivalence that Israeli culture has allowed those who made their living from blood. Yitzhak Rabin at least acknowledged that ambivalence. It's enough to read his speech on receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize to understand that even if he didn't have a legacy, he had some sensitive insight into the valley of death through which we walked.
Sharon is waved as a single flag: a winner. The Sharon legacy is success. Success at what? At war and business and building an image. Here is the historical moment the Israelis longed for: to look like a success story.