So – what does this mean for the future of Israel and of the Palestinians? How will this reshape the Israeli partisan political landscape? (A landscape which it has always been problematic to map – see this thread: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=326089) Will this make a final peace settlement and an independent Palestinian state more or less likely? How will the new party address the problem of West Bank Israeli settlers who don’t want to leave?
Polls show that Sharon’s party should come in first, with labour second and Likud a farily distant third. Course, it’ll be a while, so who knows how the election will go. cite
A Sharon victory will make a Palestinian state (albeit a weak and impovrished one) more likely. While Sharon denies he will continue with unilateral pullouts, I think that if the Palestinians refuse to deal, that’s the course he or his successor will most likely take in the West Bank. Even if he in reality won’t continue unilateral withdrawls, the threat of it will bring the Palestinians to the negotaiating table.
If Likud wins, they’ll be back to square one, with Israel refusing to cede land till the Palestinians make real concessions, and the Palestinians unwilling or unable to do so.
Because without Palestinian input, the Israelis can basically withdraw on thier own terms, draw the new borders as they see fit and offer as few or as many concessions as they feel like. This would leave the Palestinians walled up in their new homeland with limited ability to travel between parts of thier fractured state, unable to send workers to Israel, no guarantees regarding economic aid, water rights, etc. Of course Israel gets no security gurantees out of this deal, but at this point Sharon seems skeptical they’ll get any such guarantees in any case, and they’ll have a huge wall between them and Palestine which should help lessen attacks in any case.
Some are of the opinoin that this has basically been Sharon’s plan the whole time. As a one-time hardliner in favor of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, a unilateral withdrawl may allow him to keep more of those settlements intact then would otherwise be the case.
“SPLITTER”
(mods—sorry 'bout injecting a Monty Python quote into a GD thread-- but hawthorne started it. I only added one word. )
in response to the OP—
With his new party, he may have a problem creating a coalition. Current polls show him winning 30 seats. He will need to convince other parties totalling an addiitonal 30 seats to join his goverment. Right now, I don’t see how that can be done–the parties to the right of him( which in the past supported Likud) will refuse to join because they don’t want to give up land to the Palestininas. The parties to the left will refuse to join him for their own reasons (mostly due to petty squabbles and hurt pride, camoflaged by economic policies). The religious parties (Shas and Aguda) may get 14 seats, but that won’t give Sharon the 61 seats he needs.
Exactly. What does a ruling coalition look like? What does he promise to get them in?
I suspect that he distances himself from the religious right and bargains to get in Labour and Shunui (the secularist party). While that could just be wishful thinking, I see few other viable combinations that get to 61.
According to the latest polls , Sharon doesn’t even need Shinui. Sharon’s Qadima* party + Labor under the new leadership of Amir Peretz get between 59-62 seats in these polls. Likud becomes relatively marginal, with around 13 seats, according to these polls:
Anybody who thinks Labor won’t join Sharon under these conditions of near-parity is naive of Israeli politics.
Of course, by the time the real elections roll around (end of March 2006), Qadima and labor may be somewhat eroded – but they’ll probably still be worth 50 seats together. Nobody is going anywhere without them. And Shinui may well be back up over 10 seats again, completing the puzzle. Or Sharon may ask Yahad (formerly Meretz, for those of you keeping score at home…) to join him… or even rely on Yahad and Shinui alternately backing him and Labor from outside the government on various issues.
I think Sharon made the right move here – both for his own political ends, and for the country.
The proper transliteration of the letter Qoph in Hebrew is ‘Q’. I know all the media (including English-language Israeli media) seem to be writing Kadima. It’s still wrong!
Sharon is PM because he was the leader of the party that got enough of a plurality of votes to have its leader form the government. Since he has bolted, (and I presume Likud has chosen a new leader), what prevents them from declaring that their new leader is the actual PM, now, free to dissolve the government in order to re-form it and demand elections next Tuesday?
(I’m not looking for the political reality that would make this a Bad Idea for Likud to attempt, just the rules regarding parliamentary democracies/republics on those (rare) occasions when the PM bolts his own party.)
Essentially, they could – if they could muster the manpower.
I’m no legal or parliamentary expert, but my reading of our law is that it is possible to replace the government without dissolving the Knesset (parliament) by what is known as a “Constructive Vote of No Confidence”. This essentially means getting 61 members (out of 120) to join in the vote – these 61 becoming the new coalition. The government is disbanded, and this pretty much forces the President to give the leader of this new coalition block the task of creating a new one.
This idea was in fact bandied about for a short while during the days just before and after Sharon’s split, the “leader” supposedly being Uzi Landau (who is to the Right of both Attila the Hun and Netanyahu :eek: ). The (old) Likud couldn’t put together enough fingers to carry this out, though.
BrainGlutton – the difference between Kaph and Qoph in Modern Hebrew is exactly the same as the difference between a hard ‘C’ and a ‘K’
In ancient Hebrew, however (and in some accents, notably Iraqi [a word that contains essentially the same ‘q’ as 'Q’adima, BTW]), the distinction existed and to a certain extent may still exist for some small number of people.
Oh, and just one more point to address tomndebb’s question – in any case, the elections couldn’t be moved up to “next Tuesday” – Sharon (not the old Likud!) would have dearly loved to move them up closer than they are slated for right now (March 28, 2006); but there’s a 90-day minimum time in law between the decision on new election to Knesset and the earliest date that can be given for implementation – essentially the Ministry of Interior, as well as the parties themselves, need the time to organize.
Sharon had better beware. The new-elections strategy, especially when running as a peace party, could backfire in a deadly way, if the Palestinians turn violent again. Shimon Peres learned this the hard way in 1996 (to whatever extent he’s capable of learning anything).
Essentially, he just put his political future in the hands of the Palestinians. Not the wisest move on the planet.
Yes and no… Sharon, unlike Peres, has the option of “going postal” on the Palestinians’ collective ass if they get too violent in the interim – thereby “proving” that he’s still a “hard liner” when necessary. So Palestinian violence could possibly even boost Sharon in the polls.
That saind, I do agree that there’s a strong element of gambling in the whole process – but Sharon’s chances are better than they were trying to hold on to Likud, and I think that both Israel and the Palestinians stand to gain if Qadima can cause a real shift of power in the Knesset towards the center of the political map.
In other words, somewhat clearer than Israeli politics… :eek:
Seriously – ‘Kaph’ and ‘Qoph’ really are two different letters – you can see it in the different spelling of the coiuntrly of Iraq and the city of Kirkuk, within. The ‘Q’ sound is sort of like a semi-gutteral ‘K’, sounded way further back in the throat.
Hebrew, which is closely related to Arabic, retains the written distinction, but has almost completely dropped the diference in pronounciation (‘Q’ is pronounced the same as ‘K’ now, other than some people from Arab countries, notably Iraq). That’s all there is to it…
(Hey, it’s your thread… you want to hijack it, I can go on until the comes come home…
OQ, that’s qlear as mud . . .
:eek: