Peretz.. Refused to promise anything
Photo: AFP
Suddenly 'extreme' doesn't sound so bad
Someone has got to put an end to Amir Peretz's visions of grandeur
You have to remember one thing when talking about the long days and nights of coalition negotiations: Anything that looks like a farce, sounds like a farce, and acts like a farce, is a farce. And how.
This time, it's the Labor Party's turn, together with some right-wing parties, who are trying to come up with some sort of a "non-Kadima" government. Nu, come on, guys.
Absurd ideas
For several days Kadima has been hinting to the media that Labor is trying to put together a radical right-wing coalition. At first, it appeared ridiculous. Absurd, even. Who would have thought that Amir Peretz would even consider sitting in the same government with Benjamin Netanyahu, Benny Elon, Tzvi Hendel, Arieh Eldad, and other enthusiastic supporters of both Israel's peace agreements with the Palestinians and generous welfare assistance to the poor?
Therefore, Kadima's claims appeared to be a joke: during the election campaign, Amir Peretz said clearly that the Labor Party had no interest in joining an "absurd, extreme" coalition with the Likud or Israel Our Home. Peretz said this repeatedly, both on and off-the-record, even if he denies it now or tries to paint his words in a different light. The public memory may be short, but it's not that short.
Before the elections
Peretz made his remarks about the Likud and Avigdor Lieberman because at the time, in the heat of an election campaign, Kadima accused Laborites of plotting a right-wing government with the Likud.
Peretz was so upset about the accusations, intended to drive centrist voters away from Labor, that he staged a particularly vicious attack on Kadima leader Ehud Olmert and his advisors in a Hebrew-language interview with Ynet.
Then came the elections. Kadima plummeted from a predicted 40-plus seats, and the mutual suspicions and the narrowing gap between Kadima and Labor weren't good for anyone. The Labor Party started eyeing senior government portfolios and acting like the world would come to an end without them.
Dirty politics
Kadima, for its part, went for dirty politics, spiced up with fashionable arrogance and snobbishness: Instead of letting Labor people portray themselves as power-hungry, they staged a frontal attack on Peretz, shamelessly treading the thin line between rudeness and chutzpah.
They attacked Peretz on almost everything, mercilessly. "He's acting like the head of the shlepper's union at the Haifa port," they said. "It's about time he learned his place. He didn't win this election."
Peretz took it, and shut up most of the time. But at the same time he started to entertain the idea that he could become prime minister, even if it meant becoming the head of a right-wing government.
He saw an opportunity, and this morning he even tried to convince Meretz leader (and former Laborite) Yossi Beilin to swallow the idea and to agree to sit in government with the right-wing parties. It's a great opportunity, Peretz told Beilin, to bring the satellite back to the mother ship.
Planting ideas
Someone, it seems, put the idea in Peretz's head to collaborate with the right, whose hatred for Ehud Olmert is so great that it would have agreed to the unprecedented step of making Amir Peretz prime minister. Let Kadima sweat, someone proposed to the Labor chairman, it's not entirely clear why. Let them see you know how to play games with them.
But games will be games, and so, almost without paying attention, Peretz found himself drowning in an endless stream of phone calls and proposals from right-wing leaders, and even from the Arabs.
Benny Elon, for example, presented his ideas on diplomatic issues: Just freeze talks with the Palestinians for two years, and we're yours. Peretz threw the proposal in the trash. He wasn't ready to promise anything to anybody. Especially not on diplomatic issues, and especially not freezes.
Telephone calls also amounted to nothing. It is to Peretz's credit that he refused to budge, refused to promise anything. "The right hates Bibi and Olmert so much that they are ready to promise me anything," he told someone this week, with a strong dose of pleasure in his voice. "They are promising me just about everything. They've completely fallen off the rails. It's incredible."
The problem was that this was all seen as a game. He got dizzy and made mistakes.
Out of control
The devil's dance is out of control, and rumors about secret and half-official talks have taken over the body politic like wildfire in a field of dry brush. Without knowing for sure if such contacts are actually taking place, there is an endless list of claims, speculations, predictions and analysis about something that is simply not happening.
No one, it would appear, had any clear indication that such moves were going on. Apparently this is because they were not going on. There may have been proposals, but they went no further than that. As the saying goes, it takes two to tango.
Sunday night it became clear – when Meretz removed, once-and-for-all, its support for Amir Peretz, when the confused Likud and the Pensioners announced they would support Olmert – that the option for an alternative, "social-issues" government was nothing but a myth, a type of u-turn.
The question is, who will put a stop to this game? Who will be mature enough to put an end to it, and when?
