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JERUSALEM by GIL HOFFMAN & HERB KEINON
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Likud licks its wounds

Everything seemed to be going great for the Likud at the beginning of the year. The party managed to double Labor’s mandates in the January election, gobble up Yisrael B’Aliya to reach a formidable 40 Knesset seats, and form a stable coalition without Labor or Shas to get in the way.

But that was before last month’s local elections, where the ruling party was so badly trounced that for the first time in three decades all three major cities are led by non-Likud mayors.

“The party’s losses in the municipal races are the tip of the iceberg,” one Likud MK said this week. “If we don’t start rebuilding this party soon, we will fall back to 19 MKs before we know what hit us.”

Indeed, the ruling party is far from stable. The problems in the Likud are not at the top, where Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is firmly in power and the next tier of leadership candidates is being kept at bay. The Likud’s dilemma is with the party infrastructure, which is virtually nonexistent.

Although Sharon’s son, MK Omri Sharon, wields tremendous power behind the scenes, aside from Likud director-general Arik Brami, a party hack loyal to Sharon, no one is running the party in an official capacity.

The Likud secretariat, which is in charge of supervising the party’s organizational structure and election mechanisms, has not met in some two years. The head of the secretariat is former MK Yehoshua Matza, who Sharon appointed head of Israel Bonds in New York in January 2002. Former MK Moshe Arens was elected secretariat chairman in June 2002, but the Sharon-controlled Likud internal courts dismissed Arens over a technicality and never replaced him.

Sharon has also not let the Likud bureau convene in more than a year. Led by hawkish Minister-without-Portfolio Uzi Landau, the last time the bureau met it approved a resolution prohibiting the establishment of a Palestinian state that embarrassed the prime minister.

The bureau is intended to provide an essential forum for Likud MKs and mayors to have a say in shaping the party’s policies and determining its future. Without the bureau, all the Likud MKs can do is scream at Likud faction meetings and hope Sharon is listening.

The last few Likud central committee meetings ended in chaos after Sharon supporters either prevented an essential vote or announced in advance that he would ignore its results. Likud convention chairman Agriculture Minister Yisrael Katz convened a meeting Tuesday night to set a date for the next convention where the party’s organizational crisis is expected to be discussed.

More internal strife for Labor

This week’s dispute between Labor leader Shimon Peres and former chairman Binyamin Ben-Eliezer was about more than just the date of Labor’s impending merger with Histadrut Labor Federation chief Amir Peretz’s Am Ehad party. It was a clash of different philosophies with far-reaching implications.

Peres and the party’s dovish branch, led by MKs Avraham Burg and Haim Ramon, want to create a new Social-Democratic party that would include Labor, Am Ehad, Meretz, Yossi Beilin’s Shahar movement, and ideally most of Shinui. They believe that the only chance for Labor to return to power — and save the peace process — is for the entire Left to unite into a huge bloc that can serve as a viable alternative to the Likud.

Ben-Eliezer and the party’s hawkish branch, led by MKs Matan Vilna’i and Ephraim Sneh, want to shift Labor more to the center to attract Shinui and Likud voters. They believe that the only chance for Labor to return to power — and save the peace process — is to elect a hawkish chairman with a military background to finally replace Yitzhak Rabin and return the party to its former status as a legitimate alternative to the Likud.

The moment the merger with Am Ehad is approved, Labor will be flooded with refugees from Peretz’s party who will do the Histadrut leader’s bidding. Peres intends to use the new Labor recruits to extend his tenure, wrest the party institutions from Ben-Eliezer’s allies, and build the new leftist bloc in time for the next general election.

The battle over Am Ehad is merely round one in a clash between doves and hawks that will heat up as time goes on. The hawks took the opening shot this week when they succeeded in postponing the merger, delaying the party’s convention and canceling Thursday’s planned central committee meeting.

But the doves will not go down so easily. Peres may not be good at winning national elections, but he is a pro at fighting internal party politics and the octogenarian Labor leader will use any ammunition necessary to save the peace process and vindicate his life’s work. Stay tuned.

Lullabies for Omri

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon ventured back into the lion’s den on Monday, convening a closed-door meeting of the Likud faction. Sharon defended the prisoner exchange, his diplomatic policies, and the route of the security fence, as MKs took turns challenging him.

Usually MK Omri Sharon is one of the few MKs who are silent in such meetings, because he tends to fall asleep. But Omri was far from silent on Monday.

He snored. Loudly. So loudly that several MKs said after the meeting that they had trouble hearing the prime minister over the vociferous sounds emanating from his son.

“Omri sat there contentedly, sleeping away with the digital pen from his palm pilot in his mouth,” one Likud MK snickered after the meeting. “It was as if the prime minister’s speech was like a lullaby in his son’s ears.”

Jews are news

Protocol dictates that at the EU-Israel Association Council meeting to be held in Brussels this week, Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom will meet the foreign minister of the country currently holding the EU Presidency (Italy), the foreign minister of the country next in line (Ireland), and Chris Patten, representing the European Commission. The meeting is an annual affair where the sides discuss their ties and a whole range of mutual interests.

Other European foreign ministers who will be in Brussels at the same time taking part in a monthly meeting of EU foreign ministers are invited to attend the parley with Shalom, if they want, but are not obliged to. It’s a safe bet, however, that a good number of the expanded EU’s 25 foreign ministers will be on hand.

The old dictum “Jews are news,” is very much at work here, one Israeli official explained. “Israel is a very sexy topic in Europe these days.”

The official said that a good part of what the European foreign ministers say at the meeting will be designed as much for their own domestic audiences, as for trying to add anything to the EU-Israel relationship.

As hard as it may be for Israelis to fathom, the official said, most European governments are actually taking a more moderate stand on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict than their respective publics would like to see.

“They are under pressure to take a more critical position,” he said.

The meeting on Tuesday in Brussels will give many of the foreign ministers the platform to critically sound off about the security fence, extra judicial killings, and the grave humanitarian situation in the territories. All of this plays well back in Stockholm, Athens or Madrid, but — because it is so predictable — has little real impact in Jerusalem.

Shalom’s rocky road tour

Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom will travel to Vienna this week, the first Israeli foreign minister to go to Austria since Israel recalled its ambassador in February 2000 to protest the inclusion of Jorg Haider’s Freedom Party in the coalition government.

One Israeli diplomatic official said the Austrian government has recently stood out along with Germany and Italy in supporting Israel in various EU forums.

It will be the second “make-up” meeting Shalom will have in as many days. While in Brussels for the EU-Israel Association Council meeting, Shalom is scheduled to meet with Belgian Foreign Minister Louis Michel, the first such meeting since Belgian-Israeli relations were severely strained in 2001 following the move to try Sharon there for war crimes. Israel recalled its ambassador from Belgium for consultations as a result of that issue as well.

Israel’s ambassador to Belgium, Yehudi Kinar, has since returned to Brussels, and a new ambassador to Austria is expected to be announced in the near future. In July, when Austria’s foreign minister Benita Ferrero-Waldner was in Israel, Shalom announced that full diplomatic relations will be restored with Austria. This came following the dissolution of the Austrian coalition that included Haider’s party.

Diplomatic officials said the reason a new ambassador has not been named yet to Vienna has nothing to do with political considerations, but rather because these appointments take time to grind through the ministry’s bureaucratic appointments process.

A Foreign Ministry advance team was sent to Vienna this week to prepare for the meeting, which — in addition to the Palestinian-Israeli issue — will focus heavily on bilateral ties, and how to restore them to where they were before Haider knocked them off track.

Can’t we ever win one at the UN?

When Israel’s delegation at the UN decided two weeks ago to finally fight fire with fire and combat a clearly political resolution calling for the protection of Palestinian children with a similar resolution calling for protection for Israeli children, some wondered what took so long.

On the surface it seemed like a no-brainer, a perfect way for Israel to demonstrate — if any reasonable person really needed additional proof — that the UN General Assembly is a hypocritical body whose pronouncements on the Middle East need not be taken seriously.

The last time Israel introduced a resolution to the General Assembly was in 1976.

But after the Egyptian resolution dealing with the Palestinian children passed a UN panel by a vote of 88—4 with 58 abstentions, and will now be brought to the General Assembly where it will surely pass by a similar margin, some Israeli officials are questioning Israel’s tactics.

The US, along with Micronesia and the Marshall Islands, voted against the Palestinian resolution, saying it was political. How can it now support the Israeli resolution, one official asked? And if the US votes against Israel’s resolution, how will that look?

Among the 58 abstentions were the EU countries and most Western democracies. They will now obviously not vote for the Israeli resolution. How does it look for Israel, according to this argument, to be unable to garner the support of these countries for a resolution on behalf of Israeli children?

“You can’t win in the General Assembly,” one Israeli diplomatic source said, “so why even try?” The official said this doesn’t mean that Israel needs to pack it in at the UN, and that he understands the need for having an active presence at the UN defending Israel’s positions. But, he says you have to choose your fights in forums where you have a chance to win.

Michael Jordan played basketball, the official pointed out, and made a bad mistake when he tried to play baseball — the same dynamic is at work here.

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WASHINGTON by JANINE ZACHARIA
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Saudi snubbed?

Those who attended President George W. Bush’s October 28 iftar dinner at the White House — the traditional breaking of the daylong fast during Ramadan — said it was the first time they could recall the dean of the Washington diplomatic corps, Saudi ambassador Prince Bandar bin Sultan, not being seated at the president’s table. Ambassador since 1983, he is the longest serving envoy in Washington. In other Ramadan-related news, on Wednesday, Democratic presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) was scheduled to co-host a Capitol Hill iftar dinner.

Reagan controversy

CBS found itself in the middle of a political firestorm this week with its decision to pull a scheduled airing of a mini-series about former President Ronald Reagan and his wife, Nancy. Reagan supporters said the mini-series was a critical portrayal of Reagan, who is 92 and suffering from Alzheimer’s, and pressured CBS to cancel it.

Free speech advocates accused CBS of caving in. CBS chairman Leslie Moonves said on Tuesday it was an “absolute lie” that he yielded to political or corporate pressure in pulling the series.

“It was a moral decision, not an economic or a political one,” Moonves said in an interview with Daily Variety.

First Lady Laura Bush, when asked on Monday by a reporter how she would feel if there was ever a mini-series done about her and her husband, replied, “I hope it would be really, really great.”

Would she would have supported the airing of a series that portrayed her and her husband in a negative light?

“Well, every day, I argue on the side of writing really nice things about me and my husband,” she said.

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NEW YORK by MELISSA RADLER
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Kristalnacht remembered

Jakiw Palij, a retired Jackson Heights draftsman and admitted Nazi guard at the Trawniki slave labor camp in Poland during the Holocaust, spent the 65th anniversary of Kristalnacht hiding from Jewish high school students.

On Sunday, students from Rambam Mesivta High School demonstrated outside Palij’s house waving signs with the slogan, “No SS in the US.”

Palij, 79, was stripped of his US citizenship in July on the grounds that he lied about his wartime service in his original visa application in 1949, and various people of goodwill are urging the Justice Department to deport him to Ukraine rather than heed the pleas of his family to forgive and forget.

In a November 7 letter to the students, Palij’s congressman, Joseph Crowley, said that “more must be done to hold him accountable” for his crimes.

At the rally, Rambam Mesivta dean, Rabbi Zev Friedman said, “Imagine in 50 years from now we found one of Osama’s henchmen living freely in Queens, would we forgive and forget?”

George Soros and the Jewish problem

Taking the stage at the Jewish Funders’ Network day-long conference on Jewish philanthropy last Tuesday, Jewish Hungarian-born billionaire George Soros explained Europe’s recent spike in anti-Semitism.

“The policies of the Bush administration and the Sharon administration contribute to that,” Soros told philanthropists from America, Europe, Australia and Israel who gathered to hear him speak on affecting social change in turbulent environments, according to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “If we change that direction of those policies, then anti-Semitism also will diminish,” he said.

Soros, who has donated around $1 billion to non-Jewish charitable causes, then revealed a secret fear: that his success turns people into anti-Semites.

“I’m also very concerned about my own role because the new anti-Semitism holds that the Jews rule the world,” he said. “As an unintended consequence of my actions, I also contribute to that image.” Philanthropist Michael Steinhardt, who helped arrange the event, said Soros’s views “do not reflect those of most Jewish millionaires and philanthropists.”

Reform movement gets a new name

After adopting modern practices such as English-language prayers and patrilineal descent, the Reform movement decided last week that its 130-year old name, the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, was as old as, say, refusing to officiate at gay marriages. By an overwhelming majority, delegates at the UAHC’s biennial convention in Minnesota voted to change the movement’s name to the Union for Reform Judaism.

“Let me be the first to say that the most important part of any Jewish organization is not its name but its values and its mission,” explained the union’s president, Rabbi Eric Yoffie, noting that the movement’s most recent change is actually a step back to Jewish basics such as increased tradition and Hebrew prayer.

“In Judaism, a change of name takes place when a person or a group undergoes a change in essence,” he said.

Farewell to secularism

At the Orthodox Union’s Institute for Public Affairs dinner on Monday evening, Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum, the keynote speaker, substituted a prepared speech on the war on terror for a statement on the evils of secularism.

“There is no faith left in Western Europe. It’s dead, it’s secular,” he told the crowd. Secular society precedents include Nazi Europe, Communist Russia and Ba’athist Iraq, he said, and the New York Times is an avid supporter of modern-day secularism.

“If we have no religion, we have no faith, we have no goodness and then what happens?” he asked.

Santorum received a warm round of applause, but several attendees said afterward they thought the speech was “strange” and “scary.”