Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon sat down in his Tel Aviv office on Wednesday night with members of his inner circle.
They had a single purpose: to decide how to counter newspaper allegations that Sharon’s son, Gilad, had procured a payment of $1,5-million from South African businessman and old family friend named Cyril Kern.
That money, says Sharon’s many enemies, was used as part of an illegal transaction to pay off a debt incurred by Sharon senior from an illegal fundraising effort for his campaign to lead the right-wing Likud Party in 1999 — a fund-raising effort set up by his other son, Omri.
Among the men gathered in his office that night a consensus emerged: Israel’s most controversial prime minister should appear on television before the nation with documents that would prove his innocence once and for all. It would be a cool, measured and sober performance. He would go through the allegations, ticking them off one by one.
The Bulldozer — as he is nicknamed — would finally bury the scandal.
Around midnight, say sources in Likud, Sharon came to his own conclusion, rejecting the counsel of his closest advisers. Instead, the tactics he would choose would be revealed to a stunned Israeli electorate on Thursday night as their prime minister launched into a rambling, and at times hysterical, assault on Amram Mitzna, his main Labour rival to be leader of Israel when the country goes to the polls on 28 January.
Jabbing his finger for emphasis, he accused Labour and the Israeli media of organising ‘a despicable plot’ to bring down his government, while assiduously evading detail of the accusations against him.
It was, even Likud insiders admit, an embarrassing performance, even more so when it was truncated after barely 15 minutes by Judge Mishael Heshin, chairman of the Central Elections Committee, who ordered the transmission to be halted under an Israeli law that bans the broadcast of ”propaganda” by politicians within 60 days of an election.
By Friday morning — amid election adverts from Labour comparing Likud to the Mafia — even the most sympathetic of columnists were asking whether the prime minister was being entirely honest. The hostile ones were asking if ‘Arik’ had finally lost the plot.
This weekend the future of Sharon and the right-wing bloc’s grip on Israel was in the balance. According to the latest polls, less than a handful of votes separate the parties of the Left and parties of the Right, amid mutterings from Likud activists that Sharon — or at the very least his favoured son Omri, who is also running for the Knesset — may have to be sacrificed to save Likud from electoral disaster. Their polling has plummeted in recent weeks by 25%.
Whether he survives or limps on will be crucial to whether Israel will continue with a bitter conflict with the Palestinians under Sharon or choose the Left and Mitzna, Labour’s leader, who stands for unconditional resumption of peace talks.
Sharon, who barely a month ago was predicting a massive and historic mandate that he believed would allow him finally to crush the Palestinians, must be wondering how all this came to pass.
The answer has as much to do with Sharon’s personal history — as Israel’s most famous and maverick soldier — as it does with a personality that has never wavered from the view that he is inevitably right.
Twenty minutes drive from Jerusalem, amid the rocky Judaean hills, is the village of Latrun.
In 1948 — during the Israeli war of independence — Latrun, with its British police fort and controlled by Jordanian forces, was on the fiercely contested Tel Aviv to Jerusalem road.
It was here that a young Ariel Sharon was badly wounded in a disastrous assault while serving in the Alexandroni Brigade and was left to crawl across the olive terraces with a bullet in his abdomen.
It was at Latrun, too, that Sharon first met Cyril Kern, a 17-year-old volunteer in Israel’s army. In 2002, more than half a century later, Kern’s loan of $1,5-million to Sharon’s family has left the prime minister with another fight for survival.
This time it is for Sharon’s political life. In a few weeks the 75-year-old leader and his scandal-ridden right-wing Likud party has seen its popular support collapse, beginning when allegations surfaced that Likud candidates were involved in vote-buying at the party’s primary in December.
But that scandal is dwarfed by the one that Sharon him self has now been drawn into — a police investigation on allegations that he committed fraud and deception over the repayment of a campaign contribution from 1999, illegal because it had come from a foreign source, which is banned under Israeli law.
The row engulfing Sharon this weekend boils down to whether he and his son Gilad procured the Kern loan to repay the donation from 1999. In other words did Sharon commit the same crime a second time to clear his liability for the first?
Around this central allegation buzz a host of others, contributing to a stench of impropriety: that Sharon’s family tried to raise a fraudulent mortgage on his Negev desert ranch improperly to repay the debt, and that Gilad has benefited from a shady business deal because of his proximity to his father.
Sharon’s answer to these allegations in his broadcast on Thursday night has done little to help his case. Yes, he admits, some of the money that came to fund his 1999 campaign was from illegal sources. He says he repaid that sum, partly from his and his late wife Lily’s savings.
The rest he left Gilad to raise and claims not to know where that money came from.
Nor has he been helped by Kern, who told the Israeli paper Yediot Ahronoth last week that Sharon had asked for the loan, and then appeared to change his story in subsequent interviews, insisting it was Gilad who asked for the cash for business reasons unconnected with the loan.
”When a friend like Arik asks for help,” Kern said in his first account of the loan, ”of course I can’t refuse. He is an old friend and that is why I agreed to lend him the money.”
Kern said he did not directly ask what the money was for but understood it was to repay some kind of debt.
If the polls in Friday’s Hebrew tabloids — Yediot and Maariv — are to be believed, it is Kern’s initial statement that Israeli voters believe.
Maariv ‘s poll found that 43% believed Sharon was involved in corruption and 31% believed he was clean. In the Yediot poll 61% of all respondents rejected his version of events, believing he did know about the Kern loan.
What is so curious about these polls, however, is that while so many are unhappy with Sharon he is still trusted more than Mitzna. Crucially, voters seem not to have not yet reached the point where they want him step aside in favour of Likud’s equally scandal-tainted Binyamin ‘Bibi’ Netanyahu, who has declared that he would send Yasser Arafat into exile.
All of this has left Israelis approaching the present elections — the third since 1999 — already weary with the campaign and its drama. Among young voters, in particular, there is deep disillusionment with parties that have brought neither security, peace or prosperity.
That disillusionment is most pronounced among a group described by Professor Tamar Liebes, of Hebrew University in Jerusalem, as the frayerim — the ”sucker class” — who pay their taxes, do their military service and abide by the law and who, in the words of one young Israeli, ”get pissed on anyway”.
”One of the issues that has emerged from this election,” said Liebes, ”is the level of disgust among voters at the way Israeli politics has come to be dominated by issues of personal power and self-interest. People are fed up.
”There is a massive disappointment with Labour for its failure to deliver peace and a sense that — until now — the media had let Sharon off the hook.”
Most damaging of all for Sharon is the whispering campaign that has begun within his own party. At Metzudat Zeev, the tatty low-rise concrete block in Tel Aviv that is Likud’s national headquarters, factions within the party — particularly that of his rival Netanyahu — have begun to brief against Sharon, suggesting it might be better if he resigned.
But not only Bibi’s supporters are turning against Sharon. Others are against him for very different reasons — irritation with the way he has led the party, particularly in its time of crisis. Sharon, they say, has ignored the party leadership in favour of his own clique — including his two sons. Worst of all, he kept quiet on the emerging scandal, leaving Likud figures in the lurch when it broke in Haaretz.
It is an allegation that appears well-founded. Although Sharon knew two days in advance that Haaretz was planning to run a story about his family and the loan and the police investigation, he discussed it only with his inner circle: Reuven Adler, an ad executive, his bureau chief Dov Weissglass, and his sons. Given an opportunity to reply to Haaretz in advance, the clique stayed silent. Senior politicians called on to defend Sharon were left as ignorant of his version of events as a stunned public.
But now it is Omri who is looking most vulnerable. With his shaven head and massive bulk that make him look like Marlon Brandon’s Kurtz in Apocalypse Now, Omri — whom Sharon describes as his ”best friend” — has become a liability to the party.
It was Omri who told his father that to succeed in politics he would have to learn not to ”think in black and white”. Omri is credited with creating the illegal sources of election funding in 1999 that caused so much trouble in the first place. And it was Omri, as Sharon’s secret envoy to the Palestinians, who encouraged the anger of Sharon’s right-wing allies and irritated his own party apparatus.
Now Omri may become Sharon’s fall guy. He would be happy to be so, Likud sources say. But were he to resign his candidacy from Likud’s Knesset list, he argued, it might appear to confirm that his father was in the wrong.
As Maariv ‘s columnist, Shlomi Yerushalmi, summed up, Sharon has ”placed his history and personality on the guillotine”.
”If he drops in the polls at the beginning of next week, this means that the public — not only the Left and the media, as Sharon contends — wants to bring down the blade.” – Guardian Unlimited Â