No good words for Netanyahu

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): Nobody in Israel had a good word to say about outgoing Prime Minister Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu as the scale of his defeat in last Monday's election became clear. "Bibi sowed hatred and reaped his downfall," exulted journalist Yoel Marcus in the newspaper Ha'aretz. "What happened here was the final expulsion from political life of an unfit man, a man who disappointed and lied to everybody."

Ha'aretz is aligned with the Labour Party, whose leader Ehud Barak was the main beneficiary of the wave of revulsion against Netanyahu, so maybe its opinions should be discounted. But Netanyahu was also condemned by most of his ex-cabinet colleagues, three of whom became so enraged by his lies and paranoia that they founded a new party specifically to run against him. In the end he was rejected by what was, in the context of Israel's highly fragmented electorate, a landslide vote: 56 percent to 44 percent.

Many Israelis feel that the three years of Bibi have been a dead loss. Former Prime Minister Shimon Peres, for example, whom he narrowly defeated in 1996: "We had a poor government which wasted three years.

That's a pity." But the years weren't really wasted.

The most important statistic of the Netanyahu years is that back in 1996, Israelis were almost evenly divided on whether a Palestinian state was the high road to a permanent peace, or just a freeway to disaster.

Three years later, more than 70 percent of Israelis -- a majority of over two-to-one -- accept the inevitability of a Palestinian state, and believe it would not be a threat to Israel's security.

The cost of the Netanyahu interlude has been high. For three years Israel has made virtually no progress on peace with the Palestinians and the wider Arab world. The economy has remained stagnant, and the bitter ethnic and religious divisions within Israeli society have grown rapidly worse.

By the end, Netanyahu's contortions and evasions on fulfilling the terms of the Oslo peace accords with the Palestinians, as he strove to hold his coalition of right-wingers, settlers, and religious fundamentalists together, so infuriated Washington that Bill Clinton was barely on speaking terms with him.

But the real lesson Israelis have drawn from all this is that peace is unavoidable. If even this most cynical and deceitful of men, leading a coalition of all the anti-Oslo forces in Israel, was unable to avoid handing over at least some territory to the Palestinians, then it just cannot be avoided. Only the flat- earthers still believe that Israel can hold onto all of the occupied territories forever.

That still leaves a great deal to play for, however, and Prime Minister-elect Ehud Barak is no soft touch.

Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat signed the Oslo accords in 1994 under the impression that the Palestinian state to emerge from the final status talks five years later would include about 90 percent of the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. Yitzhak Rabin, who would have been Arafat's negotiating partner if he hadn't been assassinated by an Israeli right-wing fanatic, probably had around 70 percent in mind. Barak is clearly thinking around 60 percent.

But the Palestinians may yet conclude that half a loaf is better than none, especially if they get genuine sovereignty as part of the deal.

And the radically changed party standings in the Knesset (parliament) mean that Barak can put together a secure coalition that can deliver on its promises. Even the referendum he has promised on any "final status" deal should not be a problem, given the shift in Israeli thinking during the Netanyahu years.

Other issues at the top of Barak's agenda will be pulling Israeli troops out of southern Lebanon (he has promised to do it within a year), and perhaps a peace deal with Syria that involves the gradual return of the occupied Golan Heights. To the extent that Netanyahu ever had goals beyond his own political power, these are developments he will hate, but he inadvertently paved the way for them by demonstrating the futility of any other policy.

Did I predict all this a month ago? No. Did anybody else? Not that I know of. So what happened?

Netanyahu was an arch-manipulator who worked by playing on the darkest fears of ordinary Israelis. He was swept into office in 1996 by a wave of terrorist bus-bombings, carried out by Palestinian fundamentalists who detested the Oslo accords and wanted to boost an anti-Oslo politician into power in Israel. It was predictable that he would try to get the terrorists going again if the polls started running against him in this election.

Four weeks ago they did, mainly because large numbers of recent Russian immigrants who voted for him in 1996 began to defect. So Netanyahu decided to close down Orient House, the headquarters of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in Jerusalem. It was the one concrete PLO claim to a stake in the city, and Netanyahu assumed that shutting it down would unleash Palestinian riots and force the defecting voters back into the fold.

He was probably right, but the Israeli Supreme Court intervened and told him that he could not move against Orient House until after the election. Netanyahu loyalists complained bitterly that this was proof that the "establishment" wanted his defeat, and they were undoubtedly right. But it was not nearly as dirty a trick as the one it thwarted.

Sometimes, establishments have their uses.