I am more optimistic in the past 24 hours than i have been for several years. several important things have happened that have been unexpected and that, all things being equal, definitively affect the calculus of voting patterns in israel and the risk analysis of jordan in positive ways. there will be change in the region and it is time to start paying attention again. it is now probable that bibi netanyahu will lose his prime ministership come may 17. i predict (as usual a bit ahead of my colleagues) he will lose in the first round of elections and if there is a runoff on june 1 he will not be in it but that it will rather be between Yitzhak Mordechai (head of the new centrist party and up till now the defense minister) and Ehud Barak, head of the Labor opposition party. as for jordan’s crown prince hassan being removed in favor of king hussein’s son abdullah, i see this as a blessing in disguise. my colleagues are also tending to view these developments quite favorably. details follow.
Israel Election Calculus. I and a good number of colleagues have been surprised this week to see Yitzchak Mordechai fake out almost everyone in the world. It now appears that he has not been equivocating and agonizing over his decision but in fact decided long ago that he would hold out till the last possible minute and join Shahak’s party and maneuver himself into the Number One slot if conditions warranted. In doing so, he managed to lock out other contenders for defense minister (ie: Matan Vilnai) and likewise force other second-string rivals to commit to various parties. Evidently he has more gusto and guts than i and most others gave him credit for. At present I suspect there is a 40% probability that he as the head of an independent centrist party will be the next prime minister. This figure will rise or fall depending on how he actually handles his campaign but in the last campaign he was a strong campaigner for Bibi and brought him votes. i don’t know much about him but am advised that he is prime minister material. If he beats out both Bibi and the Labor Party’s Barak, it would be historic in a country where the two parties have generally controlled things. Both parties will lose a significant number of seats in the next election.
To win you need to surmount the following obstacles: 25% of the country is ultra-orthodox and Orthodox and they tend to vote nearly unanimously and blindly for Bibi or other Right wing parties. 25% of the country is Arab which tends to vote Left one way or the other so these two groups tend to cancel each other out. From the other 50%, you have about 25% that are secular leftists and 75% that are secular centrists. The entire settler population is less than 2% of the country so I am not counting them because they truly don’t count in the big picture and have been subsumed above. Of this 50%, half are Sefardi. Historically, the Sefardis voted for the Right because they can’t stand the Labor party. In cases where the Left won during the past 20 years (ie: Rabin), it was not due to direct election but due to coalition politics and Rabin was an unusual breed in an unusual time. You also have a significant amount of Russians (ie: a third of the secular centrists) and they can’t stand the Labor Party either. They may very well vote for Bibi. Remember that a good number of the Russians haven’t been in the country long enough to have voted before. So the Russians and the secular leftists cancel each other out. That leaves the Sefardis and a handful of secular centrists to throw the election. This handful of secular centrists that can go either way tends to decide elections in Israel. They have tended to vote either Labor or Likud depending on a mix of economic and security factors. An election-eve terrorist attack sways them.
Mordechai is better positioned to capture this vote than Bibi or Barak:
1. Mordechai is Kurdish-Iraqi. He is blessed by the mystics and the chief sefardic rabbi and will get tons of Sefardi votes. He is a pleasant man who real people can relate to. Both Bibi and Barak are Ashkenaz; Barak is an aloof elite. Bibi is, well, Bibi. He has no friends. Bibi went to a development town yesterday which is his most fertile ground; 4 years ago he had thousands to welcome him and party officials to get them to turn out. Yesterday, a few dozen. That’s a sign.
2. Mordechai is liked by Arabs. So is Meridor. Neither Bibi nor Barak is liked by Arabs. Arabs have often voted for Labor but they are disappointed in that party and will make it clear that they are not in Barak’s pocket. Mordechai was the only channel to the PLO in the current government. Recently, Mubarak and Hussein invited him and pointedly did not agree to meet with Bibi.
3. Mordechai sometimes wears a skullcap and quotes from the Bible. He is the most religious person to seek the office since Begin. Religious people can bring themselves to vote for him too and some will.
4. Nobody can call him a Leftist or irresponsible. Clinton recently wrote him a letter suggesting in effect that he could do better for himself than stay on as Bibi’s defense minister.
David Levy is the other big sefardi but doesn’t really matter anymore. He is more of a liability to anyone than an asset anyway. The Shas party will have to walk a fine line; they have deals with Bibi but their hearts are with Mordechai.
Barak and Mordechai will not attack each other; they will focus their ammo on Bibi. Today people I spoke to that are against Bibi haven’t decided which of Barak or Mordechai they will vote for. They want to see what the parties say. But it is fair to say that whichever one wins, the winner will coalition with the other.
Bibi does have votes and it is hard for many in the country to believe he could lose. I think the pollsters will continue to underestimate Mordechai’s votes up to election day but that it is even possible that Mordechai will get 51% in the first round and there will be no need for a run-off. In any event, I am now predicting that unless Mordechai flops as a candidate or new information surfaces that undermines him, Bibi will not survive the first round of elections. Even with Moshe Arens as defense minister, everyone knows that Arens is in there to prevent extremists from adventurism. There will be no coattails for Bibi. He will suffer most because the party’s rank and file and municipal officials won’t be out there for him.
There is real probability that Mordechai will generate excitement about his candidacy. That is why Bibi was so upset this past weekend. He lost his key to the constituency that he needed to win an election. And let’s face it, he was played for a fool. As were many of the rest of us.
One reason Morechai’s candidacy is very important is as follows: Mordechai can attract votes to the centrist party that Shahak can’t. Meridor can attract some right wing and centrist votes but Mordechai can attract many of those plus sefardi votes. If Mordechai and his colleagues can convince a significant number of israelis not just to vote for mordechai but also for the party and if the party picks up say 15 seats, you can expect a coalition between them and labor (25 seats) and, say Shas (15 seats). They need 61 in all and the other 6 can come from leftist Meretz, centrist religious Meimad or whatever. The point is that you could have a government with 3 or 4 parties instead of the blackmail that currently emanates from 8 or so parties forming a government coalition. Until now, with both Labor and Likud running unattractive candidates, there was the possibility that as many as 19 parties would get into the next parliament. That was a recipe for deadlock and disaster.
Let me pause to temper my exuberance — Shahak’s fundraising trip to the UK and the USA this past week was a massive flop. People don’t even want to meet him. They think he’s on an ego trip. Mordechai’s vote today for the Orthodox Council law may buy him votes in Israel but won’t help him fundraise here either. Money counts — Barak and the Centrists have none. Bibi has lots.
Personally, I don’t yet have a preference for either Mordechai or Barak. I think Barak will focus on making a deal with the Syrians and the Syrians say that they had good meetings with him a few years ago. Mordechai is more focused on the Palestinians. Either way, I don’t see much of a difference since the government will be formed by people from both parties. I expect that within one year there will be done deals with the Palestinians and with Syria and that the atmosphere between the peoples will noticeably improve.
P.S. If King Hussein of Jordan would like to be Israel’s prime minister and president, he’d be elected by acclamation. They love him there.
B. Jordan Succession.
What’s really going on in Jordan, you ask? Well, here’s what several of my colleagues agree on.
king hussein is dying and has at most 1-2 months to live. he came back to jordan and the UK strictly to deal with the succession issue. think about it: to come straight from the mayo clinic and go outside for a few hours in the chilling rain is either reckless (a us president died that way and king hussein is not a reckless man) or the act of a man with nothing to lose. remember he spent 3 days in the UK on the way home. his brother hassan and his family will be moving to the UK. the king wanted to brief the british, get them on board and secure a place for him to live and security. hassan was becoming a real problem. he was using the mukhabarat too much and lining up a purge of the military but he didn’t have the authority to actually do it. in a sense, he was running the country as if the king had already died and the king — not quite dead yet as they say in monty pythonspeak — did not appreciate it. queen noor was concerned that hassan wanted his own son to take the throne after him and that hassan would actually harm her children that stood in the way. she predicted a blood bath. tensions between the two families have been strong for years and lately the gossiping has been immense — particularly with hassan’s wife (pakistani, i understand). abdullah, age 36, head of the commandos and special forces, has good military loyalty among the beduin, good palestinian connections via his wife and mother’s family and gets along with the queen. hassan does not have any of these 3 things going for him and this promised to be a long term threat to the stability of the country. as far as israel is concerned, abdullah agrees with his father’s policies and may even be more to israel’s liking than hassan. abdullah also handled the bread riots well a few years ago. he is also considered a scholar. he will get off to a good start but after that it will be his kingdom to lose if he screws up. the king did not decide as to hamzah; the issue is being left open for later. abdullah’s liabilities: he has spent half his life outside the country being schooled in britain; his arabic suffers.
there are credible rumors that the US helped to convince the King to push hassan out, including a decisive meeting in the oval office in early january. also that they pushed his wife to work on him. the point being that they agreed that hassan was not popular in jordan and was a long term question mark. the iraqis should be happy; hassan was very anti-iraq — a position not popular inside jordan.
one of the king’s sons (ibn talal) along with the queen hired a U.S. publicist with strong ties in the area — he was a CIA section chief in Beirut during the 1970’s and was close to the iraqi opposition but is now against trying to promote the opposition groups and instead prefers a military coup. expect a good amount of disinformation and adventurism from that department. it is fair to say though that the us has decided that arafat and the plo must be worked with — hassan has poor relations with arafat and the plo.
This may turn out to be a blessing for Jordan in disguise. When people look at Abdullah, they see the King. When they look at Hassan, they see something different and they’re not sure they like it. Hassan’s poor ties to the Palestinians has been a problem in generating loyalty toward him and this has been a simmering problem for years. For years I have heard business leaders say not so flattering things about Hassan. Abdullah will ultimately be expected to turn over the throne to Hamzah who is Queen Noor’s son. Hamzah is now 18 and studying in the UK. Little information is known to me about the two of them and I haven’t heard anything either very good or bad. Abdullah is not expected to differ on Israel issues but it can generally be forecast that if over the next few years the Palestinian issue is not dealt with in a manner considered constructive to the region, relations with Jordan will be difficult to sustain no matter who succeeds the King. It can be expected that any future king will be surrounded by a team of advisors and at present there is such a team. Jordanians are a fairly cautious, responsible and stable lot and my initial impression is to trust the king at his word that Abdullah is qualified to run the kingdom and the country’s elite to continue to run a good show. Analysts in the White House and everywhere else will have to adjust to new scenarios; they have all been banking on the fact that Hassan would take over. Whether or not the Americans were involved in removing Hassan, the fact is that for years we and the israelis have not seriously entertained other choices.
Iraq should not be ignored. What the US is doing there is not without significance. They are giving Saddam the death of 1,000 cuts and attacking his command and control daily. Quietly but consistently. This may explain why the Arab states are stepping up support against him.
One other observation as long as I am talking about the Middle East. The BBC just aired a documentary called the 50 Years War. Now that people are finishing their lives and the cold war is over, the truth is coming out. What do we know? 1. The 1967 war came about because Russia lied to Egypt and Syria to make them think the Israelis were going to attack. The Russians thought they would profit from a war. 2. If not for the fact that a couple of Arab PR men exaggerated the Deir Yassin incident during 1948 (against the advice of the people in the village) to say that the jews raped the girls, the deed would not have boomeranged and driven thousands of arabs to flee their homes, never to return. 3. If the Egyptians had not lied to the Syrians before the 1973 war about their true intentions and sacrificed their men in the short term by moving forward in the Sinai and tying up israeli troops (they said they would do so but planned only to advance 12 km to retake the canal because they knew that to advance further would be to get their butts kicked), the israelis would not have had the opportunity to fight back on the golan. On the other hand, the 1973 war came about because the israelis and egyptians refused to compromise with each other over vital interests (ie: the suez canal) and no political solution was seen to be possible because the US was preoccupied with vietnam.
What do i get from all this? 1. Lies beget lies and you don’t know what the result will be. In these 3 cases, the Arabs lost a lot because of lies. 2. A good number of the nonsense that happened during these 50 years would likely not have happened if the arabs and israelis were talking to each other directly. 3. if you watch the documentary you will come away with the conclusion that in most cases, the parties were rational human beings. Not bloodthirsty raving maniacs. Definitely distrustful but what could you expect after all this? The point being that the gravitational pull in the region over the long term is toward peaceful coexistence — not war. After the initial opposition to the creation of Israel in 1948 (not exactly irrational if you look at the historical context), war came about because it was either manufactured by outsiders (ie: 1956 and 1967) or because there was no other choice (1973). The parties may have no reason to like each other; they may choose not to have open borders but there does not appear to be any proof that the leaders of the Arab countries have any particular urge to destroy Israel which they appear resigned to as an existing reality after the 1948 war. If anything, there seems to be more of an interest and willingness to act in destroying each other (ie: syria as to jordan; iraq and kuwait). This leaves me hope that the next generation with cheap long distance telephony, internet, satellite television and well traveled western-university educated people will do better.
