A clandestine undertaking on behalf of Israel, the Jets and the Jews.

 
The Likud Vote

In a close vote, Likud's central committee has voted against early primaries, keeping Prime Minister Sharon's coalition intact for now.

Sharon will still face an uphill battle when primaries do take place against Binyamin Netanyahu and Uzi Landau, but with today's victory he will then be in an almost no-lose situation. If he remains head of Likud and its candidate for prime minister, he will surely be re-elected. If he is defeated in primaries, he will form a new centrist party that also would be favored in national elections.

Sharon would have set up the centrist party had he lost tonight's vote, but in that scenario a victorious Netanyahu would have had much more time to run a campaign attacking Sharon and his political opportunism. Now, Netanyahu must expend all of his energy on the primaries, which also will be very close, while Sharon has months to plan his strategy while remaining the incumbent prime minister.

Among the responses to the vote results was this one from Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom's office, which stated that: "The biggest winner of the evening is Sharon and the second winner is Silvan Shalom. Once again the Sharon-Shalom coalition has proven to be a winning coalition. The biggest losers are Netanyahu, who will remain so for the next eight months until primaries, and Gideon Sa'ar who tried to play with the big players and lost the consensus."

This statement sadly reveals much about the sorry, petty, vindictive state of Israeli politics. In a normal country, a political prostitute like Sylvan Shalom would, at worst, be a mid-level political hack, not charged with foreign affairs.
posted on 9/26/2005