Israeli PM Unfairly Cast As Villain

DATELINE: Portugal.

The first leader in the country's history to be chosen in a wide-open democratic election is fighting for his political life, after the chief of a small and notoriously patronage-hungry faction within the governing coalition resigned to protest the leader's free-market economic reforms.

How would the international press cover that story? It's a good bet that (if they paid attention at all), they would take the leader's part.

But of course, this story didn't occur in Portugal. It is happening in Israel. Foreign Minister David Levy is the faction leader and Benjamin Netanyahu -- the first directly elected prime minister in Israeli history -- is the leader desperately struggling to hold his government together. And so, this story is being covered with Levy cast as the hero and Netanyahu as the villain. No surprise there. There are few heads of government in the world who get worse press than Benjamin Netanyahu.

Why should this be? We all know the answer to that one: It is because Netanyahu -- first as leader of the opposition to the Rabin-Peres government, and then as prime minister himself -- has dared to question the merits of the so-called
peace process with the Palestinians. That process has inspired such fervent devotion in the U.S., Canadian, European and Israeli press that Netanyahu's qualms have come to be seen as a form of heresy; and Netanyahu himself as the
principal obstacle to Middle Eastern peace.

Just a few days ago, however, there was printed in the unlikeliest source a refreshing dissent from the usual anti-Netanyahu rock-throwing. Ha'Aretz is the leading liberal newspaper in Israel, a staunch supporter of the Labor Party and the Oslo peace process. On Dec. 26, it printed a remarkable essay by Ari Shavit, a former member of the dovish group Peace Now and a professional journalist. (You can read an English language version of it in the archive on the paper's Web site).

On behalf of his fellow liberals and journalists, Shavit asked a direct question: Why do we hate Netanyahu so much? After all, the sainted Yitzhak Rabin and the beloved Shimon Peres used greater brutality in both Lebanon and the West Bank than Netanyahu has ever done. And many more Israelis lost their lives to terrorist violence under Rabin than have died under Netanyahu. Altogether, 'Benjamin Netanyahu bears responsibility for less bloodshed and less harm to
human rights than the two patrons of peace who occupied the prime minister's chair before him.'

So, Shavit then asks, is Netanyahu hated because he is (as he is so often accused of being) disdainful of democracy? Oops. It wasn't his government that 'hastily and recklessly adopted irreversible historic decisions with blatant disregard for proper procedure, not bothering to take into account the feelings of half the country, only bothering to receive Knesset approval after the fact.' That was the sainted Rabin and Peres governments, which committed Israel to the Oslo peace process -- the most important decision of the past 25 years -- without even the courtesy of a vote in Parliament, much less a referendum. Rabin and Peres omitted those democratic niceties precisely because they feared (with good reason, as it turned out) the Israeli public would never vote in favor of the creation of a Palestinian mini-state an hour's drive from Tel Aviv.

And 'as for ourselves,' Shavit says on behalf of the Israeli peace movement, 'we simply remained silent. We did not feel [then] that proper procedure and fair democratic rules and proper public debate were so important.'

Shavit happens to dislike Netanyahu pretty fiercely himself. But he refuses to blink the truth about the man's election which is, 'it was not the rise of Mr. Netanyahu that brought on the paralysis of Oslo, but the paralysis of Oslo that
brought on the rise of Mr. Netanyahu.' If the Palestinians had followed up that famous Rabin-Yasser Arafat handshake on the White House lawn in 1993 by unequivocally accepting Israel's right to exist, by cracking down on terrorism
within their new territories and by honoring their treaty commitments -- then Labor would have been re-elected in 1995, and the peace process would be humming happily along.

But the Palestinians did not honor those commitments. By their own actions, they discredited the peace process in the eyes of the Israeli public. That's why the government of Israel -- no matter who ends up in charge of it -- will not be
making many more Rabin-style unilateral concessions in the name of peace.

Originally published in The Financial Post