“Can two walk together, except they be agreed?” asked the prophet Amos (3,3), and perhaps heforesaw the alliance of the two power-hungry generals.
Agreed – since when? I believe that there was an understanding between them right from thebeginning of the election campaign, in which they accused each other of leading towardsnational catastrophe. Two weeks before the elections I was quite sure of it. Invited to thepopular TV talk-show “Politica”, I said that these elections will decide whether Mr. Barakwill be Prime Minister with Mr. Sharon as Minister of Defense, or whether Mr. Sharon will bePrime Minister with Mr. Barak as the Minister of Defense. The moderator, Dan Margalit,repeated this sentence with some astonishment. (A week later, Barak appeared on the sameshow. Margalit quoted my remark and asked for his reaction. Barak replied that he does not wantto comment on it, but to talk about peace, security and blah-blah-blah.
Barak’s part of the deal is an exercise in power-hungry cynicism and a breach of the voters’trust. But that is not the main part. Basically, Barak has arrived where he really belongs. Heis the right person in the right place: Ehud Barak, Minister of War for Sharon.
He once compared himself to a sailing boat zigzagging in order to reach its destination. Themedia are absorbed with the zigzags, but they are not important, the destination is. Thezigzags included the futile peace talks, which were never serious, the simultaneous hecticbuilding of settlements, the demand for the “end of the conflict” and the beginning of the war.Now he has arrived at a new harbor: the war government.
Sharon’s part of the deal is no less cynical. Two weeks ago he branded Barak and Peres astraitors selling the country to the enemy. Now he buys the routed Barak and the pathetic Pereson the cheap, in order to present the image of a moderate government and gain the trust of theworld, while preparing to deliver his big blow at the right time.
Sharon and Barak are no strangers to each other. They have come from the same place, receivedthe same education, pursued the same career and share the same world-view. The “general staffcommando unit”, commanded by Barak, was the continuation of the “commando 101” unitcommanded by Sharon. When Sharon started his bloody adventure in Lebanon, Barak was in chargeof army planning.
This will be a military government. It will be dominated by the three generals: Sharon, Barakand Shaul Mofaz, the most political chief-of-staff in Israel’s history. The government willalso include generals Vilnai and Ben-Eliezer. The civilians in the government will besubordinate. They are a pitiful lot anyhow: from the bickering dwarfs of Labor and the Likud upto Shimon Peres, who desperately holds on to office and is ready to lend his Nobel prizecertificate to Sharon as a fig leave.
In no Western democracy is there a government in which generals play such a central role. If oneis looking for examples, one has to search for them in South America and Africa. “The onlydemocracy in the Middle East” is, in this respect, close to some other Middle Easterncountries.
We are now entering a dark tunnel. The Palestinian war of liberation will intensify, and sowill the brutality of the occupation. The vicious cycle of violence and revenge, uprising andoppression will become worse. The difference between the radical-rightist Likud and themoderate-rightist Labor Party will be reduced still further.
Many good human beings, ours and theirs, will pay with their lives. There will be blood, pain,bereavement and invalidity. There will be another price, too: many of our best boys and girlswill look for a different kind of life in countries which have a normal civil society. Tens ofthousands, who are already there, will just not come back. Religious fanatics, war-happytypes and extremist converts will take their place.
Perhaps this is a phase that we must go through. Perhaps, as a people, we are just not yet readyfor a normal life. Perhaps we are condemned to remain in the valley of darkness until we are fedup with the path of war and phony “national unity”, and are ready to pay the price of peace.
The government of the generals is a recidivist relapse into a malady, which we believed we hadovercome. We are turning our back on the 21 st century, a century of civil society, science andhi-tech, and going back to the 20 th , the century of murderous ideologies and war.
“Can two walk together, except they be agreed?” asked the prophet and went on: “Will a lion roarin the forest, when he hath no prey?”