(COMTEX) B: Analysis: Netanyahu: U.S. opposes? So what?
MAALEH ADUMIM, West Bank, Aug 31, 2005 (United Press International via COMTEX)
-- A 4X4 van took former Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu up a bumpy light
brown rocky track to a hilltop between Jerusalem and the West Bank settlement
town of Maaleh Adumim.
Netanyahu chose that site, called E-1, as the first stop in his drive to replace
the incumbent Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
The plan for E-1, overlooking the Jerusalem-Maaleh Adumim road, is
controversial. The planners hoped it would help link Jerusalem and Maaleh Adumim
and plug one of the gaps in the ring of Jewish communities surrounding the
predominantly Arab East Jerusalem.
Among the Palestinians, and around the world, that plan caused concern partly
because it would disrupt contiguity between the Palestinians in the northern and
in southern West Bank. If East Jerusalem becomes an enclave surrounded by Jewish
communities, it would be more difficult to establish it as the Palestinian
state's viable future capital.
International, especially U.S. pressure, led the government to freeze work at
E-1 and the issue thus had the ingredients for the fight Netanyahu was picking
with Sharon.
In rolled up shirtsleeves, the E-1 plan beside him, Netanyahu complained the
Palestinians were building east of Jerusalem.
"What we need to do is to break this siege by building here. Sharon won't build
here. I will," he declared.
Netanyahu said he had facilitated construction at E-1 when he was prime
minister. Natan Sharansky, standing beside him in a battered army hat, built the
roads when he was housing minister.
Construction of a four-lane highway stopped six months ago because of U.S.
pressure, Maaleh Adumim municipality's Director General Eli Har-Nir told
reporters. Now, instead of building homes, public services, hotels and
recreation facilities over a 325-acre area, only a police station will be built,
he noted.
The situation is absurd, Netanyahu declared. Sharon "uprooted thousands of
houses" in the Gaza Strip settlements and at the same time "is preventing the
construction of one house here, on Jerusalem's outskirts. He is abandoning
Jerusalem's Eastern Gate to the Palestinians! It must stop and we shall stop
it," he declared.
The Americans oppose settlement here, reporters noted. "So what?" asked
Netanyahu.
Washington opposed also construction of the Har Homa neighborhood between
Bethlehem and Jerusalem.
"I just (went ahead and) built there... There are thousands of housing units
there... Nobody can tell us to freeze building in our capital," he argued.
The tough talk is designed to win the votes of the 155,000 registered Likud
members, many of whom are furious at Sharon for withdrawing from the Gaza Strip,
all the more so since he is doing so unilaterally after a party referendum
overwhelmingly voted against that.
The Likud's Central Committee is to vote on Sept. 26 on whether to advance party
primaries. Polls show the overwhelming majority there opposes Sharon.
If Netanyahu has his way, and the primaries are advanced, he could be party
leader by the end of November. He would then strive for early elections, his
spokesman Amir Eilat said.
Netanyahu was prime minister from May 1999 to June 1996 and served as Sharon's
finance minister until he quit on Aug. 7.
He formally announced his candidacy for party leader, Tuesday in Tel Aviv at an
event his aides said would be a press conference but that turned out to be an
election rally.
Dozens of fans filled the hall, cheered him, chanted his nickname "Bibi, Bibi,"
and at least once answered a reporter's question instead of him.
Netanyahu was widely considered to have been a disaster as prime minister. He
said he has changed.
"I gained experience. I learnt. I drew lessons. I am ready," he said.
The reaction in some of Wednesday's newspapers was: Really?
Tuesday's event "brought back the old Bibi," wrote Yediot Aharonot's
commentator, Sima Kadmon.
Netanyahu said he had restored security and that for two and a half years there
was not one suicide bombing. "Israel's citizens felt secure," he stated.
"One might think that during his days Tel Aviv was Geneva," Kadmon sneered.
He talked of fighting corruption. "I cannot accept that my state would be a
state of baksheesh."
The Ha'aretz newspaper's Yossi Verter noted that the Knesset Members sitting on
the dais beside him included Ehud Yatom who as a senior Shabak security service
commander had stoned to death a Palestinian highjacker that was in his custody.
Knesset Member Naomi Blumenthal who is on trial for alleged bribery, and Knesset
Member Michael Gorolovsky was accused of a voting fraud.
Police twice recommended charging Netanyahu with corruption, Kadmon noted. The
attorney general rejected those recommendations.
Netanyahu was asked about it at the press conference. He ignored the questions.
Meanwhile Sharon's people are gearing up for the fight. Sharon's supporters
noted that under his leadership the Likud Knesset faction grew from 19 seats to
40 seats, commanding a third of the Knesset.
"It is the first time that a party that is in power, that (still) has more than
a year to lead the state, is ready to relinquish power because of the personal
ambition of one of its former minister's, out of hatred and a desire for
revenge," Sharon said in a radio interview.
The implicit warning was: If I am forced out of office, and elections are held,
the Likud may not win that many seats. Some of the present Knesset members will
not be reelected; Many people who have jobs because of their Likud connections,
may lose them. You, who want to oust me, better think again.
Earlier this week Sharon told Channel 10 TV that Netanyahu is "not a responsible
person... In every instance of pressure ...he panics and loses his wits.... Here
(in this job) you need quiet, peace of mind and strong nerves. He doesn't have
it."
Sharon might survive, especially if the withdrawal from the Gaza Strip produces
quiet on that front. He may survive if Netanyahu fears he is about to lose.
A public opinion poll published in the Yediot Aharonot newspaper, Wednesday,
showed that 51 percent of the people who said they had voted Likud -- voters,
not just dues paying party members -- opposed the move to depose Sharon.
"Whom do you think should head the government," a representative sample of 601
Likud voters was asked.
Fifty-one percent said Sharon, 26 percent said Netanyahu. The others said
neither, or refused to answer.
If Sharon sees he is about to lose in the Likud, he might quit and form a new
party. He would surely take some of the Likud voters with him, and attract
members of the centrist secular Shinui Party. However, Israel's political
history showed such moves to be a mistake, and his own short-lived experience in
a list he had formed in the 1970s and called Slomzion is a case in point.
However, this time it may be different because Sharon is the incumbent prime
minister.
Some Likud diehards were so vehement that all they cared about was to see him
go.
In a car that followed Netanyahu to E-1, Knesset Member Ayoub Kara angrily
looked at the Yediot Aharonot poll among 'people who did not count.'
"The Likud members will determine...and we have an absolute majority," Kara
said.
"So we won't have mandates. We will expel him!" he declared.
"One thousand firemen won't extinguish the flames in the Likud," observed Eitan
Haber in Yediot Aharonot's editorial column.
By JOSHUA BRILLIANT, UPI Israel Correspondent
Copyright 2005 by United Press International.
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*** end of story *** (emphasis added)
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