When will they Stop the Football Match?
The Palestinian columist Ahmad Dahbur of the Al-Hayyat Al-Jadida newspaper sees the history of modern Israeli politics as a football game between a group of generals.
The ball is the Palestinian people.
He refers to the recent Labor Party leadership contest between two former Generals, Mitzna and Ben Eliezer, as part of this process. He goes further to say Netanyahu was so heavily defeated in the recent Likud leadership contest because he could not compete with Sharon’s military background. The fact that Netanyahu does not have a military record makes him even more bloodthirsty, hence his call for the expulsion of Arafat. To take Dahbur’s analogy further, Netanyahu needs to kick the ball harder to prove he can play.
He claims the rivalry between former Israeli prime ministers David Ben Gurion and Menachem Begin was played out in terms of aggression towards the Palestinians. He even argues that the parties fought over credit for Deir Yassin [in April 1947 this village near Jerusalem was stormed by Begin’s Irgun. Some 100-200 civilians were killed in what Palestinians say was a massacre]. He lists in detail what he describes as massacres against Palestinians which occurred under both Labor and Likud governments, presumably for electoral capital. Indeed, the then Likud leader Begin only made peace with Egypt in 1979, so he claims, [when he returned the Sinai Penisula, taken in the 1967 War, which was three times the size of the State of Israel] because he wanted to prevent Labor from winning the elections.
When leaders depart from the path of bloodthirstiness they fail. He points to the fate of Yitzhak Rabin, who started the Oslo peace process with the Palestinians. His wife said at his funeral “the Likud is the murderer.”
Dahbur ends the piece by asking whether Mitzna can put an end to this. The implication is not.