Sharon-Peres push Kadima forward

Peres Joins Sharon in Kadima

Just days after Ariel Sharon upended the Israeli political scene by deserting the Likud Party which he established, a major aftershock occurred when Shimon Peres, until recently the head of the Labor Party, joined Sharon in his new Kadima Party. So the two opposing party chiefs now meet in the middle.

The New York Times runs a piece cautiously pro-Kadima as polls taken after the political tsunami indicate that Labor and Likud are distant followers of the new center party. Likud has been virtually demolished, with only 10 seats after elections were they held today and Labor comes in second, but still far behind the Kadima coalition.

Sharon continues to be a primal force in Israeli politics, and Peres the perennial bridesmaid who just can’t win the PM job by election.

CAUTION: BORING PERSONAL ANECDOTE

I personally was invited by Peres to a meeting in a secluded Dead Sea location when he was Foreign Minister 10 years ago and I was an Amoco entry-strategy special emissary with full cooperation from both the Israeli Government, then headed by Rabin, and the US government. As Amoco was the first US major oil company to put a toe into Israeli geography, I got high-level access across the board.

Peres is a man of extraordinary energy and intellectual vigor, who drank two bottles of [excellent] Israeli wine and a whole plate of marzipan while we did a tour d’horizon of the entire Middle East and Israeli needs in particular.

The next day, the Oil and Police Minister, a fellow named Chacal who was born in Baghdad, so I was told, sent a thick transcript of the conversation between Peres and myself to me [it was in Hebrew] with the admonition by the messenger not to schedule meetings with Israeli government officials without going through the Oil Ministry!

END OF PERSONAL ANECDOTE

Just as De Gaulle was the only Frenchman able to extricate France from Algeria, so Sharon may be the only person to yank Israel from the umbilical to the West Bank settlements. Judging from some bloggers on the far-right fringes there is a chance that the fence will be the permanent border of the West Bank as an autonomous Palestinian state.

While the rump Likud will scream betrayal, the Sharon-Peres Kadima appears up to the task of negotiating more like the recent Condolezza Rice contribution on the Gaza border, looking forward to a relationship with a responsible Palestine. Unless Hamas kicks over the entire process, this could be a landmark on the road toward sanity in the region.