Shorn of shields

Military failures and scandals of various hues make the present leadership in Israel the most low-grade of all.

THE freak season began just over a year ago, when Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon collapsed and lapsed into a coma, leaving his Number Two, Ehud Olmert, former Mayor of Jerusalem, to take over as the leader of the new Kadima party and Acting Prime Minister. Once Sharon's condition was confirmed as irreversible, Olmert became the official Prime Minister, presiding over a coalition government with Labour as a major component.

The new leader of Labour, Amir Peretz, the maverick chairman of Histadrut, Israel's Labour Federation, promised to implement far-reaching social changes, and hinted at a dovish approach to The Conflict - the long-standing conflict between Israel and the Arab world, principally the Palestinians. But after the general elections, he became the Minister of Defence - the first civilian to hold the position since the establishment of the state in 1948.

The rest is history. Israel itself is now semi-comatose - the government has been utterly discredited; the renowned Israeli armed forces have been trounced by a small warrior movement in Lebanon; and a nasty cloud hangs over much of the leadership, from President Moshe Katzav down to minor Cabinet members and various government officials and even judges. The Attorney-General has his hands full deciding how to deal with all the different scandals. To cap it all, the Chief of Staff, General Dan Halutz, former commander of the Air Force, has been impelled to resign - in fact, to jump before he was pushed by a Commission of Inquiry assigned to analyse the mess of last summer's assault on Lebanon.

Israel supposedly launched the war because two Israel Defence Force (IDF) soldiers were abducted near the border by the militia of Hizbollah, the Shia movement. It was an unconvincing rationale, but pretexts for wars of aggression are often flimsy. If the purpose was to devastate Lebanon and impede its slow recovery from the past civil war and invasion, then the war could be described as fairly successful. But if the intention was to make the Lebanese people turn against the Hizbollah, it was a complete failure. The IDF was licked, and had to withdraw with its tail between its legs.

There have been various explanations for the miserable performance of the once-admired army - a popular one says that an air force commander is not the man to manage a ground war. Another explanation says that the government was inept, gave confusing orders, and was totally incapable of running the show.

"With Olmert and Peretz nominally above him, Halutz began to feel like the only responsible grown-up left in the room to take care of Israel's security, and the mismanagement of the Lebanon war became an almost foreseeable tragedy," wrote The Jerusalem Post following Halutz's resignation. Now begins the spitting contest between the IDF top brass, who would prefer to pick their own Chief of Staff, and the coalition parties, who have their own favourites.

Regardless of the outcome of this particular contest, it is certain that there has never been such a low-grade leadership in Israel. The President, holding a respected though purely ceremonial post, is about to be charged with rape; Prime Minister Olmert is facing an awkward investigation about the sale of a major Israeli bank to an Australian buddy of his; Haim Ramon, until recently Minister of Justice, is facing investigation under caution on charges of sexual misconduct; a judge has been forced off the bench for abusing her powers to pursue a personal interest; the police are under the media spotlight for conducting a murder investigation like a circus - the first time the Israeli public has widely expressed doubts about the process of a serious criminal investigation.

All these are recent developments, but older scandals have yet to be resolved, including those involving Sharon and his sons. Furthermore, Israel is the cosy refuge of a number of Russian "oligarchs" who happen, or claim, to be Jewish, some of whom are wanted in Russia, while some are under the spotlight in connection with the mysterious murder in London of Alexander Litvinenko, a former KGB spy.

In the midst of this sleazy scene, two former Prime Ministers, Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu, who had his own dodgy financial episodes to live down, and Ehud Barak, who became impressively wealthy after leaving office - both notoriously hawkish - are making their own comebacks into the political arena. Netanyahu has been breathing fire and brimstone about Iran and seems closely coordinated with the neocons in Washington, who are determined to proceed against Teheran with the same reasoning used to justify the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Netanyahu is indeed the neocons' darling in West Asia - it was for him as newly appointed Prime Minister that a document called "A Clean Break" was composed by members of the group that came to be known as the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), which formed the hardcore support for President George W. Bush in his "war against terror".

Ehud Barak, past Chief of Staff of the IDF and, like Netanyahu, a one-term Prime Minister, is a Labour man. Projected originally as a worthy heir of the assassinated Yitzhak Rabin, he was instrumental in pumping the oxygen out of the Oslo peace process, leaving it moribund. Under his premiership, more illegal settlements were built in the occupied territory than under the Likud leadership, and he allowed - or perhaps instigated - Ariel Sharon's provocative march on the Haram al-Sharif, which ignited the second Intifada. However, neither of these men can succeed the lame-duck Olmert unless general elections are held, which seem unlikely in the immediate future.

Halutz's resignation notwithstanding, the Winograd Commission will continue to hear testimonies about the 2006 Lebanon war. If Halutz can show convincing proof that the government never gave him an order to launch a full-scale war on Lebanon, but instead sent a flurry of less-than-decisive, improvised instructions, he may well bury Olmert and Peretz - an outcome which, according to recent polls, would please most Israelis.

To forestall this fate, the government is going through various contortions, from "leaking" information about Israel's nuclear capability to proposing to appoint an Arab Minister to the Cabinet for the first time in Israel's history (a remarkable fact, given that one-fifth of Israel's citizens are Arabs). Olmert has ordered the removal of some roadblocks barring Palestinian movement in the West Bank and delivered some of the millions of dollars of Palestinian money sequestered by Israel.

At the same time, he angrily rejected the idea that Israel may negotiate a peace settlement with Syria, and urged the West to throttle Iran's nuclear ambitions by fair means or foul. It may or may not have been an accident that a British newspaper published recently a detailed description of Israel's air force training for an attack - possibly with nuclear "bunker-busters" - on Iran's three main nuclear facilities.

Whether the Olmert-Peretz government falls in the proper parliamentary way, followed by general elections, or is replaced from within, so to speak, with "new" leaders from the ranks of the coalition partners - such as Livni from Kadima and Barak from Labour - what is certain is that it cannot survive long.

There are calls for Olmert to "suspend himself" while the investigations into his conduct continue, and Amir Peretz's position as Minister of Defence has become quite untenable. Dan Halutz is not a likeable person - when asked, during his time as commander of the air force, how it felt to drop a one-tonne bomb on a Palestinian residential area in Gaza, he said it felt like a slight bump in the aircraft when the bomb fell from the hatch. But right now he is the man of the moment, and holds some powerful cards in his hands. Never in its 58 years has Israel's political scene looked quite so unwholesome.