Puma swims into La Palma, setting off an inter-agency rescue
by Eric Jackson photos and videos by SENAFRONT and MiAmbiente
Pumas are large wild cats, not the sort of animal that goes around eating people but certainly dangerous to people if they feel threatened and cornered by them. Their natural preference is to steer clear of human habitats, but when their own is diminished by the agricultural frontier the may feed on farm animals.
It was by no means an ordinary event when, on October 23, a puma swam into the Darien town of La Palma, located on the eastern shore of the Gulf of San Miguel, on the ocean end of this vast estuary that includes the Tuira and Chucunaque rivers and their tributaries and many smaller streams, many only navigable at or near high tide. This was an animal displaced from his forest habitat, and it may have been instinctive that landing, exhausted, where he did, he would try to hide in the trees. But the beach in La Palma is not a forest but a waterfront of houses and businesses built atop stilts on a steep slope where the sea rises and falls with the Pacific tides. Alerted by neighbors the local police — that’s the National Frontier Service (SENAFRONT), which is also a border patrol and the closest thing to an army that Panama has — went under the buildings to tranquilize and capture the puma and move him to a temporary safer place.
A couple of veterinarians from the Ministry of the Environment (MiAmbiente) were called in, and an ad hoc scientific, transportation and animal rescue operation ensued. The puma was fitted with a special tracking collar, designed to fall off and emit electronic pings after one year in order to be recovered along with data that it collects. Then he was taken out to the Chepigana Forest Reserve and released, in a place where it was estimated that he would get back to a more natural lifestyle. The whole operation took about three days.
The wild areas of Darien province are home to at least five species of jungle cats — that’s how many have been documented over the years, but with habitat destruction and climate change the ranges of many animals are changing. There’s always the chance that some cat that has never been seen in the area also lives there, or that some cat that used to live in the country’s easternmost province has gone locally extinct. Most probably the number is five, with SENAFRONT and MiAmbiente making an a effort to keep it at least that. The methods are to suppress poaching by education and law enforcement.
Are there still some trophy hunters out there? Actually there are, of a couple of main types. There are a few people who will shoot and skin jungle cats — strictly forbidden by Panamanian law — and show off or try sell their trophies. And then there are cops and park rangers, who will arrest such people and take photos of the suspects, the remains of animals that they have allegely killed and the weapons believed to have been used, as law enforcement trophy pictures meant to discourage others.
In this case, the two government agencies got publicity photos of their people doing a kind deed, people will learn a bit more about how and where these cats live and the puma got away with his life.
Concluye exitosamente operativo de rescate y reubicación en la Reserva Forestal de Chepigana del Puma bautizado con el nombre Palma. pic.twitter.com/qE5KbiVf8h
The number two securities analyst with the Securities Market Superintendency (SMV) at the time, Vernon Ramos disappeared while investigating an insider stock trading scheme involving and for the benefit of Ricardo Martinelli.
Can’t run out the calendar on this case
by Eric Jackson
Can the former president avoid a murder and forced disappearance investigation via a plea bargain? Perhaps plain old murder, but the case of Vernon Ramos, a securities analyst for the Securities Market Superintendency who disappeared while investigating financial crimes allegations against Ricardo Martinelli is different.
Reports in Panamanian and international media have it that key allies of jailed ex-president Ricardo Martinelli — attorney, former labor minister and wannabe party boss Alma Cortés and spokesperson Eduardo Camacho in particular — are indirectly trying to broker a deal in which Martinelli makes a plea bargain with an appointee of his, Supreme Court magistrate Harry Díaz. A deal limiting Martinelli’s exposure to prosecution here and dropping his objections to extradition from the United States is the reported goal. The case is before the Supreme Court because Martinelli is a member of the Central American Parliament and as such enjoys immunity from investigation and prosecution by the ordinary authorities. There are a number of cases pending against Martinelli in the high court, the most advanced of these being based on a small part of the former president’s electronic warfare game, the part in which he systematically spied on some 150 persons, reading their emails, listening to their phone calls and remotely turning their smart phones into bugs.
(One of the targets of that was attorney Miguel Antonio Bernal, with whom this reporter maintained phone contacts for reporting and legal and political discussions, so he intercepted conversations with the editor of The Panama News as well. All the hacking attacks of every Panamanian news website that Martinelli did not control, including The Panama News? Martinelli stole the government equipment that he used for hacking so the hard drives are unavailable for analysis, and folks like the US National Security Agency who would have a record of that have not shared it. None of that hacking is part of the case, but the theft of the equipment is and it puts jurisdiction over the case directly within the terms of the 1904 US-Panamanian extradition treaty.)
Camacho and Cortés, each facing corruption investigations against them, either can’t leave Panama under current bail restrictions or won’t be allowed into the United States because they are considered undesirable there, or both. The plea, said to have been made in a Cortés letter to Díaz, is for the judge to go to Miami, meet with Martinelli in jail, make the plea bargain there, and bring Martinelli back to Panama with enforceable guarantees. Generally the way that works is for a defendant to plead guilty to one charge in exchange for a bar on investigation or prosecution for all other cases against him or her.
But is that a problem for Martinelli, his backers and Díaz? Murder cases, of which enforced disappearances are now a species under Panamanian law, have no statute of limitations. Disappearance cases, under UN and OAS treaties to which Panama is a party, imply some special procedures. The United Nations treaty would bar any Panamanian legal maneuver that voids the Ramos family’s right to a remedy under the law. Under the Inter-American treaty Panama is pledged “to punish … those persons who commit or attempt to commit the crime of forced disappearance of persons and their accomplices and accessories….” The OAS treaty also provides that “criminal prosecution for the forced disappearance of persons and the penalty judicially imposed on its perpetrator shall not be subject to statutes of limitations” and that “privileges, immunities, or special dispensations shall not be admitted” in disappearance cases.
So, notwithstanding the law, might Ricardo Martinelli avoid the any potential exposure to the Ramos case via the simple fact that he appointed a majority of the Supreme Court magistrates and they in turn appointed many of the lower court judges? That might be expected, but after a change or two of administrations, or changes in the membership of the court, the law would allow for such an arrangement to be set aside.
If Díaz undertakes the sort of mission to Miami that Cortés and Camacho urge upon him, there he would likely face Martinelli’s battery of six US criminal defense lawyers. One might expect that this phalanx would be joined by one or more Panamanian lawyers. The team of American lawyers has so far been blown off as a tag-team that makes frivolous motions and is not expected to have any greater success in litigation to come, except that they might win further delays.
A problem for Martinelli is that while he has been locked up in the USA, his already unsteady control over his political party has slipped almost entirely out of his hands. He says that he wants to run for mayor of Panama City in 2019 and although it might be theoretically possible, getting elected from jail in Miami is fairly improbable. But if he makes a deal in which he pleads guilty to an unauthorized wiretap charge, gets, say, a one-month jail sentence commutable by fine and comes back, then all he would have to do is convince people to forget about his crimes. Except that amnesia about the Vernon Ramos case is a legal problem.
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Actually, in the USA the left is in “wait and see” mode about the sundry special prosecutor and congressional investigations pertaining to the 2016 elections and tangents spinning off of that subject. The neocon element that came back into the Democratic Party to support Hillary Clinton — they were almost all Republicans back in the days of George W. Bush — like the idea of a next Cold War with Russia and may be hanging their hopes on political ammunition to justify such a thing. The left half of the Democratic Party dislikes wars, cold or hot, and thinks that adding another major one just accelerates a national drag race toward bankruptcy. This is not to say that antiwar Dems like or trust Putin, but the general sense of the left is that rivalries with nuclear-armed powers should be calmed and managed rather than escalated.
We have long known that key members of the Trump entourage, including members of his family, lied to the FBI and to Congress about their Russian ties. Those are crimes and easily proven, but in these times of intense polarization, can a jury of a dozen Americans that would unanimously convict be found? Prosecutors must routinely consider those sorts of factors. In its reverse it’s one of the most persistent weaknesses of American justice — opportunist prosecutors playing off of public prejudices and enhancing them in jury selection, so as to get panels that will unanimously convict people who can’t be proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. But whatever state or federal charges that Mr. Mueller and some states’ attorneys general who are apparently working with him decide to bring, there will be a report and what it says may be far more decisive in the court of public opinion than anything that may subsequently happen in a court of law.
The Republicans in Congress, well knowing all of this, are feverishly mounting a counter-attack. Hillary Clinton paid for a former British intelligence officer’s work on a celebrated dossier! How about THAT? That the campaign paid for at least some of this investigative work has been known for a long time. It’s a fact that’s relevant to any consideration of the dossier’s credibility. But surely Mueller will not rely on that set of documents for any of his case, even if he may have used it as a road map for some of the places that his probe had to go. It would be fun to watch politicians who have made careers of denouncing the exclusionary rule for unlawfully obtained evidence complain about “the fruit of a poisoned tree.” The measure of the questioned dossier is not whether it was partisan opposition research but whether its findings were true and independently provable.
Was there a Democratic lobbyist who also failed to reveal that he was a foreign agent? Probably. It’s reasonable to expect Mueller to charge him if he charges any Republicans with similar things.
Did the Obama administration make decisions that Republicans didn’t like? And… BENGHAZI! And what about the gay Nazi death squad that acted in conjunction with the flaming liberal Las Vegas gunman and were allowed to escape by the Mexican hotel security guy? If Pastor Rick Wiles said it, if Alex Jones said it, if it was in Breitbart, that means it MUST be truthy, doesn’t it? Yes, Republicans in Congress will tell us with such stuff, and perhaps up to one-third of the American people will believe it.
The entire Trump administration and its acolytes on Capitol Hill are a pack of lies and will continue to be. George W. Bush led America to a ruinous foreign war for a lie. Will Donald Trump lead the country to a constitutional crisis and perhaps to an even more disastrous civil war for an incautiously woven fabric of lies? Only if people let him do it.
Bear in mind…
When opinions are free, either in matter of government or religion, truth will finally and powerfully prevail.
Thomas Paine
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of The Lord He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored He has loosed the fateful lightning of his terrible swift sword His truth is marching on
Julia Ward Howe
Time is on the side of the oppressed today, it’s against the oppressor. Truth is on the side of the oppressed today, it’s against the oppressor. You don’t need anything else.
Malcolm X
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Wait a minute — “reputed?” Isn’t a newspaper supposed to avoid rumors? That will be the blowoff. The proposal is undergoing changes in committee and even the ETESA employees and most members of the National Assembly are not privy to that information. Plus, the draft proposal that was published implies vast changes that are not spelled out within. The legislative session ends in four days.
ETESA privatization, a rate shift
from big users to the rest of us
by Eric Jackson
We want to create a market dynamizer that is able to fill the gap that the market has, because today all generators are marketers. Today, each of the licensees and / or concessions of any technology are able to serve the market of large customers. What we are saying is that since these companies come from a long-term conception of assets, and they have clients and are into very large investments, they do not take the risk of clients who do not have risk rating or who offer a greater risk than a distributor that has a risk and benefits rating. The generator as a marketer has not filled the gap that exists to be able to serve large customers, of which 16 qualify.
ETESA director Gilberto Ferrari to La Estrella’s Adelita Coriat when asked about rates going up
No, they won’t let us see the details as are now before the legislature. They did publish a cryptic 17-page draft on October 10, but the horse trading is ongoing in the Commerce and Economic Affairs Committee and that we can’t see.
Many of us have suffered recent losses in the power surges and power outages. Historically those have been contrived in such times, with a design to create a “public demand” for action. That one was pulled a few years back to jam through hydroelectric dam concessions that privatized the water in most of the rivers is Chiriqui province and not long after to tear the Tabasara River from the Ngabe-Bugle Comarca by way of the Barro Blanco Dam.
Almost everywhere that public electric companies have been privatized, the industry has been broken up so that profitable power generation and profitable retail power sales get auctioned off, while the unprofitable power lines business stays in public hands. So it was in the late 90s when the Pérez Balladares administration, at the urging of international lenders and in conformance with the “Washington Consensus” of how US power elites thought that the world should be run, privatized the old state-owned IRHE electric utility. Private companies got chunks of the rest of the business, but the lines remained state property managed by the state-owned ETESA power line company.
Now, notwithstanding all of the glowing reports of a Panamanian economic miracle, the Panamanian government is deeply in debt and the same international financial institutions, talking the tattered remnant of the Washington Consensus doctrine, are demanding the sale of public assets, cuts in government spending on things like health and education, lower costs and taxes for big business and higher costs and taxes for everyone else.
Thus Proposed Law 573. The National Assembly says on its website that it “modifies and adds articles to the unique text of Law 6 of February 3, 1997.” ETESA director Gilberto Ferrari describes it as a “consensus” arrived among “business associations, the National Public Services Authority, the Secretariat, the Executive and some legislators with whom we have spoken.” Does Panama’s historically most diligent and most intelligent business group, the Panamanian Business Executives Association, object to a largely undisclosed piece of major economic legislation being passed in the last minute rush of the end of a legislative session? Ferrari dismisses them as part of the problem.
Things have been leaking out in the press, certain things may be discerned from the draft and then there was a remarkable interview that Ferrari gave with La Estrella’s Adelita Coriat. For example, there is the persistent rumor, not spelled out in the draft proposal, that the government will rid itself of the losses that were always intended when ETESA was created and get some $511 million from an undisclosed somebody. (There are rumors about who that somebody is, but none persistent or compelling enough to report.) But if the ETESA director complains that the utility is consistently losing money and suggests that under a new system in the making that will not be the case, he’s talking about for-profit or at least unsubsidized power lines, is he not? If he explains that the big users’ needs are not being met, he’s suggesting that they will be, and someone whom he won’t specify will have to cover the cost.
Ferrari explains and the draft suggests that the 16 biggest electricity users will be able to make private deals with designated generating companies. The draft specifies that a new class of players — comercializadores or brokers, will be created to take their cut of deal-making between large users and generating companies.
Implicit, but not expressly admitted, is that the big companies, via the new brokers, will use newly for-profit old power lines to guarantee their power at prices they are willing to pay. What will never be admitted but mathematically must be the case is that everyone else will be a “loser,” a pendejo who will have to cover the savings of the 16 companies, the income of a new broker class and the profit margin of a private power line management that will demand all of the status, salary and perks of that position in society.
When will we know the details? After the deal is done? Who gets paid to get the deal done? We can only imagine.
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Trump’s coddling can’t save the notoriously dirty industry when cleaner options and better jobs abound.
If there’s a war on coal, coal already lost
by Oscar Reyes — OtherWords
“The war on coal is over,” according to Scott Pruitt, head of the Environmental Protection Agency.
Pruitt spoke these words in a speech to coal miners in Hazard, Kentucky, where he announced the formal repeal of Obama’s Clean Power Plan. What he failed to mention is that if this is a war, coal has already lost.
The demand for coal has collapsed in recent years. More than half of all US electricity was produced from coal just a decade ago. Today’s figure is just over 30 percent, and continues to fall. Twelve coal-fired power stations have already closed since Trump took office.
A recent survey by the Union of Concerned Scientists found that around a quarter of the remaining coal units will soon be retired or converted to gas, and a further 17 percent are “uneconomic” and could also be retired soon.
Even new coal subsidies proposed by Energy Secretary Rick Perry are unlikely to reverse the downward trend. Utilities think long-term when they make investments, and would be foolish to assume that the Trump administration’s willingness to ignore the pollution caused by coal will outlast its term of office.
The decline of coal power is excellent news for the planet. Burning coal is one of the main ways we put carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, causing climate change. It also damages the health and environment of anyone who lives near mines and power stations, polluting the air we breathe while using vast amounts of fresh water.
The real challenge now is not how to save coal, but how to ensure that new, green energy jobs are created, and support is given to communities that have long relied on mining.
Energy companies and lawmakers should also ensure that coal is not simply replaced by shale gas — which pollutes drinking water and continues to damage the climate — but by renewable energy instead.
Luckily, the economics of renewable energy are getting better all the time. Residential solar power is expected to out-compete fossil fuels in over 40 states by 2020, while huge advances are also being made in energy storage and the development of electric vehicles.
The cost of wind power is also falling rapidly. A recent Energy Department report found that electricity produced by wind turbines is already considerably cheaper over the long-term than running gas turbines. Improvements in technology means that will continue to be the case even after current wind subsidies are cut.
Expanding renewable energy is good for jobs, too.
People with “green jobs” in energy efficiency, renewables, and public transportation already outnumber those employed by oil, gas, and coal companies, according to Energy Department figures. The benefits are spread widely, too: Renewable jobs already outnumber fossil fuel jobs in 41 states.
The contrast between coal and solar power is even stronger. Coal now employs just 160,000 Americans, a third of whom are miners. Solar energy, by contrast, now employs over 370,000 people and is one of the fastest growing parts of our economy.
Instead of pretending that coal jobs could return, politicians should be promoting renewable energy and the jobs that come with it. There’s little chance that Pruitt, who has close ties to coal lobbyists, would endorse such an approach.
That’s all the more reason for states to step up, putting in place transition plans that encourage a shift to renewable energy that helps workers while protecting our air and climate.
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Eloy Alfaro de Alba was Panama’s ambassador to the USA. He was also spokesman for Pipo Virzi’s Banco Universal, which was at the center of the Financial Pacific, Tonosi irrigation project, Moncada Luna money laundering and other scandals during his time with the bank.
Control of GESE goes to PRD figures
by Eric Jackson
In mid-August the US government’s drug money laundering case against the Wakeds collapsed. Yes, the Colombian nephew Nidal Waked did plead guilty to money laundering and will spend the next several years in prison. But it was about bank fraud, not drugs, for getting a line of credit from a Chinese bank for one purpose, using it for another and routing the money through US institutions in so doing. But the Clinton List is about drugs and not banking crimes, and US authorities placed Nidal Waked, his Panamanian uncle Abdul Waked and all the businesses they owned on the Treasury Department’s list of those with whom US citizens and resident aliens will be in trouble if they do business with them. Most of the Wakeds’ businesses were sold, but the two newspapers, El Siglo and La Estrella, were run by Abdul and he fought to hold onto them. Nidal never had anything to do with the newspapers, Abdul was never charged with a crime, and when the drug charges against Nidal were dropped one would think that the basis of the Grupo El Siglo – Estrella (GESE) would be gone and the ban on Americans doing business with that business would be over.
Not so, and less that a week after the Nidal Waked plea bargain Abdul Waked capitulated to US pressure and transferred 51 percent of the shares of GESE to a foundation composed of an employee of his, company president Eduardo Quirós, former Vice President under the Martín Torrijos administration Samuel Lewis Navarro and former Panamanian ambassador to the United States Eloy Alfaro de Alba. Control effectively goes to Lewis and Alfaro, who are pledging to defend freedom of expression. Aristocratic opinion is almost uniformly ecstatic. The people who work at the two newspapers — the sex and death tabloid El Siglo and the more traditional broadsheet La Estrella — are mostly relieved to see that the probability of their closure has receded, but some are also anxious about what happens next. Will political dissidents like labor leader Genaro López or law professor Miguel Antonio Bernal lose their columns? Will there be an influx of itinerant PRD publicists onto the newspapers’ staffs? Will the papers become a vehicle for the Samuel Lewis Navarro presidential campaign that some say that Martín Torrijos is trying to engineer? And might it be that the American Embassy, in a sordid and unstable political situation, is betting not so much on the PRD but trying to arrange things so that certain people in that party — former Agriculture Minister Laurentino Cortizo, who opposed the “free trade” pact with the United States; or xenophobic demagogue and legislator Zulay Rodríguez, who it is said was forced out of a judicial post at the urging of the US Drug Enforcement Administration and American Embassy after she let some Colombian drug suspects walk — from getting nominated and perhaps coming to power here?
Even were it absolutely the case, the embassy would never admit such a thing. And the 2009 Martinelli – Varela slate that was put together in a meeting at the US ambassador’s residence had nothing to do with the Americans, either, so we are told.
Lewis Navarro is one of Panama wealthiest individuals and Alfaro is also quite well to do. The former is the son of General Omar Torrijos’s emissary to Washington and key advisor during the Panama Canal treaty negotiations. The latter, also well to do, is related to past presidents of both Panama and Ecuador and some of Panamanian history’s most noteworthy diplomats. He served on the Panama Canal Authority board of directors as an appointee of the PRD administration of Ernesto Pérez Balladares.
Lewis Navarro was both president of the Banco del Istmo and Vice President of the Republic of Panama in April of 2006 when he announced to Banistmo shareholders that there was an offer to buy the bank. Thereafter, through the cabinet on which he sat there passed what was not much noticed at the time, proposed legislation to adjust the tax laws, which the Torrijos Cabinet Council passed and sent on to the legislature to be formally proposed the next month. On June 12 of that year, Lewis Navarro was in London, reportedly negotiating with HSBC about some government business. That same day in Panama the tax law went before the plenum of the National Assembly for debate. Among the provisions was a reduction in capital gains taxes on the sale of shares in certain sorts of companies from 30 percent to five percent. The law passed two days later and in the middle of July the sale of Banistmo to HSBC was announced. Under the new law there was a tax savings windfall of about $400 million that was shared among about a half-dozen people, one of them Samuel Lewis Navarro.
Banco Universal, for which Alfaro was director and spokesman throughout the Martinelli years, figured in many of the financial scandals of that time, including a lot of the activities of the now closed Financial Pacific brokerage house, the bogus Tonosi irrigation project and the laundering of proceeds from then Supreme Court president Alejandro Moncada Luna taking kickbacks for the awarding of court construction or remodeling contracts. Banco Univeral’s principal owner, Felipe “Pipo” Virzi, was vice president of Panama during the Pérez Balladares administration and is related to Ricardo Martinelli by marriage. Virzi has been in and out of jail and house arrest since his bank was shut down by the banking superintendency for defying orders to freeze certain accounts believed to be related to money laundering. It looks as if various prosecutors and courts are in the process of taking a series of dives so that the various investigations come to naught. Financial Pacific is particularly touchy, as it is most probably a murder case, the disappearance of Securities Superintendency senior analyst Vernon Ramos, who was looking into insider trading via that brokerage in shares of the now closed but not cleaned up Petaquilla gold mine’s Canadian parent company.
So the rumors and speculation about what’s in store for El Siglo and La Estrella are ongoing. Because Abdul Waked gave space to folks like far left labor leaders and political outcast anti-corruption activists whom the rabiblancos really despise, those folks are for public consumption taking a low-keyed wait and see approach to the transaction at the moment. On Twitter and Facebook, Panama’s establishment and its acolytes are generally upbeat. The most vocal critics tend to be of the left and their messages tend to be along the lines of impugning Lewis Navarro’s and Alfaro’s honesty or decrying the very notion of the US government having anything at all to say about who owns mass communications media in Panama. Those who combine these messages sometimes also talk about double standards.
The United States seized all media that could be grabbed during the 1989 invasion, and carted away all government archives with records about the Noriega regime’s dealings with the media barons of that time. With the exception of Fulele Calvo, who spent many months in jail with no charges against him, the US forces returned most of the media to their pre-invasion owners. Were files in US possession used for blackmail, or just the knowledge of their probable existence and current possession enough to assure pro-American editorial stands? We can only guess. In any case, the GESE situation is not the first time that Washington has intervened to decide who can and who can’t own a newspaper in Panama. Probably the invasions wasn’t either — in Canal Zone times and later under the US-dominated Panama Canal Commission there was a history of US agencies blacklisting or attempting to blacklist journalists so as to prevent them from working in the Panamanian media.
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One day the Israeli Labor Party felt that it needed a new leader.
That happens to this party every couple of years. The party is in bad shape. It looks more like a political corpse than a living organism. Wanted: a new leader, charismatic, energetic, enthusiastic.
So they found Avi Gabbay.
Why him? Nobody is really sure.
Avi Gabbay has no visible qualities of political leadership. No charisma at all. No special energy. No enthusiasm himself and no ability to inspire enthusiasm in others.
After serving as a government employee dealing with the mobile phone industry, he himself became the successful director of the largest mobile phone concern. Then he went into politics and joined a moderate right-wing party, and was appointed Minister for the Protection of the Environment. When the extreme right-winger Avigdor Lieberman was appointed Minister of Defense, Gabbay resigned from the government and his party and joined Labor. That was only a year ago.
He has one significant asset: he is a Mizrahi, an oriental Jew. His parents are immigrants from Morocco, he is the seventh of eight children. Since the Labor party is considered a Western, Ashkenazi, elitist grouping, these passive attributes are important. Up to a point.
Gabbay did not waste time in presenting his political identity card.
First he made a speech asserting that he will not sit in the same government with the “Joint List.”
The Joint List is the united (or disunited) list of the Arab community in Israel. It joins together the three very different “Arab” parties: the Communist party, which is overwhelmingly Arab, but includes some Jews (including a Jewish member of parliament), the Balad party, which is secular and nationalist, and a religious Islamic party.
How come these diverse parties created a joint list? They owe this achievement to the genius of the great Arab-hater, Avigdor Lieberman (see above), who saw that all three parties were small and decided to eliminate them by raising the electoral threshold. But rather than perish separately they decided to survive together. There is no doubt that their list represents the vast majority of Israel’s Palestinian citizens, who constitute more than 20% of the population. Strange as this may sound, every fifth Israeli is an Arab.
The simple numerical fact is that without the support of the Arab members in the Knesset, no left-wing government can exist. Yitzhak Rabin would not have become prime minister, and the Oslo agreement would not have come into being, without the support “from the outside” of the Arab bloc.
Then why did they not join Rabin’s government? Both sides were afraid of losing votes. Many Jews cannot envision a government including Arabs, and many Arabs cannot envision their representatives sharing “collective responsibility” in a government mainly occupied with fighting Arabs.
This has not changed. It is highly unlikely that the Arabs would join a Gabbay government if invited, and even more unlikely that they would receive such an invitation.
So why make such a declaration? Gabbay is no fool. Far from it. He believes that the Arabs are in his pocket anyhow. They could not join a Likud government. By making a blatantly anti-Arab declaration, he hopes to attract right-wing voters.
His predecessor, Yitzhak Herzog, publicly complained that too many people considered the Labor party to consist of “Arab-lovers.” Terrible.
If anyone hoped that this was a one-time anomaly, Gabbay put them right. After the first blow came more.
He declared that “we have no partner for peace.” This is the most dangerous slogan of the populists. “No partner” means that there is no sense in making an effort. There will never be peace. Never ever.
He declared that God promised the Jews the entire land between the sea and the Jordan. That is not quite correct: God promised us all the land from the Euphrates to the River of Egypt. God never made good on that promise.
Last week Gabbay declared that in any future peace agreement with the Palestinians, not a single Jewish settlement in the West Bank would be evacuated.
Until now, there has been tacit agreement between Israeli and Palestinian peace activists that peace will be based on a limited exchange of territories. The so-called “settlement blocs” (clusters of settlements near the green-line border) will be joined to Israel, and an equivalent area of Israeli territory (for example, along the Gaza Strip) will be ceded to Palestine. This would leave some dozens of “isolated” settlements in the West Bank, generally inhabited by fanatical religious right-wingers, which must be evacuated by force.
Gabbay’s new statement means that after a peace agreement, these islands of racist extremism will continue to exist where they are. No Palestinian will ever agree to that. It makes peace impossible, even in theory.
In general, Gabbay agrees to the “two-state solution” – but under certain conditions. First, the Israel army would be free to act throughout the demilitarized Palestinian state. The Israeli army would also be positioned along the Jordan River, turning the Palestinian “state” into a kind of enclave.
This is a “peace plan” without takers. Gabbay is much too clever not to realize this. But all this is not devised for Arab ears. It is meant to attract right-wing Israelis. Since a Labor-led “center-left” coalition needs rightist or religious votes, the reasoning looks sound. But it isn’t.
There is no chance whatsoever that a significant number of rightists will move to the left, even if the left is led by a person like Gabbay. Rightists detest the Labor party, not since yesterday, but have done so for generations.
The Labor Party was born a hundred years ago. It was the main political force that led to the creation of the State of Israel, and led it for almost thirty years. Its power was immense. Many (including me) accused it of dictatorial tendencies.
During all these years, the main occupation of the Zionist leadership was the historical fight against the Palestinian people for the possession of the country. Except for a tiny minority, the party was always nationalist, even militaristic. It was left-wing only in its social activities. It created the Jewish workers movement, the powerful trade union (the “Histadrut”), the Kibbutzim and much more.
This social network has long since degenerated. Corruption became endemic, many scandals were uncovered (mainly by my magazine). When the right-wing under Menachem Begin finally took over, in 1977, the Labor Party was already a living corpse. It has changed its name many times (its current name is “the Zionist Camp”) but it has dwindled from election to election.
Avi Gabbay was called in as a savior. His nationalist declarations are conceived as patent medicines. No chance.
Can the Labor Party be saved at all? I doubt it.
In the last elections, after a powerful, spontaneous social upheaval, there seemed to be a new chance. Some of the young leaders, female and male, who had appeared from nowhere, joined the Labor Party and entered the Knesset. They are genuine leftists and peace activists. Somehow, their voices became quieter and quieter. Instead of inspiring the party, the party subdued them. It seems to be beyond repair.
A question never asked is — does the party really, really want to assume power? On the face of it, the answer is yes, of course. Isn’t that the supreme prize of politics?
Well, I doubt it. The existence of a parliamentary opposition is a cozy one. I know, because I was in that situation for ten years. The Knesset is a good place, you are coddled all the time by the ushers, you get a good salary and an office, you have no responsibilities at all (unless you create them for yourself). You must, of course, make an effort to be re-elected every four years. So, if you are not particularly keen on becoming a minister, with all the work and responsibilities and public exposure that this entails, you just stay put.
What is the practical conclusion? To forget the Labor Party and create a new political force.
We need new leaders, young, charismatic and resolute, with clear-cut aims, who can energize the peace camp.
I do not subscribe to the picture of a public divided between a right-wing majority and a left-wing minority, with the orthodox on one side and the Arabs on the other.
I believe that there is a right-wing minority and a left-wing minority. Between the two there is the great mass of the people, waiting for a message, desiring peace but brainwashed into believing that peace is impossible (“there is no partner”).
What we need is a new start.
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