September 29, 2008: Kadima’s Livni must assemble a working coalition

By Michael Regenstreif

As I write, it’s the day after the Kadima Party election in Israel.

As polls had predicted, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni came out on top, but her margin of victory over Transportation Minister Shaul Mofaz was much smaller than anyone seemed to expect, just 431 votes. Livni captured 43.1 per cent of the votes cast while Mofaz took 42 per cent. The vote totals of the other candidates were inconsequential.

Livni has now begun the process of trying to assemble a coalition government. If she’s successful, Livni will become Israel’s second female prime minister after Golda Meir and its first in more than 34 years.

If Livni doesn’t manage to put together a working coalition by the end of October, Israelis will go to the polls in an early general election that will see her vie for the office of prime minister against Likud’s Benjamin Netanyahu and Labor’s Ehud Barak, both of whom are former prime ministers. Opinion polls in advance of the Kadima vote suggested a general election would be a close race between the centrist Livni and the right-wing Likud leader.

I like much of what I’ve seen, so far, of Livni. She is tough, scandal-free – she’s sometimes referred to as ‘Mrs. Clean’ – and has shown the ability to evolve in her thinking.

Livni’s parents were Irgun fighters prior to Israeli independence and her father was a Knesset member representing Likud. She followed her father into Likud and was first elected to the Knesset in 1999 as a protégé of Ariel Sharon.

And just as Sharon evolved in his thinking about the peace process and territorial compromise during his final years as prime minister, so too did Livni as one of his cabinet ministers.

She followed Sharon out of Likud to help establish Kadima as a third-way alternative to Likud and Labor. As foreign minister, Livni has been Israel’s lead negotiator with the Palestinians in Israel’s search for the two-state solution.

Assuming Livni’s success in putting together a coalition, she will, as noted in the JTA report beginning on page 1, have a heavy agenda of priorities that will demand her attention.

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The Canadian Council for Israel and Jewish Advocacy, together with Canadian Jewish Congress, the Canada-Israel Committee and the Quebec-Israel Committee, has produced a document called Federal Election 2008: Guide to the Issue for the Community. It lays out what they consider to be the major of issues of concern for the Canadian Jewish community along with suggested questions to ask of candidates and parties.

Reports on the Federation’s Communications and Community Relations Committee’s meetings with the major parties will be published in the October 13 edition of the Bulletin. Unfortunately, that will be too late for anyone who wants to read the articles before voting in the advance polls before the Sukkot election day. Therefore, we’re posting the articles online as soon as possible. In fact, by the time you read this column, the articles should be available ottawajewishbulletin.com.

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We have a JTA brief on page 4 that talks about some people being upset that they’ve received Rosh Hashanah cards from the prime minister. A Conservative Party spokesman denied the party had a prepared list of Canadian Jews and declared they hadn’t purchased one.

I’ve read election column notes and letters-to-the-editor in several Canadian dailies from Jewish people wanting to know how the PMO knew they were Jewish and from non-Jews wanting to know why the PMO thought they were Jewish.

A column in the Ottawa Citizen mentioned a Jewish person in Ottawa who “subscribes to no Jewish publications and doesn’t give to any specifically Jewish causes, so he isn’t sure how the PMO got his name.” The Bulletin has not, and would not, supply or sell a list of subscribers to any political party or office. But I’d like to know why I, with a publicly Jewish media job that entails contact with politicians and their staffs, including Conservative cabinet ministers and MPs, didn’t rate a card.

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The June 16 issue of the Bulletin included an article that described how Soloway JCC member Marion Dewar was recovering the use of her injured hand through the centre’s gentle yoga course. Ms. Dewar, the universally respected social activist and former mayor of Ottawa, died earlier this month at age 80 from injuries suffered in a fall while visiting Toronto. We offer our sincere condolences to the Dewar family.

April 21, 2008: Rabin and Peres – Bitter rivals who shared a dream

By Michael Regenstreif

On April 10, I was at the Soloway Jewish Community Centre’s screening of Rabin-Peres: Everything is Personal, a fascinating documentary film that examines the lifelong, often bitter, rivalry between two great Israeli leaders: Yitzhak Rabin, who was assassinated while prime minister in 1995, and Shimon Peres, also a former prime minister, who is now Israel’s president.

Rabin, born in 1922, was a sabra. He grew up in Tel Aviv, attended the Kadoori Agricultural High School and joined the Palmach in 1941. By 1947, Rabin was chief operations officer. He was in charge of army operations in Jerusalem in the 1948 War of Independence.

By 1964, Rabin was chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). It was under his command that Israel achieved what was probably its greatest military victory by swiftly winning the Six Day War in 1967.

In 1968, Rabin began his post-IDF career as Israel’s ambassador to the United States. He was first elected to the Knesset in 1973 and became minister of labour. In 1974, he became leader of the Alignment Party and succeeded Golda Meir as prime minister.

Peres was born in Poland in 1923 as Szymon Perski. His family immigrated to Palestine when he was nine. A kibbutz leader, Peres joined the Haganah in 1947 and was given the responsibility, by David Ben-Gurion, for arms purchases and personnel. By 1953, he was director-general of the Ministry of Defense.

Peres was first elected to the Knesset in 1959 and held a number of cabinet positions. Eventually, Peres became leader of Alignment after Rabin stepped down in the wake of a currency scandal in 1977. Peres lost the 1977 election to Menachem Begin and Likud.

Rabin, the military hero, was Israel’s native-born, fair-haired boy. In comparison, Peres, the bureaucrat, was an outsider, a newcomer with a Polish accent. And even though Peres performed vital functions in Israel’s defence, he was never seen as the war hero Rabin was.

Rabin and Peres were rivals in the Alignment and Labor parties. Both served when the other was prime minister and they were in the cabinet, and they faced off against each other in several leadership campaigns marked by personal bitterness toward the other.

Only in a robust democracy would you see such a personal rivalry within the same political party among competing personalities with similar goals for their country. Watching the film, I was reminded of some other bitter intraparty rivalries, some of which also lasted for years. Perhaps the most obvious example from recent Canadian politics was the long rivalry between former Liberal prime ministers Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin.

South of the border, we’re currently witnessing what has turned into a very bitter battle for the Democratic Party presidential nomination between Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, two politicians whose platforms and points of view on almost all issues – including their support for Israel – are remarkably similar.

Like the long rivalries between Rabin and Peres, and Chrétien and Martin, the Clinton-Obama fight is mostly about differing personalities and personal egos rather than differing visions for their society.

Despite their personal enmity, Rabin and Peres were on the same side and shared the vision of Israel at peace with the Palestinians. When Rabin was assassinated – not by an Arab terrorist, but by Yigal Amir, a right-wing, religious Jew out to destroy the peace process they had worked so hard to further – you could see in the film that Peres, too, was figuratively shattered by Amir’s bullet.

Rabin, one of Israel’s greatest warriors, did not lose his life on the battlefield fighting an enemy. He was murdered by one of his own people, one of our own people, who did not share the dream of peace that we all should be reminded of every time we say, or hear, the word shalom.

Hopefully, that dream, shared by Rabin and Peres, by the residents of Sderot who visited us in Ottawa recently, and by so many others, will sooner than later become a reality.