Sharon Won’t Resign After Gaza Defeat
JERUSALEM (AP) – Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said Monday he will rework his plan for pulling out of Gaza and four West Bank settlements in an effort to salvage the proposal following its resounding defeat in a ruling party referendum.
Sharon told a meeting of lawmakers from his Likud Party that he would submit the new version to the government and the parliament for approval, according to officials who attended the meeting. “I want to say in the clearest fashion there will be another plan that I will come up with,” Sharon said, according to the officials. “I will come up with a plan that will get wider support.”
With a turnout of only half the 193,000 Likud members, 60 percent voted against the “disengagement plan,” leaving Sharon politically weakened and scrambling for an alternative. “Crushing defeat,” read a headline in the Maariv daily.
If this kind of thing doesn’t start convincing Israelis that they need to junk the English parliamentary system for a Federal system like the US has, where the president doesn’t face recall with every vote of Congress, I don’t know what will.
It is absolutely unbelievable that in the midst of a crisis like the one Israel has been in since 1948 that anyone thinks anything short of a strong executive with a definite term of office can accomplish anything useful toward ending the crisis.
I keep waiting for the IDF to pull a coup just so they can know for a fact from one day to the next what they’ll be doing. At least Israel should form a government of national unity that is given a mandate to govern for a specific period of time without having to worry about confidence crises caused by some little religious party withdrawing its three or four votes from the coalition because some secular decision made by the government irked them.
What annoys me more than anything about this is that I didn’t used to care. But on May 22 a very dear friend of mine is (IMHO misguidedly) making aliyah. And I damn well want Israel to have a strong government that can end this crisis and give at least a reasonable assurance that my friend will be safe.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: The only country where the English parliamentary system works is ENGLAND. Israel needs a new system, and it needs it NOW.