Excerpts;
Having failed in an initial attempt to rally the rest of Likud’s leaders for a gang-up ambush on Netanyahu, the 47-year-old Shalom chose to launch his attack by a series of interviews that dominated last weekend’s papers. Shalom’s analysis of his party’s dismemberment is plausible: it had become too hawkish, anti-social and divided, while Netanyahu’s personality chased away numerous good people and gave rise to assorted new parties, the last of which was Kadima.
The conclusion is obvious: I, Silvan, am the balanced visionary, responsible economist, seasoned diplomat, loyal team player and people’s person that Netanyahu will never be, and the Likud so sorely needs. Since some people are prone to actually take this self-description seriously, and since Shalom apparently suffers from selective memory, here are some reminders that can help put things in perspective.
THE FIRST thing Silvan conveniently fails to discuss is his performance as treasurer. With formal schooling in accounting, economics and law, Shalom excelled last decade as a Knesset Finance Committee member who demonstrated the kind of fiscal and procedural knowledge few lawmakers here possess. As a deputy defense minister and science minister in the Netanyahu government he may have not been brilliant – no one ever was in those positions – but in winter 2001 he was nonetheless crowned finance minister, a token of appreciation for his loyalty to Ariel Sharon.
Yet once he made it to Israel’s innermost decision-making sanctum, Shalom set aside long-term policy making, focusing instead on short-term self-promotion. He ignored warnings about an approaching economic tempest, and opted instead for baseless growth forecasts, on the basis of which he expanded the deficit, distributed political booty and dragged his feet on structural reform.
The result was Israel’s worst-ever recession, including the shekel’s plunge, at one point, to a historic low of 20 cents, and unemployment’s rise to two-digit levels. Sharon took notice and decided to remove Shalom from the national chest. At that point Shalom deployed another weapon he now prefers to ignore – ethnicity.
Somehow, when his loss of the Treasury was but a few days away, a protest movement within the Likud began to decry it as anti-Sephardi discrimination. Whatever his role in this was or wasn’t, Shalom certainly did not stand in this effort’s way. While obviously unfounded, the charge began gathering a storm that disturbed Sharon sufficiently to make him offer Shalom the prestigious Foreign Ministry.
TO HAVE not sinned at that point, Shalom should have displayed two properties: humility and loyalty. The humility should have been vis-a-vis a field – diplomacy – about which he knew very little. The loyalty should have been toward the man who saved his career: Ariel Sharon. Shalom failed on both counts.
As a diplomat, he failed to establish a presence in Europe’s and America’s corridors of power at a time that demanded the kind of inspiration and worldliness that most of his predecessors, from Moshe Arens to Shlomo Ben-Ami, possessed, but he lacked.
Commentary;
Sylvan Shalom has shown himself to be the proto-type of self-interest, self-glorification, self-aggrandisement — constuency be damned. Sylvan, why take your arrogant, overgrown ego with you and go to Kadima with all the loose-cannons waiting to explode! I the final analysis, a knock-down, drag out primary may just end in some surprises; perhaps both you and Bibi on the short-end. MB