Israel Matzav

Stop attacking Lieberman already!

Both our local and the international media are having a field day attacking Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman for deviating from the government's line during his address to the UN General Assembly last week. But as Elliot Jager points out, Lieberman's actions were hardly an anomaly for an Israeli foreign minister.

Lieberman's decision to present his scheme at the General Assembly highlights a structural anomaly in Israel's political system. The job of foreign minister is a patronage appointment. Prime ministers usually have to tap rivals from within their own party or from one or another coalition partner. As a result, foreign ministers seldom see themselves as bound to a premier. Moshe Sharett vehemently disapproved of David Ben-Gurion's security policies. Moshe Dayan represented Menachem Begin only insofar as their views on particular issues happened to coincide. Shimon Peres offered territorial concessions to the Palestinians without first clearing them with Yitzhak Rabin. Tzipi Livni conducted her own talks with Ahmed Qurei as a sideshow to Ehud Olmert's bargaining with Mahmoud Abbas. Silvan Shalom was hardly Ariel Sharon's vicar, any more than David Levy or Shimon Peres had been Yitzhak Shamir's. Later on, during the crisis years of the second intifada, Sharon and Peres did work mostly in tandem—but only because they agreed on the overriding need to quash Palestinian aggression.

It was therefore not all that odd for Netanyahu's office to distance itself from Lieberman's speech, to state that the foreign minister had not coordinated his address with the premier, and to recall that Netanyahu and not Lieberman is the one heading negotiations with the Palestinians. Some may seek more Machiavellian explanations for the speech and the premier's response to it, but this may be giving the two men more credit, as politicians and statesmen, than they deserve.

What would it take for Israeli foreign policy-makers to speak with one voice? Nothing short of jettisoning Israel's electoral system of pure proportional representation and empowering premiers to dismiss wayward cabinet ministers without paying a grievous political price. In the meantime, it is easier to lash out at Lieberman the unlovable.

Make sure to read the first comment there too - it was written by a JPost reporter. Lieberman is nowhere near the one-stater that the media is making him out to be.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 8:31 PM