Ariel Sharon's decision to abandon the Likud and establish a centrist party captures the predominant political mood in Israel, writes Emanuele Ottolenghi.
A political earthquake has struck Israel: Ariel Sharon has left his Likud Party to establish a new one, called National Responsibility. Of the 40 Likud parliamentarians and ministers who sit in the Knesset, 13 have already joined the prime minister in his political gamble ahead of the upcoming elections, now scheduled for next March. Many more intellectual, academic, political and public figures are expected to join what promises to be a dream team for a centrist party in the upcoming battle for Israel's leadership and the future of its policies vis-a-vis the Palestinians.
Israel's political history offers no successful precedent for such a manoeuvre: in 1965, David Ben Gurion - Israel's most revered leader - left the Labour Party to form his own list, hoping to capitalise on his own aura of statesmanship, but failed in his gambit and won only 10 seats. The Democratic Movement for Change, running in 1977 on the promise to play a pivotal role in Israeli politics, won an impressive 15 seats only to disintegrate soon after. In 1999, four prime ministerial wannabes joined forces, with the powerful financial and political backing of Israel's best and brightest, to establish yet another centrist party. After a meteoric rise in the polls, the Centre Party won only six seats and followed its predecessors' fate. Why would Sharon succeed where everyone else failed?
Sharon is neither a political novice nor a gambler. Perhaps the shrewdest and most seasoned Israeli politician at present, he has chosen the perfect timing to announce his decision only after careful polling and only after having proven to all but the most hard-line public on the right that the Likud left him with no alternative.
Under Sharon and his policies, Likud regained its electoral strength and returned to a level of power and popularity it had last enjoyed under Menachem Begin, more than 20 years ago. Nevertheless, Sharon's policies were constantly thwarted by his party central committee and his moves to the political centre torpedoed in the name of an ideology most Israelis have now soundly rejected.
No more.
With a new political party, Sharon will be freer to pursue the centrist policies that kept him in power and gave him a popularity no Israeli politician has enjoyed since Begin's times.
As he slams the door of Likud, he will take half the house with him, counting not only on ministers and parliamentarians, but most likely also on Likud mayors and much of the grassroots of the party up and down the country. With activists, local leadership, and infrastructure will also come party funding and the kind of party machinery that can ensure that his party, unlike previous attempts, will be successful and long-lasting, not a one-man, one-term show.
But the organisational element is but one factor in showing why Sharon's gamble makes perfect sense.
Abroad, Sharon is still considered a hard-line ideologue of Greater Israel.
The reality is different. Though Sharon is the architect of both settlements and the Likud (which he helped establish in 1973), Sharon did not emerge from the old Revisionist right wing of Israel's political spectrum, as did some of his Likud opponents.
In fact, Sharon's roots lie with the Revisionists' old ideological enemies - the hawkish but pragmatic and unsentimental tradition of Israel's Labor movement. His commitment to settlements, as well as to the Likud, was always instrumental: a means to achieve a thriving Israel, safe in a hostile Middle East for generations to come. His quest for secure borders certainly does not match Palestinian aspirations; still, Sharon is not driven by a dogmatic and uncompromising attachment to the land. He is driven by pragmatism and a deep understanding of the difference, in diplomacy as well as war, between what is desirable and what is possible.
For three decades, Sharon saw the settlements as a tool to secure Israel's borders. But since his election as prime minister in 2001, he changed his mind.
Recognising a new strategic environment in Israel's conflict with the Palestinians, Sharon understood that much of the territories and the settlements he had so enthusiastically supported until then now constituted a liability for Israel's security. Elected to fight a war after his predecessor Ehud Barak had succumbed to the Intifada and his own failure to seal a peace accord with the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, Sharon realised that in the long term his popularity as a tough and security-minded leader would fade unless he could offer a credible political alternative to both the peace vision of Israel's left and the Greater Israel illusion of Israel's right - which had both been largely discredited by reality.
With both forces collapsing under the weight of reality, Sharon identified an emerging moderate centre in Israel's public opinion, whose basic tenets combined the main theses of both the left and the right: the left was right in saying that Israel's occupation could not last forever - but the right was also correct to assume that the Palestinian leadership would not recognise the legitimacy of the Zionist dream, a Jewish state on portions of the ancestral land of Israel.
Sharon's political vision on security and peace enjoys broad support among the public; and his credibility as a leader who can deliver while protecting the national interest makes him more popular than all his challengers put together.
The road to Israel's elections is still long. But Sharon's decision to abandon the Likud and establish a centrist party, historical precedents notwithstanding, captures Israel's predominant mood.
There is a moderate constituency and a moderate political programme. Now, with Sharon's political gamble, there is a party to represent them too.
Dr Emanuele Ottolenghi teaches Israel studies at Oxford University