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The old Ezer returns!
During most of his first nine
months in office, Defense Minister
Ezer Weizman, his nose to the
grindstone, had been one of the
quietest and most tight-lipped of
Mr. Begin's ministers. This stance
was so at variance with his life-long
flamboyant, life-of-the-party
image that it was taken as final
corroboration of the suspicion that
Weizman had at long last learned
the essential political lesson of
lying low as long as it was not
absolutely necessary to come out
into the open either to mount a
challenge or to respond to one.
Last month, it seemed that the
older, more familiar, Ezer had
emerged. Some saw his reported
foot-stamping, intercontinental
telephone threat to resign if his
cabinet rival. Minister of
Agriculture Arik Sharon, did not
desist from carrying out West
Bank settlement projects at the
moment as a repetition of
Wei/man’s attempted “putsch”
against Begin’s leadership ofHerut
in 1972.
This interpretation is highly
questionable. Not that the time for
that may not come. There should
be no mistake about it: Ezer
Weizman has been in the running
for the premiership since his
meteoric entry into politics
straight from his post as deputy
chief of staff in 1969. But the time
is not yet ripe.
With regard to the recent
dramatic events, it would seem
that Weizman was so openly
provoked that he had no
alternative but to strike back with
the perhaps intentionally
unguarded telephone conversation
with Prime Minister Begin. He had
left the country with the clear
understanding that the decision in
his favor on halting settlement
preparations at Kadesh Barnea in
Sinai meant that nothing more
would be done on this touchy issue
until he and Prime Minister Begin
returned from the U.S.
Instead, urgent calls from his
intimates informed him that
development work that he had
expressly forbidden at the Nebi
Salah and Beit El sites in Samaria
was to be pushed forward in his
absence at the urging of Sharon
with the acquiescence of the Prime
Minister and Deputy Prime
Minister.
His decision to put his foot
down before he was ready for a
confrontation indicates that he
regarded this as too direct a
challenge to his authority as
minister in charge of the
administered territories to be
passed off without undermining
his political power.
What is the source of*
Weizman’s power?
First, there is the force of his
personality. Like some of the other
top military men who have been
catapulted to the apex of party and
government politics, Weizman
entered politics radiating a prime
ministerial potential which
attracted instant supporters.
Like Dayan, Rabin and Sharon,
Weizman was impatient to turn the
potential into the real. In 1972,
from his post as chairman of the
Herut Party executive, he
attempted to mount a challenge to
Begin’s generation-old dominion
over the party he had founded on
the basis of the defunct Irgun Zvai
Leumi underground.
Weizman and his supporters at
first seemed to have won an
assured majority on the party’s
new executive committee. Before
this situation could be solidified,
Weizman was unceremoniously
slapped down by party leader
Begin. As a result, he left active
politics and only returned to head
the Likud’s election campaign in
last year's elections.
Ezer Weizman
That return did not increase
Begin’s regard for him. The party’s
frantic insistence on bringing
Weizman back was, in effect, an
unvoiced admission that it had
abandoned nope of winning an
election under the leadership of its
founder alone.
Weizman’s present power stems
primarily from the fact that it was
he who won the election for the
Likud, after its constituent parties
had failed in eight previous tries.
He did this primarily by
compelling Menachem Begin to
take a back seat and stop
projecting the traditional true-
believer image which, for all its
charisma, had undeniably repelled
more potential voters than it had
attracted.
Instead, Begin was turned, for
the time being, into the doting
grandfather romping with his
grandchildren in a Tel Aviv park.
Meanwhile, campaign chief
Weizman and the non-political
public relations firm running the
campaign played down the uneasy
war and peace issue that had been
Begin’s bread and butter in past
campaigns, and hammered away
at the corruption and inflation
issues, where the Alignment was
most vulnerable.
Weizman and his strategy—
added to the internal collapse of
the Labor Alignment—made
Begin Prime Minister. This did not
endear Ezer to his beneficiary, but
it was a solid enough performance
to guarantee him the Defense
Ministry, although Begin was
believed to have preferred Sharon.
Weizman is by no means the
dove he is reputed to be in the
present cabinet confrontations.
But he is as far as can be from a
“mystic" territorial maximalist.
Since his earliest days in the 1969-
70 government of national unity,
he has consistently expressed the
need for far-going but selective
territorial concessions in return
for a peace agreement.
In his personal demeanor, Ezer
is the epitome of the brash sabra,
the very antithesis of Begin, with
the “grandeur” he inherited from
Jabotinsky.
In his challenge to the Old
Guard, Weizman is somewhat
reminiscent of the earlier Moshc
Dayan. He differs from Lone Wolf
Dayan, however, in his faculty for
working with colleagues and
subordinates, and for attracting—
and keeping—the loyalty of
supporters around whom he can
continue to build up his political
power.
It is perhaps this personality
difference which has led to the
differences between these two men
in the present situation. While they
are both extreme pragmatists, free
of any trace of any ideology,
Dayan has gone out of his way
since Sadat’s visit in November to
vent his basic pessimism about the
feasibility of an agreement with
Egypt
Weizman, on the other hand,
has been the cabinet’s greatest
optimist on the matter. It is
difficult to tell whether this is the
result of the warm rapport he has
established with Sadat, or whether
it was his innate optimism that
caused Sadat to single him out
from the entire Begin cabinet for
such a relationship.
An additional point to keep in
mind about Weizman is that, like
Dayan, he has an attitude to party
that is entirely functional rather
than emotional or mystic. In the
transitional phase through which
Israel politics are passing, it is not
unthinkable that Weizman, at a
critical point, would engage in the
sort of hopping from political bed
to bed for which Dayan is
notorious.
To dale, the cabinet, under the
overpowering domination of the
Prime Minister, has not really
come to grips with the course that
has developed, willy-nilly, in the
wake of the Sadat visit.
When that stage arrives, one
thing at least is certain: the
uncharacteristically quiet Ezer
Weizman of the past nine months
will be heard from loud and clear.
Jerusalem Post
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13 THE SOUTHERN ISRAELITE April 14, 1978