David Horovitz: Israel needed Labour to stick with Mr Sharon

Thanks to the personal ambition of Benjamin Ben-Eliezer, we have been deprived of a stable government

When Ariel Sharon was overwhelmingly elected Prime Minister of Israel last year, he offered the two most senior positions in his government – the jobs of Foreign and Defence Minister – to the Labour Party, as part of an overture for what became the "national unity coalition". However, the new Likud premier had no need to be so generous.

The Labour Party, discredited by the collapse of the Oslo peace process and haemorrhaging support, would probably have accepted his invitation on far less attractive terms. But Mr Sharon saw the partnership as essential to his government: without Labour, he would have been at the mercy of far-right religious factions. With Labour, he was able to claim wide national support and to benefit internationally from the presence in key positions of Labour's "moderate" leaders, especially Shimon Peres at the foreign ministry.

Crucially, figures such as Mr Peres, with their unarguable track record as would-be peacemakers, have been able to explain to the international community – underinformed and, sometimes, misinformed by parts of the media – what has been unfolding in the two years-plus since Israel offered everything short of national suicide to reach a peace accord with Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority. Their message – that Mr Arafat betrayed the peace process, that the Palestinian resort to terror is strategic and that Israel has no choice but to defend itself – has often been greeted with scepticism, but at least it has been heard.

As of today, when the resignations from Mr Sharon's coalition of Mr Peres, Labour's leader Benjamin Ben-Eliezer and the party's other ministers take formal effect, those moderates will be sitting in opposition. And the dreadful irony for those who want to see Israel flourish as a democratic Jewish state, is that it is not Mr Sharon who has driven them out, but the political ineptitude of Mr Ben-Eliezer, the outgoing Defence Minister.

Mr Ben-Eliezer is facing a challenge to his leadership of Labour from Haim Ramon, a veteran political operator, and Amram Mitzna, the Mayor of Haifa. Lagging in the polls, he apparently concluded that his best chance of seeing them off was as the robust, independent leader of an opposition party demanding dramatic change in Israel's diplomatic and domestic policy-making.

To that end, he nakedly manufactured a crisis out of nothing – even his own representative in the budget talks that sparked Labour's walkout acknowledged that the disparity with Mr Sharon's Likud amounted to a few tens of millions of pounds, hardly the kind of sum to justify a coalition collapse.

Mr Ben-Eliezer was yesterday still wittering on about how Labour's departure was a matter of principle – that the settlers are getting too much of the country's sparse financial resources at the expense of the poorest sectors. Many Israelis, and certainly the Israeli poor, entirely agree. They just don't believe that their plight is why he quit the government. As Defence Minister, furthermore, he was the man best positioned to crack down on illegal settlement building, and well placed, along with Mr Peres, to try and help encourage the Palestinian moderates who are trying to establish an alternative to Mr Arafat's dead-end governance. No longer.

Pitifully, indeed, neither Israel nor Labour, nor even Mr Ben-Eliezer himself, will likely reap any benefit from this most sordid of political manoeuvres. For Mr Ben-Eliezer, his behaviour this week has been so demeaning as to alienate rather than attract supporters for his continued Labour leadership. For his party, premature general elections carry the prospect of Labour losing up to half its Knesset seats. As for his country, Israel can only suffer from the political instability he has wrought.

What Israel needs – with America gearing up to try to remove Saddam Hussein (a prime Israeli interest), tension on the northern border, incessant Palestinian terrorism and the complexities of defending against the bombers while attempting to minimise the appalling suffering such defence imposes on ordinary Palestinians – is unified, responsible leadership. Instead, we will now either be forced immediately into a divisive and costly election campaign or be briefly governed by a coalition so rightist as to render Mr Sharon one of its more moderate pillars, to be followed by elections when that alliance inevitably falls apart.

The bitter conflict with the Palestinians has condemned Israelis to live with a reality few in the UK can, fortunately, understand. We have been deprived of what ought to be a natural assumption: that the people with whom we come into contact share the simple pleasure of living. In fact, we have had to learn to assume the reverse: that in any gathering – at any restaurant, cinema, supermarket or street corner – somebody may lurk who is thirsting for his or her own death, and for ours.

Now, thanks to Mr Ben-Eliezer's personal ambition and miscalculation, we have also been deprived of a stable, fairly representative government. Mr Arafat, and all others who work and hope for our destruction, will be delighted. But then, with politicians like Mr Ben-Eliezer, who needs enemies?

The writer is the editor of 'The Jerusalem Report' news magazine www.jrep.com