Caroline Glick:The assault on democracy [by Sharon]
THE JERUSALEM POST Sep. 23, 2004
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During his address at last month's Likud Central Committee meeting, Prime
Minister Ariel Sharon said repeatedly that the Likud must accept its role as
the ruling party and act with national responsibility.

The odd thing about Sharon's insistent assertion is that it is he, through
his policies since the start of his first term as prime minister in 2001,
who has done more than anyone to prevent the Likud from exerting national
leadership that befits the national ruling party.

It was Sharon, in collusion with Shimon Peres who prevented general
elections from taking place in 2001 for the sole purpose of blocking
Binyamin Netanyahu's return to the Prime Minister's Office. Using a legally
dubious interpretation of the elections law as it stood at the time, Sharon
and Peres connived to prevent general elections to the Knesset, keeping the
fractured 1999 Knesset, in which the Likud had in place only 19 MKs versus
Labor's 26, and enabling the public to vote only for the prime minister.

This Sharon did despite the fact that opinion polls from December 2000
projected that Likud stood to win more than 40 Knesset seats while Labor
would be decimated, dropping to a mere 15 seats. The devolution of the Oslo
process into the Oslo War had brought about a complete rejection of Labor
with this appeasement based ideology by voters and a clarion call for
national leadership by the Likud.

Yet Sharon refused to listen. What interested him was being prime minister
and this he could do only by preventing voters from exercising their right
to choose their representatives in the Knesset.

So Sharon's first government, with Shimon Peres serving as foreign minister
and Binyamin Ben-Eliezer as defense minister was completely
non-representative of the public will. The public wanted a government
reflective of its sentiments - that is a right-wing government led by the
Likud. Instead it had a left-wing government led by Sharon.

When, in 2003, the public showed that its sentiment had not waned and the
Likud won 38 Knesset seats to Labor's 19, it was clear again that the public
had asked Likud to take on the mantle of national leadership and move
forward with its anti-appeasement, pro-Israel agenda. But Sharon again
balked.

RATHER THAN leading the country on the basis of his platform, within a year
he was in open warfare with his own party as he first accepted the Quartet's
so-called road map, in my view the most anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian
document ever brought before the Israeli government for approval, and then
adopted the Labor's election-losing platform of unilateral surrender of
territory to Palestinian terrorists that had just months before been
completely rejected by Israeli voters.

In an effort to silence criticism of his policies, Sharon has repeatedly
stated that "what you see from here [the prime minister's chair] you can't
see from there." The meaning here is obvious: As prime minister, I am privy
to information that you - mere citizens of Israel, members of the Likud,
members of Knesset and government ministers don't know. And therefore, you
can't question my judgment because of my unique perspective.

Sharon's protestation of special knowledge which delivers him from the need
to debate and defend his policies is matched by his insistence of viewing
any opposition to his policies as a personal attack. By dismissing all
opponents as either "self-serving hacks" or "extremists," Sharon
delegitimizes not simply the notion of policy debate, but also the idea that
people can have political and even moral convictions that outweigh their
loyalty to the head of their party. So it is that every government minister
who opposes Sharon's policies is criticized by Sharon and his allies as
subversive, untrustworthy, self-serving and disloyal.

In so doing Sharon has dumbed-down public discourse to the point where the
virtues of politicians rather than the virtues of policies that will impact
the lives of every Israeli for years to come has become the only acceptable
focus of discussion.
In behaving as he has for the past three and a half years, Sharon has harmed
not only his party - which he has systematically demonized - he has harmed
Israeli democracy.

It is not just that on every significant political and military issue he has
ignored the advice of his party members, MKs and government ministers,
preferring Labor policies instead. It is that in his assertion that it is
all about him, and not his policies, he has served to undermine the
legitimacy of the very notion that democratic governments' policies must
reflect the wishes of the voters as they made them clear on election day,
not those of the politicians who serve at their consent.