Opinion & Comment
Sharon Still Has More Cards to Play

Right-wing circles are praying the investigations against Sharon and his sons will end as quickly as possible, one way or the other. Not out of great concern for the Prime Minister or a sense of pity for the legalistic torment he and his sons are undergoing, but out of ideological concerns, i.e. Eretz Yisroel and Judea and Samaria.

What does the investigation have to do with Judea and Samaria? Plenty.

The Right holds that all of Sharon's moves are influenced by the police investigation against him and against his sons. They claim that Sharon thinks that if he caters to the Left, which controls the courts and the legal profession, he will be rewarded.

The Right maintains this is the only way to make sense of Sharon's statements at a recent conference in Herzliya and at last week's Likud convention, that he will evacuate settlements and will not bring his policies to the party for a vote. Even Menachem Begin brought the decision over the Egyptian peace accords before his party and Yitzhak Rabin declared he would hold a referendum over the agreement to evacuate settlements. Sharon, however, insists the decision over unilateral evacuation of settlements will be his alone.

In other words: "the extent of the withdrawal depends on the extent of the investigation." The deeper the investigation and the more the Sharon family gets entangled, the more Sharon will swing to the left and the louder his declarations about the evacuation of settlements and the establishment of a Palestinian state will become. Thus the Right is hoping the investigation ends as soon as possible and that Sharon and his sons come away clean--which appears unlikely--to ensure Sharon's left-leaning pronouncements end in words and speeches and not in actual deeds.

The political establishment expressed great wonder over Sharon's choice of confronting the Likud Center with declarations many members would find unappealing when he could have easily delivered a much more pareve speech. In fact before the convention he even hinted to several close ministers of his intentions to rile Likud Center members. The reason, they say, lies in matters of personal expediency. Although he was standing before the Likud Center he was really speaking primarily to the decision-makers in the legal establishment who have the power to exert influence over his and his sons' cases.

The Numbers That Make the Difference

Toward the end of the Gregorian calendar year the Central Bureau for Statistics published demographic data on the Jewish and Arab populations in Israel. According to their figures there will soon be a non-Jewish majority between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River. The Palestinian Central Bureau for Statistics claimed Palestinians would be the majority by the year 2007.

Rabbi Yisroel Eichler claimed these statistics are distorted because they overlook a very important fact: today 500,000- 700,000 non-Jews from the former Soviet Union are living in Israel. In its calculations, the Central Bureau for Statistics counted these non-Jews as Jews because they arrived under the Law of Return. Thus the demographic situation is really far graver than the official data indicates.

Shinui's meteoric rise can be attributed almost exclusively to this segment of the population and its negative influence on the surroundings. These immigrants helped churches and non- kosher butcher shops flourish and spread. It comes as no surprise that the students at a Jewish school under the auspices of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem reached the point of holding a Chanukah party that included a tree--and were even backed by the principal and Knesset Education Committee Chairman Shalgi of Shinui.

The rise in violence and crime is closely tied to this segment of the population, a fact that can be demonstrated simply by reading the names of people involved in incidents of violence. Non-Jewish immigrants have ruined the Jewish state and made Shinui what it is today.

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