WHAT DOES THE LIKUD PARTY STAND FOR?

Between Idealism and Pragmatism

The Likud Party faithful who gathered in Tel Aviv on April 14 for a pre-Passover holiday toast heard party chairman Benjamin Netanyahu announce that he would amplify Israel’s security and peace principles for negotiations with the Palestinian Arabs before a joint session of the U.S. Congress next month.

As he surveyed the crowd from the podium Prime Minister Netanyahu was no doubt reassured by a recent survey showing that 76 percent of Likud members opposed annexing all of Judea and Samaria. Yet he also would have known that 10,000 party recruits had newly been signed up by uncompromising settler leaders. To keep the Likud unified and in the center of Israel's political mainstream, Netanyahu's mission will be to bridge the gap between ideological purism and pragmatism, the religious settlers and centrist hawks, the needs of security and the quest for peace.

In doing so, he follows in the footsteps of party founder Menachem Begin, according to Hebrew University political scientist Abraham Diskin, editor of From the Altalena to the Present Day, a newly published political history (Hebrew) of the movement and its transition from Herut to Likud.

Menachem Begin's decision to form the Herut party (Likud's antecedent) on May 14, 1948, the day the state was declared, can be seen as a victory of pragmatism over ideological zeal. All too often when underground factions compete -- such as Begin's Irgun Zvai Leumi and David Ben-Gurion's Haganah – in a liberation struggle they have gone on to fight one another after independence, as Herzl Makov, chairman the Menachem Begin Heritage Center in Jerusalem pointed out in the book's preface. Begin, however, was determined that there would be no Zionist civil war even after the Haganah fired upon and sank the Irgun arms ship Altalena off Tel Aviv on June 6, 1948 with Begin on board. From that dark day on, in the face of relentless campaigning by Ben-Gurion to marginalize and delegitimize the Herut party, Begin steadfastly committed the movement to the ever-shifting center-right of Israel's parliamentary democracy.

From the beginning, the political deck had been stacked against Begin. Ben-Gurion's Labor movement had dominated the quasi-governmental Jewish Agency and Histadrut workers federation so it was no surprise that his Mapai faction captured a 46 seat plurality in the first Knesset elections on January 25, 1949 against 14 mandates for Herut. Ben-Gurion then formed the country's first coalition government as his movement continued to dominate all subsequent governments until 1977.

Not only did Ben-Gurion rule out a political reconciliation between the Begin-led Jabotinsky camp and his own Laborites, the Mapai boss pledged to forever ostracize Herut by keeping it out of any Labor-led government. His animosity ran so deep that Ben-Gurion wouldn't even deign to utter Begin's name in the Knesset referring to him instead as "the man sitting next to Dr. Yohanan Bader."

Paradoxically, it was Begin's quest to surmount Ben-Gurion's blacklisting that contributed mightily to his determination to keep Herut in the political mainstream. But in crystallizing Herut's ideology, diluting Jabotinsky's ideas and replacing them with his own, Begin had also to overcome the opposition of the Revisionist Zionists party, which claimed to be the true standard-bearer of Jabotinsky's ideology. Under the leadership of Herzl Rosenblum and Aryeh Altman, Ben-Gurion had welcomed the party into the Provisional State Council, though it failed to cross the one-percent electoral threshold in the first elections and would ultimately be absorbed into Herut. The Freedom Fighters for Israel (Stern Group) also ran independently for the first Knesset garnering one seat. Only in 1973, with Yitzhak Shamir's entry into Gahal, would the remnant of Abraham Stern's followers rejoin the Jabotinsky movement under Begin.

Begin's fiery 1952 orations against Israel accepting Holocaust reparations from West Germany were portrayed by Ben-Gurion's supporters as indicative of his innate right-wing extremism. In truth, opposition to taking "blood money" from the Germans was hardly limited to the right. And in any event, Herut picked up one additional mandate in the next elections.

Ben-Gurion's political quarantine on Begin began to disintegrate in 1954 as a result of the political fallout following a botched Israeli intelligence operation in Egypt known as the Lavon Affair. With the Laborites bickering among themselves and Ben-Gurion out of power, in 1964 Prime Minister Levi Eshkol permitted Jabotinsky's remains to be brought to Israel and interred on Mount Herzl not far from the gravesite of the Zionist movement's founder. This, too, subtly contributed to Herut's legitimacy as a mainstream party. Next, Begin orchestrated an alignment with the centrist Liberal Party, which had fallen out with the Laborites over the Lavon Affair, to form Gahal which garnered 26 mandates in the 1965 elections. As a classical liberal, Begin's principled opposition to maintaining military law over Israel's Arab citizens (rescinded in1966) further chipped away at Labor's defamation of Herut.

But it was Gahal's entry into the Labor-led national unity government just before the outbreak of the 1967 Six Day War that permanently shattered Begin's political isolation. He became a minister without-portfolio and in that capacity rejoiced over the IDF's liberation of Judea and Samaria. In due course, Begin quit the government, now headed by Gold Meir, to protest its acceptance of the 1969 Roger's Plan.

After the devastating 1973 Yom Kippur War, with Labor's authority to rule increasingly called into question, Begin joined forces with Ariel Sharon to orchestrate the emergence of the Likud from Gahal (and several smaller factions). Begin's sacrifice of ideology for pragmatism bore fruit in the Likud's smashing 1977 electoral victory overturned Labor's monopoly on power. Begin had pulled together settlers, security hawks, predominantly Ashkenazi proponents of a free market economy, and working class Sephardim tethered to the welfare state. It was an amalgamation that he further reinforced in 1981 during his second administration by solidifying Orthodox backing. The glue that held it all together was an overriding distrust of Arab intentions.

In government, Begin redefined Jabotinsky's line on Greater Israel, according to the Jabotinsky Institute's Prof. Arye Naor, a contributor to From the Altalena to the Present Day and Begin's former cabinet secretary. The political center in Israel had shifted and Begin was determined to attune his leadership accordingly even if it required jettisoning ideological purism. In 1979, Begin came under bitter criticism from former comrades-in-arms Shmuel Katz, a Jabotinsky biographer and movement ideologue for trading Sinai land in return for peace with Egypt and from Geula Cohen who broke away from Likud to help form Techiya. Begin's alliance with the Orthodox parties was yet a further deviation from Jabotinsky's preference for a separation of religion from politics. When Begin went to the polls in 1981 it was under the banner: "Better the Difficulties of Peace Than the Pains of War."

Some saw his decision in December 1981 to have the Knesset suddenly annex the Golan Heights as a manifestation of his Jabotinsky ideology, but the case can be made that it was more the result of Begin's justifiable pique at the Reagan administration. After all, the Syrian's had let it be known that they would not recognize Israel even if the Palestinians did; Washington was in the process of selling advanced military weapons to Saudi Arabia while threatening to embargo military aid to Israel over the destruction of the Iraqi nuclear reactor; and the State Department had infuriatingly criticized an Israeli retaliatory raid against PLO facilities in Beirut. Begin had had enough, asking rhetorically of America: "Are we a vassal-state of yours? Are we a banana republic?"

In a nut shell, all subsequent Likud prime ministers have grappled with the same tensions between pragmatism and ideology. Under Yitzhak Shamir, Likud demonstrated far more ideological steadfastness yet even his government could not avoid being dragged under U.S. pressure to the 1991 Madrid talks which were aimed at achieving a permanent resolution of the Palestinian issue. In his first administration, Netanyahu far from renouncing Israel's commitments to the fatally flawed 1993 Oslo Accords actually carried out a partial Hebron pullback in 1997. In the midst of the second intifada, Ariel Sharon campaigned in 2003 elections as a "Leader for Peace" and in May 2003 accepted the Quartet's Road Map whose endgame was the establishment of a Palestinian state. When the Likud rank-and-file repeatedly voted not to support his unilateral Gaza disengagement plan, Sharon defected in 2005 to form Kadima.

Netanyahu has now been back in power for the past two years juggling the demands of his right-wing coalition against those of Israel's fickle international allies. If From the Altalena to the Present Day is any guide, he will continue to navigate the Likud toward the political center – where most voters are – espousing strength on security along with pliability on the diplomatic front and striving, like his predecessors, to bridge the gap between idealism and pragmatism.

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-- April 18, 2011

DRIFTING APART - NEW GERMANY AND NETANYAHU'S ISRAEL

The news that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman were in Germany last week was overshadowed in Israel by coverage of Hamas's anti-tank missile attack on a lumbering yellow school bus that left one Israeli youngster fighting for his life.

At the de rigueur joint news conference in Berlin with Chancellor Angela Merkel, Netanyahu described Germany as a "great friend of Israel" saying that the talks had taken place in an atmosphere of mutual trust and friendship. Yet any sober assessment of the German-Israel relationship would reveal that Berlin is no longer Jerusalem's most dependable ally inside the EU. Germans have grown increasingly -- sometimes unreasonably – disenchanted with Israeli policies. As a German friend working in Israel recently told me, "We just don't understand Israelis anymore."

German's bristle at being told they are naïve. Their faith in the two-state solution, and by implication in Mahmoud Abbas's goodwill, is unshakeable. Germany is Europe's biggest financial backer of the Palestinian Authority. For Germans a solution to the Palestinian issue is practically a prerequisite for regional stability and they blame Israel – definitely not the Palestinians – for the current diplomatic stalemate. Germans myopically view settlements as the alpha and omega of conflict: Israel's refusal to peremptorily capitulate on settlements all but justifies Abbas's intransigence.

But the fissures extend to just about every facet of Israeli behavior. While most Israelis have not forgiven Turkey for its role in the Mavi Marmara affair, the Bundestag unanimously blamed Israel not Ankara or the violent Islamist radicals on board. Israel behaves as if it has no respect for international law, say Germans. Outrageously, 47.7 percent of Germans surveyed believed “Israel is conducting a war of extermination against the Palestinians.”

Sitting next to Merkel, Netanyahu was prompted to comment on the upheaval in the Arab world. He said Israel wanted to see its neighbors move toward democracy, "but we can't be sure" whether the transformations underway were a harbinger of the positive change Europe experienced in 1989 or that left Iran a mullahtocracy in 1979 "and we have to fashion our policies to that effect."

But many Germans have been infuriated by Netanyahu's attitude. On Egypt, for example, my German friend said Israelis ought to be cheering on the protestors and trying to form positive relationships with this new generation of potential leaders. In the face of the democracies they sense to be blooming, Germans see Israelis' obsessing over the Islamist menace as cynical and counter-productive.

On the diplomatic front, Germany supported a Security Council resolution promoted by the Arabs in February that demanded Israel cease all "settlement activities in the occupied Palestinian territory" including metropolitan Jerusalem, and termed any Jewish presence anywhere over the Green Line "illegal." Only a US-veto blocked passage. In the old days, Germany would have justified its infidelity toward Israel by citing the obligation to vote with other EU members. (Actually, the German's broke ranks with the EU by abstaining on the Libyan "no-fly zone" in the council.) When Netanyahu telephoned Merkel to protest the German vote on settlements, she turned the tables on him complaining that he had not followed through on a promised new peace overture.

To give Merkel her due, she did assure Netanyahu last week that Berlin would not agree to any unilateral recognition of a Palestinian state at the UN. This commitment takes on added significance because Germany has just begun a two-year term on the Security Council. Even so, there are persistent reports that Germany, France and Britain have been egging on the Quartet toward imposing a solution on Israel – hardly any better than Palestinian unilateralism in Israeli eyes

In 2008, Merkel told the Knesset that Germany would "never abandon Israel" and would "remain a loyal partner and friend." At the press conference with Netanyahu she declared that Iran's nuclear program is "a greater threat now than ever before" and that everything possible must be done to prevent the Islamic Republic from acquiring nuclear weapons.

But Merkel's kinship toward Israel wins her few points even in her inner circle. Sixty-five years after the Holocaust, sentimental notions of historic responsibility are mostly balanced by realpolitik and Euro-left political culture.

That may be the context in which to understand Berlin's €4 billion annual trade with genocide-advocating Iran. To be fair, doing business with Iran is not illegal anywhere in the EU so long as it does not directly aid the mullahs' quest for nuclear weapons. Berlin, unlike Washington, professes to be unconvinced that the Hamburg-based European-Iranian Trade Bank is in fact a financial conduit for Iran’s nuclear proliferation. Anyway, Germans are big believers in engagement and say that punishing sanctions would mostly hurt innocent Iranians while paving the way for China and Russia to exploit the business vacuum created by Europe's departure.

Despite a sense of disillusionment that is increasingly mutual, it would be reckless to minimize Jerusalem's need for good relations with Germany. Germany is one of Israel's most important trade partners and its largest trading partner in Europe. Berlin has financed half the costs of three custom designed Dolphin-class submarines for the Israeli navy; two more are on order (negotiations over subsidizing a sixth are foundering). The subs are crucially vital to Israel's strategic deterrence against Iran. Germany's Interior minister was in Israel last month and held meetings with intelligence officials as part of the ongoing security relationship.

Netanyahu acknowledged in Berlin that Israel's existential security is one of Merkel's paramount concerns. Unique among EU leaders, she unequivocally refers to Israel as "the Jewish state" when promoting the two-state solution. For now, and under this Chancellor, the foundation of the German-Israel partnership remains solid even if, plainly, the façade is starting to crumble.

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-- April 12, 2011

Was Mohandas Gandhi a Zionist? Not quite.

A Saint for 'Palestine'

A new book about Mohandas Gandhi (1869-1948) by Joseph Lelyveld, a former executive editor of the New York Times, has set off stormy protests in India because it implies that the country's iconic founding father was bisexual.

In “Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India,” Lelyveld recalls Gandhi's relationship with a well-to-do German-Jewish architect, Hermann Kallenbach (1871–1945), though makes no explicit assertion of a sexual angle. That claim was made by British historian Andrew Roberts in his cutting review for the Wall Street Journal. Roberts said Lelyveld's account provides enough material to conclude that Gandhi was "a sexual weirdo, a political incompetent and a fanatical faddist."

The book will likely find readers in Israel not only because of the titillating possibility that Gandhi's homoerotic interest was a Jew, the suicidal counsel he proffered Jews facing Hitler and his hardhearted opposition to Jewish national self-determination, but also because Indian elites relied on his teachings to frame their country's foreign policy toward Israel. Gandhi's ideas greatly influenced the country's first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru.

Nowadays, Gandhi's memory is being repeatedly invoked by Palestinian Arabs and their cultish international supporters to reinvigorate the 60 year-old Arab boycott of Israel.

His "legacy of peace" has also become a family franchise for two grandsons, Arun and Rajmohan Gandhi, who make appearances in Bil'in the site of ferocious weekly demonstrations by Palestinian Arabs and foreign radicals against Israel's life-saving security barrier. Anna Baltzer, winner of the "Rachel Corrie Prize" is one of many Jewish "activists" who has invoked Gandhi legacy in her "reportage."

Another is filmmaker Julian Schnabel who paid tribute to the Gandhi myth in an interview about his recent Israel-exploitation film Miral. In awarding the perfidious ex-Israeli academic Ilan Pappe their Honorary Guide Title, even a group devoted to belief in extraterrestrials cited Pappe's attachment to Gandhi.

In this way, the mahatma, or great soul, has also become a fuzzy icon for the history-challenged.

Palestinian Arabs have drawn parallels between Gandhi's imaginary support for black Africans and their own cause. In truth, during the 21 years he lived in Africa, Gandhi was not particularly sympathetic toward black liberation. Instead, the Hindu solicitor became an indispensable go-between for the Muslim Indian business elite and the authorities. A proponent of race purity, he was known to complain that "the Indian [was] being dragged down to the position of the raw Kaffir."

It was, incidentally, during this period that Gandhi left his wife to live with Kallenbach.

Later, back in India, this saint of the underdog went on his first hunger strike in 1932 to oppose granting low-caste "untouchables" political representation in the Indian parliament. Though media-savvy Palestinian Muslims have adopted Gandhi as their a hero, his inept handling of relations with Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who became Pakistan's first leader, helped set the stage for the break-up of the Indian subcontinent into warring Hindu and Muslim states.

Like Africans, Jews have little reason to place Gandhi on a pedestal. "My sympathies," he wrote in late November 1938 after Kristallnacht, "are with the Jews." No doubt, in a peculiar sense, this was true. He valued Jews like Sonja Schlesin, his loyal secretary in South Africa and Henry Polak his soul mate and right hand man.

Such sympathy notwithstanding, in 1937 and again in 1939, Kallenbach visited Gandhi in India endeavoring to elicit his support for the Zionist enterprise to no avail. Gandhi wrote about it in a 1939 letter: "I happen to have a Jewish friend living with me. He has an intellectual belief in non-violence…I do not quarrel with him over his anger [against the Nazis]. He wants to be non-violent, but the sufferings of his fellow-Jews are too much for him to bear." Gandhi acknowledged that the Nazi persecution of the Jews had no parallel in history. Nevertheless, Gandhi's resolute counsel to Jews facing the Nazis was non-violent civil disobedience – and forgiveness.

In contrast, to his own followers he taught that "war may have to be resorted to as a necessary evil." He even blessed a provincial Hindu nawab who had given orders to shoot ten Muslims for every Hindu killed in his state.

Whatever their mutual affections, Kallenbach, a utopian Zionist who served on the Executive of the South African Zionist Federation, was unable to convert Gandhi to the cause. "The cry for a national home for the Jews does not make much appeal to me," he confessed. Why couldn't the Jews think of Palestine as a kind of biblical metaphor and let that suffice. He dismissed international commitments for a Jewish homeland as illegitimate. If they must settle in Palestine, Gandhi told the Jews, they should do so only with Arab goodwill.

If worse comes to worse, the Jews should allow themselves to be "thrown into the Dead Sea." Any other course to preserve their survival would make them the guilty party. Even after the destruction of European Jewry and a litany of Arab atrocities in Palestine, Gandhi held firm: the Jews must practice non-violence.

No doubt Gandhi was a complicated historical figure yet this much is straightforward. He was not the liberal humanist many in the American civil rights movement imagined him to be. He was no friend of Africa; certainly no lover of Zion. In the stark judgment of historian Paul Johnson, his teachings didn't even have much relevance to India's problems. Upon further reflection, perhaps it's fitting that a fraudulent Palestinian "narrative" has appropriated the Gandhi phenomenon to its century long and comprehensive war against the Jewish return to Israel.

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THE NEXT GAZA WAR -- WHAT ISRAEL MUST DO

Gaza Endgame

The weekend meeting in Ramallah between Palestinian Authority chairman and Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas and an unofficial delegation of West Bank Hamas "parliamentarians" was not just about reconciling the two factions.

Abbas told his visitors that long months of Palestinian diplomacy were being jeopardized by Hamas's bellicosity.

Fatah is on the cusp of gaining United Nations backing for a Palestinian state along the 1949 Armistice Lines, without having conceded the "right of return," or recognizing Israel as a Jewish state, or addressing a single of Israel's security needs.

If the Palestinians played their cards right they could bring Yassir Arafat's June 1974 plan for the destruction of Israel in phases massively closer to realization. But another Gaza war now, Abbas warned, would only highlight Palestinian disunity and prove Israel's claim that an imposed international solution would leave Jews and Arabs still killing each other.

Abbas might have told his visitors that in the West Bank and east Jerusalem Palestinians can hurl rocks at Israeli motorists or ambulances, attack soldiers without provocation, or riot against the security barrier without negative consequences to Palestinian interests simply by invoking the "occupation."

Some in the media had even downplayed the slaughter of a Jewish family at Itamar as having been provoked by "settlements." He might have agreed that Palestinian diplomacy was not adversely affected by Israel having interdicted a ship laden with weapons bound for Gaza "militants," and that no one seems perturbed over foiled Hamas terror efforts to tunnel into Israel from Gaza.

Still, some recent "resistance" activities had risked Fatah's strides at the UN. What was the point of pummeling Israel from Gaza with 50 mortars in 15 minutes back on March 19th? Or take the recent bus-stop bombing in "west" Jerusalem which almost claimed a British television reporter and killed a visiting Christian bible scholar? How are Fatah's diplomats to explain the bombardment of Beersheba and Ashdod by Grad missiles?

A direct hit on some Jewish kindergarten could setback painstaking PLO diplomacy.

Had they been in a position to speak frankly the Hamas men would have acknowledged that they, too, have an interest in seeing Abbas succeed at the U.N. After all, a diplomatic victory for Fatah today will accrue to Hamas tomorrow – as the Islamists fully expect to one day assume control over a reunited Palestinian polity.

For now, however, Hamas's calculations are anything but straightforward. The popular uprisings now sweeping the Arab world have shaken Hamas's confidence as demonstrated by the brutally with which its thugs have crushed Gazans' protests. What better way to redirect criticism of the regime than by instigating a conflict with Israel?

Moreover, Hamas is not monolithic. There are divisions between the hard-line armed faction led Ahmed Ja'abari and the purportedly more moderate "government" led by Ismail Haniyeh. He wants to be seen as open to reconciliation with Abbas; Ja'abari makes no such pretense. There are also tensions between the Damascus-based leadership, buffeted by the upheavals in Syria, and Hamas chiefs in Gaza.

In this environment, it may be that Hamas is having trouble imposing its will on other extremist factions in the Strip. For only hours after Hamas announced that Gaza terror groups were ready to return to a de facto ceasefire with Israel, two Islamic Jihad gunmen were liquidated by the Israeli air force on their way to launch rockets against Israel. (Curiously, for its own Machiavellian reasons, Islamic Jihad has been advocating Fatah-Hamas reconciliation.)

Add to this mix uncertainty over the future of Syria and by implication, Lebanon, Egypt and Jordan and it's no wonder that Hamas would rather Palestinians vent their spleen against Israel.

That is precisely why Israel has no interest in shifting the attention of the Arab street onto itself. By demolishing the headquarters of the Hamas government in Gaza, continuing pinpoint targeting of terrorists engaged in attacks, deploying the imperfect Iron Dome anti-rocket defensive shield, and signaling that targeted killings of Hamas leaders was on the agenda, Jerusalem is endeavoring to deter Gaza violence in a prudent and calibrated manner.

What if, nevertheless, a terror attack resulting in mega casualties leaves Israel with no choice but to go to war? If an Operation Cast Lead II becomes obligatory, Israel will obviously strive to avoid the mistakes of the first Gaza war. But it must do more.

This time Israel needs a coherent mission: ending Hamas rule. That would require a strategy of unremitting attack against the movement's leaders, structures and symbols regardless of whether they are political or military so that Hamas loses the ability to command and control events in the Strip.

With its back to the wall Hamas can be expected to unleash its entire arsenal. To win, the IDF will need to be led with élan. A broad based national unity cabinet would need to inspire heretofore elusive solidarity on a besieged home-front. The country's diplomats would have to argue convincingly that with Hamas looking over his shoulder, Abbas has been petrified to make necessary compromises for peace and has turned, instead, to a morally obtuse international community to deliver Israel prostrate.

What would the impact of destroying the Hamas government be on Abbas's diplomatic campaign?

With Hamas vanquished and the Palestinian Authority presumably back in Gaza, Abbas will be faced with a dilemma: make real peace with Israel or continue down Arafat's falsehearted path. The big unknown is whether the Obama administration and those EU countries not pledged to Arab cause robot-like will press Abbas to choose wisely.

Defeating Hamas would be no panacea, but as Max Singer, a Senior Fellow at the BESA Institute of Bar Ilan University has argued, an Israeli willingness to defeat a Palestinian army and destroy a Palestinian government can serve as an important deterrent, signaling that the Jewish state will not tolerate a belligerent regime anywhere between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.


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March 28, 2011

IS TURKEY A MODEL FOR ARAB AND ISLAMIC DEMOCRACY IN THE MIDDLE EAST?

One best case scenario to the current upheaval in the Arab world foresees the emergence of Turkish-style political systems in places like Egypt and Tunisia in the event Islamic parties come to power by democratic means. In Egypt, a plebiscite over the weekend approved amending the constitution in a way that strengthens the prospects of the Moslem Brotherhood in forthcoming parliamentary elections. As for the depth of Turkey's own commitment to democratic principles, that may only begin to clarify itself after elections on June 12th.

Polls predict the Islamic AKP (Justice and Development Party) will easily achieve its third consecutive victory. AKP's strongest challenger, the CHP (Republican People's Party) is not expected to garner more than 20 percent of the vote. The CHP and its new leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu carry the mantle of the country's founder and architect of Turkey's secular path Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. AKP's platform pledges to amend Turkey's constitution, but doing so could further entrench Islamist control. Customarily, the Turkish army had served as a (self-interested) guarantor of the country's faithfulness to Ataturk's path.

Paradoxically, as Turkey became more democratic, more committed to joining the EU, as its government became more religiously parochial, the principle that the army had a homeostatic role to play if the nation drifted from Ataturk's ways has become delegitimized.

Meanwhile, the AKP's go slow, Islam-friendly, conservative approach begs the question: What is its ultimate destination? It has deftly reworked the ideas of the late Necmettin Erbakan, who trailblazed non-violent Islamist participation in Turkish politics; breaking with his anti-free-market principles – by, for instance, favoring accession to the EU – while modulating his anti-Western, though less so his anti-Zionist, line.

At a recent conference at Hebrew University's Truman Institute to discuss the Middle East in transition, Prof. Umit Cizre of Istanbul University pooh-poohed concerns that AKP had a hidden Islamist agenda or intended to introduce Sharia law. Instead, she criticized Turkey's secularists for harping on the Islamist threat without presenting a coherent political platform of their own. Yet Cizre described the AKP as having "deliberately" positioned itself "ambiguously" on the political spectrum.

Why, though, is the secular camp so weak? Voters are uncomfortable with hard-line secularism. A new class of Islamic business elites has arisen alongside their secularist counterparts. Also, secularists have also been blamed for mishandling their management of the state when they were in charge. Moreover, while the moderate tone pursued by AKP has made it difficult to mobilize non-Islamists, ideological and personal differences have riven the secularist camp.

It may also be true that nowadays secularists are less committed to pure democracy than the Isalmists. Last but not least, secularists have been undermined by the so-called Ergenekon affair, which the government asserts has exposed a vast plot by the military and their allies in the media to overthrow the regime. A good number of serving generals have been arrested on "flimsy" even "fabricated" evidence, say the generals' defenders.

No one disputes that the AKP has helped make Turkey a success story and engineered the world's 15th largest economy. Unparalleled political stability has contributed to economic boom; GDP is up to $10,000 compared to $3,000 at the start of the decade. Turkey's economy would be still better if it didn't need to import 95% of its energy needs.

As befitting a regional power with grand aspirations, Turkey recently hosted an alternative "political" Davos in Istanbul. Unfortunately for Erdogan and his political rival President Abdullah Gül the gathering was a complete flop as unrest at home kept expected guests – including Syria's leader Bashar Assad and Egypt's Gamal Mubarak (invited before his father was ousted from the presidency) from attending. Even Spain's Socialist Workers' Party Premier Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, who is in the forefront of an effort to paper-over differences between Western civilization and the Islamists, was a no-show.

Abroad, Turkey's distancing from Israel exemplified by Erdogan's periodically staged outbursts against the Jewish state and by a sharp deterioration in bilateral relations in all fields -- save trade -- is now a well established feature of Ankara's foreign policy.

Turkey may claim that its warmth toward Hamas and its instigation of the Gaza flotilla crisis is intended to somehow promote peace. But Israelis can't imagine how and wonder if Erdogan is tapping into the kind of anti-Semitic sentiment that has propelled such despicable films as Valley of the Wolves into blockbusters.

Actually, foreign policy signals out of Turkey are jumbled. For instance, Turkey opted not to stop the Victoria from leaving its port bound for Gaza via Egypt with Iranian weapons in its hold. But it grounded two Iranian planes in search for arms. Ankara denounced the Itamar massacre but in the same breath asserted the community's existence was a breach of international law. So far, it has had nothing to say about Hamas's intensified bombardment of Israel.

Other aspects of Turkey's foreign policy are equally troubling. Erdogan's chauvinism and Islamic assertiveness has led him to accuse Germany of pushing its 3.5-million-strong Turkish minority too hard toward acculturating into their adopted country. Teach your children Turkish before German, he told a Dusseldorf rally.

But with countries it borders, including Iran, Syria and Iraq, Ankara professes to pursue a "zero problems" policy. Sure enough there has been a substantial increase in trade and exchange of high-ranking visitors with Iran and mutual cooperation against the Kurds. Nevertheless, the geo-strategic rivalry between Iran and Turkey is undeniable even if camouflaged by talk of pan-Islamic solidarity. Dr. Gallia Lindenstrauss, a Turkish foreign policy specialist at Tel Aviv University told the Truman conference that the Turks see a nuclear-armed Iran as destabilizing. Nor is it a coincidence that an Erdogan visit inevitably follows one by Ahmadinejad around the globe. The two countries are destined to balance each other's power. For instance, while Iran will oppose a Syrian peace with Israel, Turkey favors one (albeit on Syria's terms). Or take Turkey's warning that it would not "remain silent" if the IDF retaliated against Lebanon for Hezbollah attacks on Israel. Some analysts interpret this as a challenge to Teheran's hegemony over Beirut as much as a cheap jab against Jerusalem.

Indeed, Lindenstrauss makes the case that if any country can pull Syria away from Iran it will be Turkey. Sure enough, Ankara, which was once on the brink of war with Damascus, now helps train the Syrian military. As for Iraq, Turkey is now its number one trading partner and recently opened a consulate in the Kurdish city of Erbil. And while Iran wants a Iraq weak, Turkey prefers Iraq to remain unified and stable.

At home, Turkey is still a free country where television can show a series about Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent that jars Islamic sensibilities, but not without a warning from regulators at the Radio and Television Supreme Council.

Freedom of the press is mostly unfettered but secular voices have been increasingly targeted; some have been arrested in connection with the Ergenekon conspiracy and one journalist critical of the regime was murdered in 2007 under suspicious circumstances. The AKP has not even hinted at imposing Sharia law, but the authority that oversees religious affairs is coming under greater government control and there are signs it is moving in a more traditionalist direction.

So is the Turkish model a paradigm for democratic rule in Moslem-majority countries? The jury is still out but the signs are not encouraging. In advance of Turkey's elections, one thing is for sure, in the words of the Turkey-sympathetic Economist: Erdogan "is getting bossier and less tolerant by the day."

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-- March 21, 2010