JERUSALEM, 9 July 2004 — Israeli President Moshe Katsav added to mounting calls yesterday on Infrastructure Minister Yossef Paritzky to resign after he was exposed for trying to frame a Cabinet colleague from his own party.
“I support the decision of the prime minister (Ariel Sharon) and the justice minister (Tommy Lapid) to dismiss Paritzky, as this case — which I hope is exceptional — throws the whole political class into disrepute,” he told public radio.
The scandal, however, shook Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s fragile governing coalition after Paritzky apologized publicly over allegations he had once tried to smear another.
Senior officials said the affair in Shinui, the second biggest party in Sharon’s governing coalition, was unlikely to lead to the breakup of the government.
But the issue was a fresh irritant to an already turbulent government, after two ministers quit last month over Sharon’s plan to evacuate the Gaza Strip, leaving his coalition shy of a majority, with only 59 seats in the 120-member Parliament.
Paritzky was exposed by Israel public television late Wednesday for attempting to ruin the public career of Interior Minister Avraham Poraz, in primary elections among the Shinui party’s parliamentary faction two years ago.
On tapes played in the Channel 1 report, Paritzky was heard speaking with a private investigator, telling him: “I have thought about bringing Poraz down, I want to screw him, I’m telling you to stitch him up.”
Shinui leader Lapid, whose party has five seats in the Cabinet and is the second largest coalition partner after Sharon’s Likud faction, was one of the first people to demand his head. “After the newscast I told Paritzky that he has to resign. He said he was taking note of my request,” Lapid told army radio yesterday.
“The only thing you can do when you find such puss is to take a scalpel and clean the wound as quickly as possible. And I have to tell you the wound is very painful.”
In the wake of his exposure, Paritzky said he was sorry and asked forgiveness from Poraz, saying, “I messed up during the political struggle.”
Paritzky has so far resisted the demands to quit but if he does not go of his own accord, he will almost definitely be sacked by Sharon at Sunday’s weekly Cabinet meeting.
Meanwhile, Israel held fast to its policy of ambiguity about whether it has nuclear weapons and its refusal to sign the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty as UN nuclear chief Mohamed El-Baradei concluded a visit yesterday.
International Atomic Energy Agency chief El-Baradei had come to Israel on Tuesday urging the Jewish state to “clarify” whether it has nuclear weapons and to join the non-proliferation regime which his agency is mandated to verify.
But speaking after El-Baradei met with Sharon, a senior Israeli nuclear official said there would be no change in the government’s long-standing “strategic ambiguity” policy.
“For now, we see no reason, justification or requirement to change it,” the official with Israel’s Atomic Energy Commission told reporters, referring to the policy of neither confirming nor denying Israel’s nuclear weapons capability. Most foreign experts believe Israel possesses a nuclear arsenal of up to 200 warheads.
El-Baradei was also campaigning to get Israel to sign on to his plan to make the Middle East a nuclear weapons-free zone.
El-Baradei said Sharon had “affirmed to me that Israel’s policy continues to be that, in the context of peace in the Middle East, Israel would be looking favorably to the establishment of” such a zone.
In another development, as an army officer outlines how Israel is trying to minimize the impact of its vast West Bank wall on the civilian population, a Palestinian farmer pulls up on his mule-drawn cart in front of the soldiers guarding one of the gates and tries to cross into his land.
For Col. Tamir Hayman, the very fact the farmer is able to reach his fields from the nearby city of Qalqilya perfectly illustrates the measures put in place by the army to ease the suffering caused to local Palestinians by the wall.
But 36-year-old Mutassem Abu Tayyem, a hat shading his head against the burning sun, begs to disagree.
“We are living in a prison. We are being treated like animals in a cage,” he told reporters on a guided tour of the wall organized by the army.
Sitting next to him, his 10-year-old son Samer nods his agreement. Their home town of Qalqilya in the northern West Bank is totally closed in by the wall, which in some places takes the form of a wire fence and in others, a towering cement wall.
Pointing to the gate he has just passed through, Abu Tayyem said it is only open for three hours a day — first thing in the morning, at midday and at the end of the afternoon.
“If you get here late, you have to wait several hours until they reopen the gate,” he grumbled, showing surprise at the interest shown by the heavily-guarded group of journalists.
