MK Rechavam "Gandhi" Ze'evi of the National Union: "Us Here, Them There."

	Review: Origins of the "transfer" idea in pre-state Israel Anita Shapira, The New Republic
	Speech: Ze'evi addresses his party before the last Knesset election Rechavam Ze'evi, Ichud Leumi web site
	Why Barak should go home Ellis Shuman
	Barak quits; will not be part of Sharon’s government
	Coalition talks stall over Labor internal strife
	Labor leaders aim to thwart Ehud Barak
	Prime Minister's Office
	The Knesset
	National Union Website

Outgoing Prime Minister Ehud Barak said that he would not join a national unity government with the Ichud Leumi-Yisrael Beiteinu faction, which he decried as a party of extremists and "transferists."

This new condition advanced by Barak followed faction whip MK Ophir Pines-Paz's announcement that he would oppose joining a government with the right-wing party in the central committee.

"The right-wing extremist path of Gandhi [MK Rechavam Ze'evi] and [MK Avigdor] Lieberman," said Pines-Paz, "would lead the government at best to a stalemate and at worst to inflamed tension in the region. We cannot enter the government to serve as a fig leaf for such extremism."

Apparently the objection was not merely to Ze'evi and Lieberman being Cabinet Ministers but also to the inclusion of their faction in the government coalition.

MK Lieberman, interviewed on Israel Television Monday night, said that Barak was attempting to deflect attention from efforts to dump him as Labor Party Chairman and Defense Minister in Sharon's government.

MK Ze'evi, interviewed on Army Radio Tuesday morning, expressed amusement at the new condition, which he said was never raised in the preceding ten days of coalition talks. The latest demand reflected, he said, the interest of some in the Labor party to "torpedo" the national unity talks.

Jerusalem Mayor Ehud Olmert, a Likud negotiator in the coalition talks, said on Army Radio that Labor had been told from the start that "under no conditions, under no circumstances, in no form will we give up on our partnership with the National Union.'" Sharon reportedly scheduled a meeting for late Tuesday with the faction leaders.

Ze'evi acknowledged that he was aware that the incoming government would not support his calls for "voluntary transfer" of Palestinians. However, he expressed confidence that Sharon would not dismantle even one settlement, a condition for his faction's agreement to join a Sharon government. He said that Sharon had recently reaffirmed that commitment to him.

Ze'evi also lambasted the hypocrisy of Barak and the Labor Party for opposing the transfer idea. Transfer, he said, was a policy of Israel's First Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, and other founding members of what become the Labor movement, which was implemented by force, an apparent reference to the expulsion of Arabs from Lod, Ramla and other locations during the Independence War.

Ze'evi claimed that Barak's slogan calling for unilateral separation from the Palestinians - "Us here, them there" - had been appropriated from his own party's platform. The only difference, he quipped, was the question of "where is 'there'?"

The same might be said for the question of who will be in, and who will be out, in Sharon's new government.

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