A Triumph for Common Sense

The mayor's release helps Begin get off the hook

"In fire and spirit we redeem you, O Bassam!" shouted the jubilant townspeople of Nablus. Under a shower of rose petals, Bassam Shaka'a, 48, freed from prison and reinstated as mayor of the largest town in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, was hoisted on the shoulders of his Palestinian supporters and carried past garlands of flowers and olive branches into the town hall to greet his family. Smiling broadly, the mayor thanked his constituents for the hero's welcome. "I owe you my freedom, and from now on I am yours," he told them. "Victory to the fedayeen!" the crowd responded, raising their hands in the V sign of victory.

That triumphant homecoming last week followed swiftly on a dramatic policy reversal by the Israeli government. Jerusalem had suddenly released the popular mayor from prison and rescinded the expulsion order imposed on him for allegedly having spoken out in support of Palestinian terrorism. It was a dramatic finale to an embarrassing episode that had drawn wide international criticism of Israel and confused the Middle East peace process with Egypt. The Jerusalem Post hailed the freeing of Shaka'a as "a triumph for common sense."

The mayor had been arrested four weeks ago, following the leak of a private conversation between Shaka'a and General Danny Matt, Israeli military administrator of the occupied territories. Despite the mayor's denials that he had expressed any approval of Palestinian terrorist acts, Defense Minister Ezer Weizman ordered him deported to Jordan; the Cabinet unanimously affirmed the decree.

Shaka'a embarked on a 14-day hunger strike, during which he was to lose 26 pounds. Other mayors in the Gaza Strip and West Bank staged an angry protest demonstration and then resigned en masse. In a letter to Premier Menachem Begin, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance bluntly urged reconsideration of the deportation order. Egyptian President Anwar Sadat publicly complained that "such measures do not contribute to the creation of an atmosphere of confidence" for the slow-burning negotiations on Palestinian autonomy.

A three-member tribunal appointed by Brigadier General Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, Israeli military commander for the West Bank, then reviewed the case; last week it was announced that Shak'a's deportation order had been annulled. Among the "many considerations" involved in the turnabout, General Ben-Eliezer explained, were "the welfare of the city of Nablus and the welfare of Mr. Shaka'a's family." He might have added that the well-being of Begin's embattled government had also been a factor. In fact, nobody seemed happier with Ben-Eliezer's decision than the Premier. With obvious relish, he announced that he would meet Sadat at a summit at Aswan on New Year's Day. The Premier's confidence, shaken ever since the resignation of Foreign Minister Moshe Dayan last October, seemed restored and appeared to give him a new vigor with which he went on to defuse two other political crises.

One was the determination of the ultranationalist Gush Emunim group of settlers to defy a Supreme Court order that had declared its West Bank settlement at Elon Moreh illegal. Begin had grown despondent over the problem because he feared that if troops were ordered to evict the settlers forcibly, the clash might even lead to civil war in Israel. Last week, however, Begin offered the Gush Emunim an alternate site five miles away and finally persuaded the group to relent and evacuate Elon Moreh peaceably by the end of the year.

Begin managed to defer, if not resolve, his other crisis with a calculated political gamble. At issue is a quarrel within his own shaky Likud coalition over proposed changes in Israel's liberal abortion law; the Orthodox religious Agudat Israel Party wants tougher legislation. Faced with Agudat's threat to pull out of the coalition, which would reduce his parliamentary majority to a single vote in the 120-member Knesset, Begin scheduled a vote of confidence on the abortion issue for next week. If he loses, Begin will have to resign and call an election. But he is gambling that pro-abortion defectors from his coalition will come back to the fold when the fate of the government is on the line. As Begin mused last week: "Wouldn't it be ironic if the government that brought peace with Egypt should fall over an issue like abortion?"

Begin appeared to be taking another gamble with an economic austerity program launched by Finance Minister Yigael Hurvitz. In an attempt to curtail Israel's 100% inflation, Hurvitz has ruthlessly eliminated subsidies on basic foodstuffs, frozen state development programs until 1981, and proposed to slash $200 million from the sacrosanct Israeli defense budget. The Finance Minister also wiped out 10% of the government's limousine fleet and pledged an all-out battle against upper-income tax evasion. Although there were protest marches in Israel's major cities after the subsidy cuts were announced, Begin is hoping that the attack on the rich will placate the lower-income Israelis, who form the government's main base of support.

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