Longtime Meretz leader and Oslo Peace Accords backer Dr. Yossi Beilin announced on Wednesday that he is quitting politics to go into business. Nationalists' sighs of relief may be short-lived when they learn that his replacement is a hareidi religious woman with the same views as her predecessor.
Knesset Member Beilin served as leader of Meretz after he broke off five years ago with the Labor party, which he had joined in 1977. He was so fond of Labor and of its veteran leader Shimon Peres that Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin called him "Peres's poodle."
Beilin turned to Meretz after he quit Labor in 2003, and was elected as chairman. He failed to bring the party more than five seats in the current Knesset and was recently replaced by Knesset Member Chaim Oron.
In the early 1990s, he supported secret and illegal negotiations with former Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) leader Yasser Arafat, paving the way for the Oslo Peace Accords that blew up into the Oslo War in 2000.
Along the way, he worked with Mahmoud Abbas, now chairman of the Palestinian Authority, and later teamed up with the PA's Yasser Abed Rabbo to form the Geneva Accord, which essentially is the same agreement that the Olmert administration has proposed. It calls for a new Arab state on virtually all of Judea, Samaria and Gaza, in return for the PAs' recognition of the State of Israel as the homeland of Jews. Jewish population centers in Judea and Samaria would be retained by Israel in exchange for land in which Israeli-Arabs live.
Replacing Beilin in the Knesset is Dr. Tzvia Greenfield, a resident of the hareidi-religious Jerusalem neighborhood of Har Nof. Representing a small minority of hareidi Israelis who are pro-Arab, she is a long-time activist for surrendering Israeli land to the PA.
She also heads the Machon Mifne Institute, which in the past has received $200,000 for the purpose of "encouraging the settlements and religious communities in Israel to change their prevailing negative attitudes towards peace and democracy." The EU grant document described the national religious community as "democracy-suspicious" and "non-educated."
Although Dr. Greenfield is part of the hareidi-religious community, she informed the EU that Machon Mifne "enjoys a unique position among the right-wing nationalistic audiences."
Dr. Greenfield has written a book that charges hareidi-religious Jews with lining up with nationalists as a way to bring about the demise of Zionist Israel.