On to the Political Wars

It had been rumored for months, but only last week did the Israeli government itself leak the news: Lieut. General Haim Bar-Lev, 47, chief of staff for the past four years and the man whose name was given to the Bar-Lev Line of Israeli fortifications along the Suez Canal, will leave the army at the end of the year in line with an Israeli tradition of generals retiring before they are 50. Bar-Lev's successor: his oldest friend and current second-in-command as chief of operations, Major General David ("Dado") Elazar, 46.

On the surface a simple hand-over of command, the move injects a new and complicating element into Israel's already tangled politics. Barring another war, Bar-Lev will step into the Cabinet, probably in April, to take up the key economic portfolio of Minister of Commerce and Industry. He will also step into an increasingly bitter campaign for the succession to Premier Golda Meir.

The Israeli armed forces may hardly notice the change. Friends since childhood days in Yugoslavia, Bar-Lev and Elazar confounded the Egyptians during the 1948 war by talking over their field radios in Serbo-Croatian. Bar-Lev, a tank man, refined the Israeli army's blitzkrieg tactics as chief of the armored corps between 1957 and 1961. That task was continued by his successor in the post, Elazar, who later led the attack on the Golan Heights during the 1967 Six-Day War.

Bar-Lev, prematurely silver-haired, courtly and softspoken, was chief of operations during the Six-Day War, and later reshaped the Israeli army for the static "war of attrition" proclaimed by Egypt's late President Gamal Abdel Nasser in March 1969. Bar-Lev had his answer ready: a 100-mile line of forts, dug into the Suez sand, which weathered massive artillery assaults until the two sides agreed on a cease-fire last year. Meanwhile Elazar, also a monumentally calm commander, was backing up his chief by subduing the Arab fedayeen in the occupied territories.

Hot Skirmishing. In the Cabinet, Bar-Lev, a thoroughly apolitical general who does not belong to any party, will inescapably find himself in the middle of hot political skirmishing as the 1973 elections approach. By that time, Premier Golda Meir will be past 75. Since she recently told a meeting of Labor Party chiefs that politicians should retire at that age, she is not expected to stand for reelection. At present, the warmest rivalry for her post is between Defense Minister Moshe Dayan and Finance Minister Pinhas Sapir, who counts on Bar-Lev as a Cabinet counterweight to Dayan. Bar-Lev is being talked about as a possible candidate for the Defense job--and even, in a decade or so, for the premiership.

While Dayan is still the most popular politician in Israel, Sapir has the party organization sewed up. At the moment he commands the center of attention, since Israel's major problem is not military but economic. Facing severe austerity in 1972, Sapir has announced plans to cut back on benefits for immigrants and on the elaborate pageantry planned for Israel's 25th anniversary celebrations. The Treasury is so hard up that Israel was even ready to abandon its claim to the 50 Mirage aircraft held in France under an arms embargo imposed by Charles de Gaulle at the start of the 1967 war. Paris announced last week that it would buy back the planes, which originally cost $67 million.

Decisive Year. With the front lines quiet for 15 months, Sapir has been pressing Dayan to whittle down the defense budget from this year's $1.5 billion. Dayan grudgingly cut $120 million from his 1972 budget. But then Sapir struck again. He told the Cabinet that the government would have to set a limit of $3.9 billion for spending by all departments or risk disastrous inflation. That would mean a 40% cut for every other ministry unless Dayan gave up even more. In effect Sapir pitted the entire Cabinet against Dayan.

Dayan earlier warned armored-corps officers that, with negotiations over a Suez Canal settlement at an impasse and with Egypt's President Anwar Sadat making threatening noises, "1972 will be a decisive year." Last week he declared: "I won't give my hand to cutting 100 or 200 tanks from our forces." His aides meanwhile put out stories that Israel would have to curtail purchases of bombs and shells and construction of forts if the defense budget were cut too sharply. Bar-Lev was no help to Dayan. He allowed that, if the cease-fire continued, reserve duty could be reduced, resulting in considerable savings.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.