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MK Yossi Sarid: "I have no need to break Guinness world records like Shimon Peres."
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| By Associated Press December 1, 2005 |
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Yossi Sarid, the acid-tongued leftist, said Thursday he would retire from Israeli politics after 31 years in the parliament.
Sarid, 65, served as head of the dovish Meretz party, resigning after a stinging electoral defeat in 2003 cut the party's strength. He said he will not run in the March 28 election for a new parliament.
He couched his announcement Thursday with a typical broadside against Shimon Peres, who at age 82 is jumping from the Labor Party to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's new Kadima.
"I don't need the seat (in parliament) to allow my voice to be heard," Sarid said. "I have no need to break Guinness world records like Shimon Peres," who has been in parliament since 1959.
The slender, balding, bespectacled Sarid is best known for slouching back in his seat in the parliament, hurling barbed comments toward speakers at the podium, his deep voice reminiscent of an old-time radio announcer -- which he was before he entered politics.
U.S. President George W. Bush did not escape Sarid's sideswipes.
Last year Sarid said Israeli intelligence knew all along that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction.
"It was known in Israel that the story that weapons of mass destruction could be activated in 45 minutes was an old wives' tale," Sarid told The Associated Press. "Israel didn't want to spoil President Bush's scenario, and it should have."
Among the first to advocate a full Israeli pullout from the West Bank and Gaza Strip in exchange for peace with the Palestinians, Sarid saw the Israeli body politic move closer to his views over the years, culminating in Israel's withdrawal from Gaza and part of Judea and Samaria in the summer at the hands of Sharon, till then a main Sarid enemy.
Sarid's toughest exchanges came with ultra-Orthodox Jewish rabbis and members of parliament. Objecting to budget allocations for ultra-Orthodox seminaries and schools, though most of their followers to not serve in the military or work for a living, Sarid said in 1998 that the secular public is tired of "carrying the ultra-Orthodox on their backs."
In 2000, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, spiritual leader of the Shas party, called Sarid "Satan," adding, "may his memory be wiped out. He must be uprooted from the seed of Israel."
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