BACKGROUND

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'LARRY DERFNER

Israel Correspondent

T

he Likud's "hard
core" of support — the
masses of deeply con-
servative, working-class
Sephardim — looked as hard
and solid as ever last week,
as the party's campaign
came to Atlit just south of
Haifa.
Even disaffected Likud-
niks here, those who are out
of work, or finding it hard to
meet the mortgage, or who
are fed up with politicians
and hopeless about ending
Arab terror and the threat of
war, weren't ready to jump
to Labor's side. Either they
won't vote at all, or they
would vote for one of the
small, far-right parties, they
said, but God forbid, they
would never vote Labor.
Recent polls in Israel show
that the Likud is beginning
to close the gap. Labor, run-
ning strictly on the personal
prestige of its leader, Yit-
zhak Rabin, remains the
most popular single party,
but single parties don't form
governments in Israel. Co-
alitions do, and polls in-
dicate that the Likud, with
its partners in the religious
and extreme-right parties,
has a good chance to win a
Knesset majority on June 23
and retain power.
Labor, whose only natural

On the campaign trail with Benny Begin,
it's clear that the Sephardi population
is still anti-Labor

ally is the left-wing Meretz
party, appears likely to fall
short.
Add to this the by-now
predictable trend among
Israeli pollsters to
underestimate the Likud's
strength on Election Day.
The phenomenon probably is
similar to the one that took
hold recently in England,
where voters complained
about the government to
pollsters all through the
campaign, but when the
moment of truth came, they
reverted to habit and cast
their ballots for the Tories.
As inherently conservative
as British voters may be,
they have nothing on
Israel's Sephardim. It was
there to see in Atlit, whose
5,000-plus people are over-
whelmingly Sephardi, and
who give about 75 percent of
their votes to the Likud.
Benny Begin was in town.
Mr. Begin, son of the late
Menachem Begin, is the
Likud's "prince of princes"
— a hugely popular figure,
who, in his first Knesset
term, has already estab-
lished himself as one of the
four or five leading con-
tenders for the party leader-
ship after the 78-year-old

Yitzhak Shamir steps down.
"He loves the Jewish peo-
ple; he has modesty, per-
sonality, intelligence, and he
doesn't hit his opponents
below the belt. I think he's
going to be the one to take
over," said Shalom Amar, a
Likud operator in Atlit who
pledges his first allegiance
to the ultimate Sephardi pol-
itician, Foreign Minister
David Levy.
Mr. Amar left out the key
element to Benny Begin's
appeal — his name.
"Our leader, Menachem
Begin, may his memory be
blessed, allowed us Sephar-
dim to hold our heads up,"

Benny Begin told
the crowd that,
despite what Labor
says, life under
Likud isn't so bad.

said Atlit Mayor Mordechai
Amar, Shalom's brother, in
introducing Benny Begin to
the crowd.
"Twenty years ago
Menachem Begin came to
Atlit, and now his son has
come." Posters of Menachem
Begin were plastered on

trucks and cars surrounding
the rally site, a parking lot
next to the local Likud
headquarters in a run-down
apartment building. On the
apartment balconies
overlooking the stage, young
mothers with babies in their
arms and barechested men
in shorts and sandals stood
watching and listening.
The Likud jingle, with its
emotional chords and chorus
of voices, played over and
over, reminding listeners of
their blood-deep ties with
the party:

"It's my home, it's my way
That's right — the Likud

The Likud's in my heart
The Likud's in my head
. . .

Mr. Begin, a bespectacled,
49-year-old former geog-
raphy professor, wore an
open-collared shirt and
spoke to the roughly 300
people in a style described by
Shalom Amar as "not above
them, and not condescending
to them, but right at their
level." He concentrated on
two themes: that a govern-
ment led by Yitzhak Rabin
would bring on a death
threat to Israel in the form of
a Palestinian state, and that

A

Don't Count The Likud Out

despite what Labor says, life
isn't so bad in Israel under
the Likud — in fact, it has
never been better:
"A few weeks ago Rabin
said in an interview that he
favored an independent Pa-
lestinian authority in Judea,
Samaria and Gaza. Such an
independent authority will
make a Palestinian state in-
evitable . . . This will be
stage one, and then they (the
Palestinians) will demand
their right of return (to
Israel proper) and we won't
agree to it, and they'll corn-
mence their acts of terror.
There won't be one day of
peace . . .
"Eighty thousand apart-
ments have been built in the
last year. It was a hard
winter, but nobody slept in
tents. In Nesher, in Ofakim,
in Beersheba, in Carmiel,
the population is doubling.
For the first time, there is a
Jewish majority in the
Galilee . . . There are many
difficulties — we have ab-
sorbed over 400,000 new
immigrants and we have
about 11 percent
unemployment — but there
are economic difficulties
throughout the world now.
Even in Canada and Den-
mark, where they do not
have to absorb so many new
people, there is also 11 per-
cent unemployment."
Mr. Begin began slowly,

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