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Party Time

There are 25 political parties on the ballot, advocating everything
from cab drivers' rights to Transcendental Meditation.

LARRY DERFNER

Israel Correspondent

erusalem - Of all the things that can be
said against Israel's political system - it's
in perpetual deadlock, it's been hijacked by
the ultra-Orthodox, it worships seniority,
it's riven with nepotism - one thing that
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can't be said is that it's undemocratic. There are 25 po-
litical parties on the June 23 election ballot. Any voter
who says that none of the parties speaks for him is either
,- a knee-jerk nonconformist or a political misanthrope.
Besides the basic far-left, left, center-left, center-right,
' right and far-right parties, there are three Arab parties,
two Sephardi ultra-Orthodox parties, one mixed Ashke-
c nazi-Sephardi ultra-Orthodox party, and two Russian
immigrant parties. There is a women's party. There is
a cab drivers' party ("On Wheels"). There's a party for
mortgage victims, homeless and demobilized soldiers,
and a party for pensioners, immigrants and elderly. The
Picanti party is named for the sausage company owned
by the party's leader. The Natural Law party's platform
is Transcendental Meditation.

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This is a partial list.
What we have here is a menagerie of democracy, a
Middle Eastern shouk of voting choices. Anyone willing
to pay the election fee of nearly $10,000, and able to sub-
mit 1,500 signatures of verifiable Israeli voters can get a
party on the ballot. That is, if the party doesn't violate
the law against candidates who are racist or who deny
the Jewish and democratic character of the state, or whose
filing papers aren't in order.
This latter regulation doomed the candidacy of Robert
and Rochelle Manning's State of the Jews party. The
Mannings submitted 1,598 certified signatures, but the
Central Elections Committee, headed by retired Supreme
Court Judge Avraham Halima, found inconsistencies in
the Mannings' list of candidates, and disqualified them.
This finding pre-empted the committee from having
to rule on whether the Mannings, with their links to
the Kach party, were racist. (Kach and the breakaway
Kahane Chai, or Kahane Lives party, were both banned
in this election as racist.) The Mannings' filing incon-

sistencies also kept the committee from having to decide
whether prisoners could run for the Knesset. The Amer-
ican-born Mannings are in an Israeli jail, awaiting ex-
tradition to the U.S. on charges of murdering an
Arab-American activist. Some say they sought Knesset
seats to keep them out of jail since members of Knesset
cannot be extradited.
Disappointed State of the Jews supporters can always
turn to the Torah and Land party of Rabbi Moshe
Levinger, pioneer of the ultra-militant wing of the West
Bank settlers. After the start of the intifada, when his
car was stoned in Hebron, Rabbi Levinger got out and
began firing his gun at random, killing an Arab man. He
served a few months in prison for the killing. Rabbi
Levinger doesn't try to hide the deed. In his televised ad-
vertisements, the rabbi is shown walking through the
Hebron casbah carrying an Uzi submachine gun. The TV
spot ends with the rattle of gunfire.
Rabbi Levinger stands very little chance of getting into
the Knesset. A couple of larger right-wing parties, how-

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The smaller parties, particularly the religious parties, are being wooed by Prime Minister Shamir(right) and the Likud.

THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS

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