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Israeli Election

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After a bitter campaign,
consensus points to a new Israeli
prime minister next week.

ERIC SILVER
Israel Correspondent

Natan Sharansky, minister of trade and industry, right, defeated opposition
leader Ehud Barak in a seven-move chess game in Tel Aviv Sunday

Jemsalem

A

s Israel's national election campaign came down to
its final days this week, incumbent Prime ivtinister
Binyamin Netanyahu of the Likud Party and
Labor Party challenger Ehud Barak seemed locked
in a close race, while most of Israel was predicting there
would be a new team at the helm come next week.
The elections, originally scheduled for next year, came
early after key coalition partners yanked their support
from Netanyahu. They felt his signing a "land-for-peace"
deal in November violated Likud's historic claim for Israeli
sovereignty over all of the West Bank, or the biblical heart-
land known as Judea and Samaria.
The voting on Monday, May 17, could give an out-
right popular-vote majority to Barak, avoiding a June 1
runoff election. Center Party leader
Yitzhak Mordechai was under pres-
sure to get out of the campaign and
assure Barak a first-round victory. The
two other candidates — Ze'ev
"Benny" Begin, the head of the right-
wing National Unity bloc, and Azmi
Beshara, the first Israeli Arab to seek
the premiership, said they might get
-
out if Mordechai did.
The campaign was overwhelmingly one of personality
rather than issue. Neither Netayahu nor Barak would be
specific about his intentions for topics such as the peace
process, security with Lebanon, the ailing economy, water
resources or religious pluralism. That political strategy will
give the winner maximum flexibility in forming a 61-mem-
ber ruling coalition in the Knesset, but provides no clear-cut
mandate to move toward specific policy goals.
After a sluggish start and with the guidance of American
political consultants, Barak, the former military chief of
staff; led a strategic campaign. He identified his targets —
the Russian immigrants, the disappointed, mainly Sephardi,
instinctive Likud voters in the depressed "development"
towns and big city slums — and pounded away.
By contrast, Netanyahu, under the influence of his own
American consultants, constantly sought a sound bite to

CENTER on page 26

5/14
1999

\ AA

ankees Aghast

Americans from the Detroit area find the election dismaying.

DAVID JOSEPH
Special to the Jewish News

Jerusalem

le

ven before the official election results
are in, Idele Ross is sure of one thing:
This election has been the nastiest, dirt-
iest, least issue-oriented election in the
nation's 51-year history.
"This whole election has been a headline-grabbing
and macho game of `mine is bigger than yours,"' said
Ross, a Detroit native and former Livonia resident
who works as a broadcast journalist for Voice of Israel
radio. Now that there are direct elections for prime
minister — like America — the campaigns have
become more personal and more aggressive."
In interviews this week, Americans from the
Detroit area said they were disturbed by the lack
of civility in the campaign, where words like
"liar," "traitor," "dangerous," "Godless," "leeches"
and "rabble" are used casually in the Israeli media
to describe candidates, parties and constituents.
The Americans said they could not tell whether
the sound-bite, slogan-slinging slop was yet anoth-
er American product finding its niche in Israel, or
whether it was home-grown.
Probably a little of both, said Marilyn Grant, a
Detroit native who lives in Netanya. "The intensity
of Israeli elections, where everyone is involved, every-
one has an opinion and more than 80 percent of the
country comes out to vote is pure Israel," she noted.
Grant's husband, Murray, is president of the
University of Michigan Club in Israel, and active
in politics in the United States and Israel. She
counts herself a firm supporter of Labor and its
prime ministerial candidate Ehud Barak.

While intensity and high voter turn-out is good,
she said, she despairs at what she sees as an American
influence creeping into Israeli political life.
"When I came to Israel in 1971," Grant
remembers, "elections were about the issues.
Candidates would talk to you (on television) for
15 minutes and explain what they believed in and
why. Today, with all these 15-second commercial
jingles on TV, they're just selling Jell-o.
"Where is the debate? Where are the issues?"
The fragmentation of the political parties was an
eye-opener for Renee Himelhoch, a former assistant
director of the Michigan/Israel Connection who
made aliya in 1996. The proliferation of small par-
ties makes politics feel less cut-and-dried than
America's Democratic-Republican split, she noted.
"Here you have the option of picking a large
party whose views you only partially agree with or
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picking a smaller party whose views you do agree
with but whose sphere of influence is minimal."
Several noted with dismay the political posters
seen everywhere, producing a visual pollution that
America would not accept. The Americans also
noted that the common Israeli practice of tearing
down your opponent's poster before replacing it
with your own, leads to mounds of trash clutter-
ing the streets under billboards.
Dori Adelman, a New York University student L. - \
from West Bloomfield who is spending her junior
year in Israel, said she was amazed at the ubiqui-
tous nature of the election.
"Everyone is so involved," she said.
"Everywhere you look there's a 10-year-old hold-
ing a poster and trying to give a bumper sticker.
This election clearly affects people's lives here to a
much greater degree than it does in America." I I