By Graham Usher Barely two weeks old, the Israeli election campaign has already reverted to type -- with most contenders radiating unusual moderation vis à vis peace with the Palestinians and absolute vitriol vis à vis their political opponents. The tone was set by Binyamin Netanyahu's Likud Party. Last week, Likud posters were plastered across the country showing the smiling face of Labour party leader, Ehud Barak, above the slogan, "Barak flees from truth and responsibility". The phrase "flees from" is a reference to an old, unsubstantiated charge that Barak, while Israel's chief of staff, once fled from the scene of a lethal army training accident rather than tend to the wounded. Barak gave as good as he got. Netanyahu was less "good for the Jews", he said, than "good for Sheikh Ahmed Yassin", the Hamas leader Netanyahu was forced to free following a botched Mossad assassination hit on another Hamas leader, Khalid Mishaal, in Amman in August 1997. Even Israel's most recent prime ministerial hopeful -- former army chief of staff, Amnon Lipkin Shahak -- wanted to get in on the recriminations. Announcing his candidacy on 6 January, he declared that "Netanyahu was dangerous for Israel" -- a danger that apparently did not prevent Shahak from quietly serving under him for most of the last three years. In a series of interviews and press conferences, Shahak has spent much of the last week explaining why Israelis should vote for him rather than the leaders of the established Labour and Likud parties. His main argument is that only he can heal the rifts that divide Israeli society, where "the secular is against the religious, the Ashkenazim are against the Sephardim" and "the Right is against the Left". Israel, says Shahak, "is a country at war -- at war with itself". The problem is that Shahak is ill-cast in the role of healer. Ashkenazi and secular, he is a product of Israel's old political and military elite that many Israelis see as out of touch with a country where the growing constituencies are neither secular nor European in descent but religious, Sephardi or the 800,000 or so new immigrants from the ex-Soviet Union. Neither is Shahak helped by his policies, which to most observers appear identical to those of Barak's Labour Party. At his launch meeting, Shahak did not refute the idea of a Palestinian state "at the end of the road" but only as the result of the final status negotiations between the two sides. He also implied that he could "compromise" on the occupied Golan Heights if this were needed to reach a full-fledged peace treaty with Syria. But he ruled out any unilateral Israeli withdrawal from south Lebanon or that there could be any shared sovereignty with the Palestinians in Jerusalem. This is virtually the same as Barak's election platform, and it is difficult to see how in running against each other the two men will help anyone other than Netanyahu. This appears to be Netanyahu's reading, who has focused most of his fire on Barak rather than the new threat posed by Shahak. More immediately still, Netanyahu needs to ensure that he will be Likud's nominee for prime minister, due to be decided next month. So far, there are four candidates running against Netanyahu for the leadership of Likud, including former head of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee, Uzi Landau, and Netanyahu's political mentor, former defence and foreign minister, Moshe Arens. Declaring his candidacy on 11 January, Arens said he was standing against Netanyahu to "stop the haemorrhaging of our top people from the party" since, without this, "our chances of winning the elections are not good." Arens has been alarmed by the defection from Likud of such historic figures as Benny Begin, who has formed a renewed Herut Party based on the creed of a Greater Israel, and Netanyahu's former finance minister, Dan Meridor, who is in daily negotiations with Shahak about creating a new centre party in Israeli politics. Both Begin and Meridor left Likud in protest at Netanyahu's autocratic leadership style and both are expected to draw away votes from Netanyahu in the prime ministerial contest. Given such internal dissension, many Israeli commentators have written off Netanyahu as a serious candidate for reelection on 17 May. Others are less sure. Although undoubtedly bruised by the collapse of his coalition, Netanyahu is still registering between 38 and 40 per cent in opinion polls, five points behind Barak, but with a colossal 15 per cent of voters yet to decide. He also commands the loyalty of many Likud party activists, enough probably to ward off the challenges of Arens and Landau. Netanyahu also has support outside Likud, and from an entirely expected quarter. On 3 January, Netanyahu's former General-Director of the prime minister's office, Avigdor Liberman, announced the formation of a new party based on Israel's Russian immigrant community. In a speech that was extreme even by Israeli standards, Liberman declared war on Israel's political and legal establishment and called for a return to "iron fist" policies in Lebanon and the West Bank. He also said his aim was to build a coalition made up of Russians, Ultra Orthodox Jews and the poor against the "liberal elites" that rule Israeli society. Finally, he declared his party's support for Netanyahu as Israel's next prime minister. It is too soon to assess Liberman's electoral prospects. But very few observers dispute that the formation of a Russian party has the tacit blessing of Netanyahu, or that it was precisely Liberman's projected "coalition of outcasts" that brought Netanyahu to victory in 1996. They may do so again in 1999, with the scenario that the future of the peace process will be every bit as grim as its past.
