Next Step : Restless Russians Hold Key to Israeli Election : Many immigrants are underemployed or jobless. Wielding 200,000 votes, will they turn against Likud?

Marat Berkowitz, an immigrant from Belarus, doesn’t yet know who will get his vote in the June Israeli elections, but he knows who won’t.

“No Shamir. Shamir, no!” he exclaimed when asked to discuss the vote. “Anybody but Shamir.”

Berkowitz’s emphatic response directly reflected his unhappy situation. He was eating lunch at a soup kitchen in Karmiel, a hilltop town in northern Israel, because he lacked money for three square meals a day. He has no job and no prospects, and he’s blaming the government.

About 200,000 immigrants from the former Soviet Union are eligible to vote in the pivotal elections. Their numbers--if they voted as a block, they could determine up to eight seats in the 120-member Parliament--are viewed as a bonanza for any party that can claim them. A swing of just a few seats between Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir’s Likud Party and the Labor Party, headed by challenger Yitzhak Rabin, may go a long way in deciding who will lead Israel for the next four years.

The Russians, as they are now collectively known (even if they come from such non-Russian former republics as Azerbaijan and Ukraine) have it within their power to break a long electoral deadlock in Israeli politics. Will they vote their pocketbooks and punish Shamir or will they be drawn to Likud because of its emphasis on security?

(Some say an equally important question is whether they will vote at all. Already, a controversy has broken out over charges that the incumbent government is making it difficult for the Russians to go to the polls by erecting bureaucratic hurdles.)

The two main parties are dedicating plenty of attention to the Russian voter.

Labor is pressing home the message that Shamir has botched immigration policy, wasted resources and sacrificed potential help from the United States on the altar of expansion into the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Likud is taking immigrants on tours of the West Bank to let them know that someday, they too can go out and live in the relatively wide-open spaces. (Crowded Gaza is not part of the tour.)

Polls, notoriously inaccurate in Israel, nonetheless harbor bad news for Likud: The surveys give the Labor Party more than 40% of the Russian vote to less than 15% for Shamir’s party. The rest is spread among an array of parties, with a hefty 21% undecided.

At least three parties have been formed among former Soviet citizens in hopes of creating an immigrant bloc in the Knesset, Israel’s Parliament. In Israeli coalition politics, even minor special interests can win big if they hold the balance of power between the main parties.

“One who has no voice has nothing. We have to enter the Knesset to accomplish change,” said Yuli Kosharovsky, a former “refusenik”--one who was refused permission to emigrate from the Soviet Union. Kosharovsky heads Da--meaning yes in Russian--considered the biggest and best-organized of the Russian parties.

In the past, Soviet immigrants voted proportionately like everyone else, dispersing their ballots across the political landscape. But when Soviet emigres began to arrive more than two years ago, conventional wisdom--backed by opinion polls--put them in the Likud camp.

As a distressed minority back in the former Soviet Union, they were supposed to be attracted by Likud’s big-stick policies toward the Palestinians. But the Likud, ruling in a right-wing coalition since early 1990, has by all accounts mishandled its programs for absorbing this most recent flood of Jewish immigrants--a flood totaling about 350,000 men, women and children. The immigration rate has dropped dramatically, from an average of about 12,000 a month in 1991 and 15,000 a month the year before to about 5,000 a month so far this year.

Shamir’s government built new permanent housing for the immigrants in Israeli backwaters with few jobs. Moreover, there was no program for new jobs, so Israel’s economic slowdown in recent months has left about 30% of the newcomers unemployed and a large percentage of the rest doing menial labor far below their expectations. The difficulties have overshadowed the scores of successes: the absorption of new scientists into high-tech industries, the performance of musicians in new orchestras, artists churning out paintings.

“There’s no doubt that the major complaint among immigrants is jobs,” said Simcha Dinitz, the head of the Jewish Agency, which is the quasi-governmental organization in charge of bringing immigrants to Israel.

“It’s OK to clean streets for six months if you think your future is going to be better. But if cleaning streets is your future, then there’s going to be dissatisfaction.”

President Bush declined to provide a requested package of guarantees for discount loans totaling $2 billion for this year on the grounds that Israel was using its own funds to expand housing in the West Bank and Gaza. Bush regards the settlement program as a unilateral move to torpedo compromise at Middle East peace talks.

The combined calamities have given birth to multiple scenes of hardship: Russian families in quarters even more cramped than they left behind in the former Soviet Union; Russian scavengers picking over discarded fruit in market garbage dumps; panhandlers and prostitutes; and, here in Karmiel, the humiliation of taking handouts.

“They often come saying they want to help. But it’s out of embarrassment. They really need to eat,” said Rabbi Avraham Zvi Margalit, who runs the kitchen on donated food.

Matar Berkowitz was a post office worker in Belarus. But at 55, he has been unable to find equivalent work and rejects taking a menial job. “I’m not going to sweep streets,” he said.

In words rarely heard in the early euphoric days of the immigration, Berkowitz regrets having come at all. “I blame myself. It was a mistake,” he said.

He was seconded in his bitterness by Eulena Arlovsky, a nurse and divorced mother from Kiev, Ukraine. “The most important thing a party can do is provide work and jobs. What I have seen here is unacceptable,” she said.

Arlovsky plans to vote for Labor, but the dozen lunch-mates who spoke to a reporter the other day were less sure of their ballot choices. “I don’t know what to believe. Maybe I should just not vote,” commented Yam Furmanov, 26, an unemployed ship mechanic who arrived in Israel two years ago.

Jobs and housing are not the only irritants. The religious segment of Shamir’s government fears that the Russian influx is undermining their drive to make the state more pious. Recently, the absorption minister, who is an Orthodox rabbi, banned immigrant rock groups and avant-garde artists from an outdoor fair on the grounds that they would offend religious sensibilities.

Another rabbi, Interior Minister Arye Deri, controls the voting rolls, and liberal politicians accused him of purposely leaving off immigrants. “You watch. On election day, there will be a lot of Russians standing around shrugging,” said Avishai Margalit, a political commentator.

Some political observers warn that a bloc Russian vote would create resentment in an already fractured population. “Formation of a Russian party is not positive,” argued Dinitz, who identifies with the Labor Party.

Natan Sharansky, Israel’s best-known former refusenik, flirted with forming a new party, but rejected the idea of an all-Russian group because, he said, he doesn’t believe in immigrant parties.

Kosharovsky dismisses the idea that formation of a Russian party will lead to a tribal separation of the new immigrants. “We are not trying to reserve the Russian population for us. In order to integrate, we need a government to pay attention to our needs,” he said.

He declined to say which of the two major parties he would prefer to join in a coalition, although it is clear by his criticisms that he largely blames Shamir for the immigrants’ troubles. “Shamir is a clear failure. He is insensitive and made too many mistakes,” Kosharovsky said.

While criticizing the Bush Administration’s decision to withhold guarantees for loans, Kosharovsky scored Shamir for his “provocative” management of relations with the United States.

Kosharovsky is vague on issues of defense and the possible surrender of territory for peace, even though he lives in a West Bank settlement himself. He says only that such issues should be put to a referendum. “We can’t remain frozen on these issues. They are divisive, and we have to get beyond them,” he said. The Da party hopes to pick up four seats in the election.

Injection of the Russian vote holds the potential to crack Israel’s ideological logjam of 15 years. Likud stands for intense nationalism, with the need to expand into the West Bank and Gaza as its central goal. Labor has tried to shed its old image of patronizing socialism, but like the Labor Party in Britain, the once-dominant group is dogged by its past. “We say no to any rigid ideological approach,” said Kosharovsky, who campaigned for free emigration from the Soviet Union.

When it was suggested that his call amounts to a perestroika, or restructuring, he laughed. “Yes, I suppose that’s what we need. In these conditions, we don’t have much respect for doctrine,” he said.

The ideological preoccupations of either Labor or Likud are probably far from the Russians’ minds. Unlike earlier migrations from the former Soviet Union, the newcomers escaped not for a mystical return to a Zionist homeland, but to better themselves.

“This is a middle-class immigration and wants to improve its lot. Get a house, food, a car that runs. These people are not sloganistic; they are not here to solve the problems of the Middle East. They will vote for moderation and not adventure,” Dinitz said.

Waves of Russian Immigration

1st peak* 1882-1903, 25,000

2nd* 1904-1914: 40,000

3rd* 1919-1923: 35,000

4th 1973: 33,477

5th 1979: 17,614

6th peak 1990: 183,000

Russians began arriving in Israel, the called Palestine, in 1880’s as Zionist movement took hold. Kremlin later curbed emigration and then finally opened floodgates in 1990, producing biggest wave ever.

* Note: Heavily but not exclusively Russian.

Sources: Encyclopedia Judaica, Israeli Government