NEWS ANALYSIS : Likud Blames Its Own Missteps for Debacle : Election: Russian immigrants helped turn the tide for Rabin.

No more than a year ago, Yitzhak Shamir was considered unbeatable in the coming national elections. He was praised for his restraint during the Persian Gulf War and appeared to be the darling of Russian immigrants flooding the country, who would be able to vote for the first time.

All that changed, however, and Shamir was ousted Tuesday in the balloting, an event Israeli commentators labeled a political upheaval. The swing from his right-wing Likud Party to rival Labor was enormous--and matched the reversal suffered by Labor in 1977 when it first fell from power.

On Wednesday, Likud members were saying this was an election they lost by their own missteps rather than a vote won by Labor. For its part, Labor praised its choice of candidate for prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, as a master stroke. The truth lay somewhere in between, in a milestone election that was complex and in some ways mystifying.

The Russian Jewish immigrants who once seemed to be made for Shamir votes provided Labor with a big cushion. Close to half of the newcomers cast their ballots for Labor, a turnout worth about 100,000 votes, or four seats in the Parliament.

When they began to arrive, their experience with anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union was supposed to make them fiercely nationalistic, just right for Shamir’s brand of muscular Zionism. But his government mismanaged the influx. It built houses where there were no jobs. It did almost nothing to create work for the relatively skilled population of 300,000 (even the house-building jobs went to others: Arab laborers were recruited for the work).

By spring of this year, anger had built up among the newcomers, and some expressed regret that they had come to Israel. The numbers fleeing the Soviet Union for Israel, which once totaled upward of 20,000 each month, dropped to fewer than 3,000 a month. More were seeking refuge in the United States than in Israel.

There seemed also to be a middle-class backlash, although this is harder to gauge. The economy, in per capita terms, stopped growing. The row with the United States over loan guarantees made businessmen uneasy. Persistent tales of Likud’s squandering of public funds upset taxpayers, who wondered whether they would have to pay more to cover welfare expenses for the immigrants once the election was over.

An indication of the shift came Tuesday night when, for a spell, returns from small towns seemed to favor Likud. Party headquarters in Tel Aviv remained quiet; votes from cities such as Haifa and Tel Aviv were yet to come in, and no one expected Labor to pick up much support.

But then, as the other returns appeared, the vote began to turn. One of the surprise factors was the vote of the Sephardim, the so-called Oriental Jews, a bedrock Likud constituency that had reason to harbor resentments against old Labor governments for treating them badly during their own immigration to Israel from North Africa and elsewhere in the Middle East.

In this election, however, there were differences. Even before the Russian influx, unemployment in some Oriental Jewish areas had reached 10% and higher. And for the first time, pro-Labor propaganda hung freely from window sills in modest neighborhoods like Bat Yam and the Hatikva quarter of Tel Aviv. Likud revealed its worries by running last-minute television ads imploring those voters not to flee to Labor or to rightist parties competing with Likud for their votes.

Rabin aggressively sought them out. He made his last campaign appearance in Hatikva, keeping Likud on the defensive until the end.

Neither the Russian immigrants nor the middle class nor the disadvantaged Oriental Jewish voters seemed swayed by Shamir’s priority item: building settlements. In the end, the prime minister realized that the issue was a liability and virtually erased it from his campaign propaganda.

For all their campaign problems, Likud officials are convinced that they could have recovered were it not for party infighting among potential successors to the aging Shamir. In post-election comments, one such aspirant, Benjamin Netanyahu, focused on the party divisions as the cause for defeat. “What Labor did was take advantage of the internal problems in Likud and tell the public, ‘Look, we have mostly the same positions they do, without the same problems.’ ”

The leakage of Oriental Jewish support was probably exacerbated by one particular case of internal feuding. David Levy, the foreign minister, complained that he was being robbed of a chance to succeed Shamir because of his Moroccan heritage. Early on the campaign trail, Shamir would hear Moroccans scream insults at him.

Of the votes lost by Likud, some undoubtedly went rightward--to the Tsomet party, which campaigned on a clean government platform, and to the Sephardic religious party, known as Shas. Wherever they went, they helped hold Likud down to such a small share of Knesset seats--32--that the party can hardly claim to be a candidate to join Labor in a power-sharing government.

Labor dates the reversal of its fortunes to last winter’s primary, the first held by an Israeli party to choose a candidate for prime minister. The system brought two benefits to Labor. First, it made the party appear an epitome of decorum compared with Likud, which waged its leadership fight in back rooms and on a noisy convention floor.

In addition, the primary produced Rabin, a colorless leader who nonetheless provided Labor with a needed change of image.

In the primary, Rabin defeated Shimon Peres, the party head who had been unable to lead Labor to victory in four straight elections. Peres, considered an able administrator, was nonetheless saddled with a sleazy image.

Rabin, on the other hand, with his slow drawl and grave demeanor, came across as straightforward if colorless. His candid answers to questions about an attack of nerves he suffered on the eve of the 1967 Middle East War, when he was chief of staff, brought him sympathy even from Likud officials. Likud attacks on his alleged drinking habits caused some voters to consider him a victim of dirty tricks.

More important, perhaps, his military history made him attractive to security-conscious voters. Whatever his state of mind as the 1967 war approached, he was able to lead Israel to a swift victory. Labor produced a speech by Likud Prime Minister Menachem Begin praising Rabin for his role in the daring Entebbe rescue of Israeli hostages in 1976. His offer of self-rule to the Palestinians seemed to scare only those totally opposed to peace talks. His pledge to repair relations with the United States was soothing. (Shamir denied there was a problem.)

Likud officials paid him the indirect compliment of expressing a willingness to join him in a coalition government. If Likud can live with him, some Israelis reasoned, why not wavering voters?

“Rabin appeared almost as a hawkish prince of the right and managed to blur his party’s differences with Likud and woo a great segment of the electorate away from them,” wrote Sarah Honig, a pro-Likud commentator in a post-election newspaper column.

Rabin and Labor ushered in an era of personalized campaigning. Labor advertised the choice as “Labor under Rabin,” not just Labor. It was, observers said, the Americanization of Israeli politics. And it worked; Labor won 47 seats, nine more than it held in the defunct session of Parliament.

This is the second tidal change of Israeli voting habits in the country’s 44-year history. The other was in 1977, when Likud ousted Labor.