2 Right-Wing Israeli Parties Join Forces to Take on Peres

The date of the election has yet to be announced, but Israel’s campaign season got off to a surprising start Monday as the leader of the center-right Likud Party announced that his followers will join forces with a far-right nationalist party in an effort to unseat Prime Minister Shimon Peres.

The move seemed intended to demonstrate that the right, which splintered into many small, competing parties before the 1992 elections and lost to Peres’ center-left Labor Party, is capable of uniting in a last-ditch effort to slow peacemaking efforts with the Palestinians and Syria.

Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu said that he and Tsomet Party leader Rafael Eitan, a former army chief of staff, agreed to field a single list of candidates. Tsomet, which now has five seats in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, was guaranteed eight seats on the combined list.

Eitan, in return, promised not to run for prime minister in the nation’s first direct elections for that office and to publicly endorse Netanyahu’s candidacy. The two parties will maintain separate political platforms.

The move stunned the political community, which has been gripped by election fever since Peres began hinting a few days ago that early elections are inevitable. Elections are scheduled for Oct. 29, but Peres is expected to announce soon that they will be moved up to May.

Peres has cited the need to make tough decisions on economic reform and the fact that campaigning is already underway as reasons for moving up the elections. But his opponents say he is eager to take advantage of his popularity since the Nov. 4 assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by a right-wing Jewish law student.

Netanyahu needed to make a dramatic gesture to change the post-assassination dynamics of Israeli politics, analysts said Monday. He has come under fire from commentators on the right and left in recent days as he pushed Likud leaders to modify the party’s platform and recognize the Israeli-Palestinian peace accord as an irreversible fact.

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Likud officially still rejects the Oslo accord that Israel signed with the Palestine Liberation Organization in September 1993, and the party still refuses to deal with the PLO or Yasser Arafat, the head of the self-governing Palestinian Authority.

“We were against these agreements; we thought that they were bad,” Netanyahu said Monday night, appearing on the “Dan Shilon” television interview show. “I still think that they are bad now. But the agreements created certain facts on the ground, and I can’t ignore those facts.”

Given the beating he was taking in the media--and Peres’ 15- to 20-point lead on him in the polls--Netanyahu needed to show leadership and boldness, pollster Rafi Smith said Monday.

Joining forces with the hard-line Tsomet “gave Netanyahu legitimacy as a right-wing leader,” said Smith, who has in the past accurately predicted the outcome of Israeli elections. “Our polls show that Netanyahu has a problem being perceived as a leader. With this move, he is trying to change the dynamics of this campaign and the public perception of him.”

A snap poll conducted by Channel 2 television showed that Netanyahu did enjoy an immediate boost in popularity as a result of the partnership with Tsomet.

According to the telephone poll, Netanyahu would capture 42% of the votes and Peres would garner 46% with Eitan out of the race. With Eitan running, the poll showed Netanyahu capturing only 30.9% of the vote.

But the same poll showed that a combined Likud-Tsomet list of candidates would not capture any more seats than the two parties could count on running separately. That left Netanyahu open to charges within Likud that he was sacrificing the party’s interests for his own.

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Both Likud and Labor have said that the elections are crucial because the government that emerges will be responsible for negotiating the future of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Jerusalem with the Palestinians and a peace deal with Syria.

Both sides are already staking out their positions with the electorate. Labor is portraying itself as the party that brought peace and prosperity to Israel and produced a martyr in Rabin. Likud is touting itself as the only obstacle standing between Israelis and the creation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip with Jerusalem as its capital.