Peres Seizes on Popularity, Calls Early Vote

Evoking the memory of slain Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and appealing to opposition parties to ensure a nonviolent campaign, Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres told the nation Sunday that parliamentary elections will be moved up from October to late May.

Acknowledging that his decision was one of the worst-kept secrets of Israeli politics for the past few weeks, a confident-looking Peres opened a televised news conference in his office by saying that “this equivocation has ended, and I’ll get right to the bottom line. I have decided to advance the elections to the earliest date that is possible, according to the law.”

Peres promised that his Labor Party will conduct a “restrained” campaign and appealed to the opposition to do the same. He said he hopes that Israel will show it has “regained its former self” and put an end to political violence in the wake of Rabin’s Nov. 4 slaying by Yigal Amir, a right-wing Jewish law student opposed to Rabin’s peace initiatives with Palestinians.

“I call for an elections period which will be short, just. The horrid words ‘traitor,’ ‘murderer’ and the like must not be said again,” Peres said. “Differences of opinion . . . should be expressed to the people in a direct, cultured way.”

Peres spoke emotionally of the shock that he and the nation felt the night that Rabin was gunned down and of how he resisted calls within his party to hold elections immediately after the assassination. He said his first task has been to heal the rift that the assassination caused between left and right in Israel.

“I do not feel that the period of restabilization has been completed,” he said. But he added that Labor has made important gains in making peace with Israel’s neighbors and that the time has come to seek a new mandate for himself and his government, which holds a narrow and tenuous majority in the 120-seat Knesset, or parliament.

Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu, who held a rival news conference as Peres spoke, said his party supports holding early elections. “The time has come to give the Israeli public a choice,” he said.

But Netanyahu and other Likud leaders blasted Peres for what they said is his cynical exploitation of the nation’s grief over Rabin’s slaying.

In the wake of Rabin’s assassination, public opinion polls have consistently shown an erosion in support for Likud--which opposes the rise of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip--and other right-wing parties and an increase in support for the government’s peacemaking efforts with the Palestinians.

Likud leaders also said Peres decided to hold early elections because his efforts to speed up peacemaking efforts with Syria have yielded no tangible results.

“The public ought to know that Labor’s hands in this matter aren’t clean,” said Moshe Katsav, head of the Likud faction in the Knesset, in an interview Sunday with the newspaper Haaretz. “If [Syrian] President [Hafez] Assad had agreed to have his photo taken with Peres, then there would have been no early elections.”

Peres insisted Sunday night that negotiations with Syria will continue, although he acknowledged that “it has become clear to us that a number of subjects . . . require a lot of time. We decided thus not to conduct the negotiations with Syria amid pressures about election dates.”

U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher has made 17 trips to the region, trying to broker a deal between Israel and Syria. Christopher’s last trip was just last week, and diplomatic sources said Peres told him then that he had decided to call early elections.

Labor faction head Raanan Cohen said he will introduce a bill, possibly as early as today, calling for the Knesset to be dissolved and for elections to be held May 28, although Peres said he prefers May 21 or May 24.

Seventy members have said they will support early elections, making passage of Cohen’s bill a near certainty.

Peres told his ministers Sunday that the nation has been in the midst of an unannounced election campaign for weeks, as pressure mounted on him from within his party to call early elections. He said it would be too costly and exhausting for the campaign to continue for nine months.

Labor leaders have been pushing Peres hard to move up elections since Rabin’s assassination. Initially, he resisted and said publicly that he would use each remaining day of his government’s four-year term to broaden Israel’s peacemaking efforts in the region.

But aides acknowledge that Peres has indeed been frustrated by Syria’s reluctance to speed up talks on exchanging the strategic Golan Heights that Israel captured from Syria during the 1967 Middle East War for a peace treaty that would normalize relations between the two archenemies.

Peres also was persuaded by advisors who warned that his popularity had probably peaked in recent weeks.

For the first time, Israelis in these elections will directly elect their prime minister, in addition to voting for a list of candidates for parliament.

A Gallup poll published by the Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot on Friday showed Peres winning the race for prime minister by capturing 50% of the vote compared with 30% for Netanyahu, his nearest rival.