Campaigning American Style Woos Israelis

Three sharpshooters pace the rooftop of an apartment building overlooking the neighborhood basketball court where Prime Minister Shimon Peres makes his entrance for an afternoon campaign rally. “Shi-mon! Shi-mon!” youthful supporters call to him, but when the candidate takes a sudden turn into the crowd, anxious secret service agents bolt in front of him.

Across town, challenger Benjamin Netanyahu arrives at an after-school center for disadvantaged children wearing an elegant black suit and thick face makeup from the filming of his television commercials. He lifts a small boy up for photographers and smiles winningly as the kids shout his nickname: “Bibi! Bibi!”

Tight security, flashy television ads and personality politics. Israel’s first-ever direct vote for a national leader on Wednesday is, in the eyes of many people here, Israel’s first American-style election.

Security measures imposed after the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin last year have put an unprecedented distance between Israeli politicians and the public. Fear of an attack, and an unwillingness on the part of Israelis to jump through security hoops, prompted the leading Labor and Likud parties to cancel their final rallies.

So more and more Israelis are experiencing the campaign as Americans do theirs--from afar, through television.

Israelis also have adopted the seemingly American penchant for selecting a candidate who is perceived as the “lesser of two evils,” a view summed up by a cartoon in the Jerusalem weekly Kol Hair that showed a man holding his nose with one hand and casting a ballot with the other.

Although they are very different men with sharply contrasting political views, Peres and Netanyahu have one thing in common: They are perceived as too slick, too quick with the turn of a phrase for an Israeli electorate that prefers a rougher, roll-up-your-sleeves kind of guy.

Like American politicians, Peres and Netanyahu make much of the fact that they have penned books. But Israelis liked the unpolished awkwardness of Rabin and the stubborn silence of former Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir.

“Israelis want a man of action, not a man of words,” said Yaron Ezrahi, a political scientist and senior fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute.

“Peres has always suffered from his eloquence,” Ezrahi said. And Netanyahu comes across as “a big talker . . . an actor in the production of Netanyahu.”

Campaigning on the issues of peace and security, the two candidates have expended much energy blurring their political differences in order to attract the undecided and presumably centrist voters who will determine the outcome of a race that is too close to call.

With Israeli flags and blue-and-white print, Labor and Likud posters are so similar that voters must look twice to see whose is whose. In television ads, the 73-year-old Peres surrounds himself with adoring youths, while the younger and less experienced Netanyahu positions himself next to a flag, a heavy desk and other symbols of statesmanship.

Peres, who shared a Nobel Peace Prize with Rabin and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat for the 1993 Israeli-Palestinian peace accords, donned a leather jacket to talk tough during “Operation Grapes of Wrath,” the recent military offensive to subdue Islamic fundamentalist guerrillas in Lebanon. Netanyahu, who still views the Palestinian leadership as terrorists, says he will honor the accords, and he adopted the dove of peace for his television ads.

This is because the question for most Israelis is not whether to continue with the peace process--that is a given--but which of the two men should be entrusted with carrying out final negotiations with the Palestinians over the next three years and, possibly, separate negotiations with neighboring Syria.

The so-called undecided voters--about 8% of the electorate--seem to find both men lacking on the issue of trust. One Israeli trying to describe Peres explained, “I never know if what he thinks is what he says and if what he says is what he is going to do.”

On the other hand, wrote Yediot Aharonot newspaper columnist Nahum Barnea, many Israelis suspect that Netanyahu “is like the library which was built to serve as background to the monologues with which he begins his television advertisements. The books look like books. The wood really looks wooden. The riddle is whether or not everything is hollow.”

The vast majority of voters have already made up their minds about the two men and their radically different visions for pursuing peace and fighting terrorism. Few Israelis are blase about either candidate. Few buy the posters that seem to be selling the same thing.

Peres has been around a generation longer than the state of Israel, to which he has dedicated most of his adult life. He has served as prime minister, defense minister, foreign minister and finance minister, and is responsible for the development of Israel’s nuclear capability.

Yet in a country where men and women are obliged to serve in the army, Peres’ credibility on security suffers from the fact that he never risked his neck in combat. He also is fighting a reputation as a perennial loser. Having led the Labor Party to defeat in national elections four times, Peres is campaigning feverishly to prove that he can be a winner.

Peres inherited the prime minister’s office from Rabin, who was murdered by a Jewish law student opposed to his land-for-peace deal with the Palestinians. Peres held such a huge lead over Netanyahu after the assassination that he moved up the election date, but that gap quickly closed following a wave of suicide bombings by Islamic extremists in February and March that took more than 60 lives.

Since the bombings, Peres has tempered his vision of a new Middle East of integration and full cooperation between Israel and the Palestinians and moved toward the view held more widely in Israel that what is needed is separation of the two peoples.

Peres is aware that some Israelis fear that his age is pushing him to move too quickly to complete his mark on history and that he will make too many concessions without guaranteeing Israel’s security. In response, he has promised to hold referendums on a final agreement with the Palestinians and any accord with the Syrians.

Ahead of negotiations for such pacts, Peres and Netanyahu start from very different positions.

The Labor government has put a halt to the expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, a predominantly Palestinian area that Israel captured from Jordan in the 1967 Middle East War. In the so-called final status talks, Peres’ negotiators say, they would seek the annexation of the largest settlement blocs and offer the other settlers incentives to move. Those who declined would be guaranteed the right to remain in Palestinian-ruled territory.

Peres says he would prefer that the West Bank be part of a Palestinian confederation with Jordan, but his Labor Party removed its objection to Palestinian statehood from its platform this year, and statehood will be a likely outcome if Peres is elected.

The 46-year-old Netanyahu believes the peace accords have gone too far already, although he has promised to honor Israel’s international commitments and to recognize “certain facts on the ground” created by the agreements. Netanyahu and his hard-line allies from the Gesher and Tsomet parties advocate further settlement in the West Bank, which they refer to by its biblical name, Judea and Samaria.

The status quo of limited Palestinian autonomy is a final solution in Netanyahu’s view. His Likud Party platform says that “under no circumstances” would a Palestinian state be established, and he says Palestinians will never have control over foreign affairs or security.

He threatens to send Israeli soldiers and intelligence agents back into West Bank cities if Arafat does not control terrorism, and says that threat alone should be sufficient to force Arafat to comply.

“I intend to let the IDF [army] and its officers have the freedom to act in all places,” Netanyahu told Yediot Aharonot’s Shimon Shiffer.

The underlying assumption is that Arafat cannot be trusted. While Peres views Arafat as a reliable partner in peace, Netanyahu started the campaign saying he would never meet with Arafat. He later changed his mind, saying he would meet Arafat if “compelled” by affairs of state.

Such flip-flops have fed Israeli doubts about Netanyahu’s character.

A graduate in business administration of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Netanyahu has served in the Israeli Embassy in Washington and as Israeli ambassador to the United Nations. He is best known in the United States for his measured TV briefings on the situation in Israel during the Persian Gulf War.

Israelis, however, note that Netanyahu has been married three times and, when threatened by a member of his own party with videotaped evidence, admitted committing adultery. He was a captain in an elite infantry unit, has a sexy smile and is master of the television sound bite. But to many Israelis, those are signs that he is either superficial or a good salesman--not necessarily a capable leader.

Netanyahu’s American advertising consultant, Arthur Finkelstein, has tried to make the candidate look like a strong statesman while portraying Peres as a man incapable of protecting national security. Playing on Israeli fears, the opposition ads show pictures of bombed buses and insist that Peres will redivide Jerusalem in final negotiations with the Palestinians.

The Palestinians want their capital in East Jerusalem, which Israel also captured in the 1967 Middle East War. Peres says Jerusalem is nonnegotiable, that no Israeli is willing to see the city redivided.

“Jerusalem has never been the capital of another nation, nor have we ever had any capital but Jerusalem,” Peres said in a speech on the day marking the city’s reunification. “Everyone wishing to pray in Jerusalem shall be welcomed, but no one shall be able to divide the city or dismantle its unity.”

In U.S.-backed negotiations with Syria, however, Peres has all but stated that he would be willing to give up the Golan Heights for a comprehensive peace agreement with Syrian President Hafez Assad. He believes that Assad is ready to deal and that regional peace depends on an agreement with Syria.

Netanyahu believes Israel must remain in the Golan, also captured in 1967, and that Syria “is not ripe” for an agreement.

The candidates offer a distinct choice, but on the campaign trail it is clear that the decision is not a simple one for Israeli voters.

“I was always a Likudnik, but now I have a problem. I do not trust Bibi,” said Liora, a 31-year-old vendor in Jerusalem who gave just her first name. “I am for peace, but it is being made too fast, and the price we are paying is frightening. I fear in the end we will be left with nothing.”

Difficult decisions for a divided country. In the Musrara neighborhood basketball court where Peres campaigned, several children wore “Bibi” stickers, while in the Katamon neighborhood, kids sang the “Song of Peace” to Netanyahu under a picture of Labor’s Rabin. Their parents want an end to terrorism but understand that neither candidate can guarantee American-style peace in the Middle East any time soon.