Acrimony Intensifies in Israeli Campaign

Israeli politics is starting to look like something out of a Jerry Springer show.

With elections for prime minister and parliament still more than three months away, candidates Tuesday were flaying each other over who had the most fascist campaign slogan, who had done the most damage to the country and who was likely to do more damage in the future.

But a new height in campaign hysterics was reached during one of Israel’s foremost political talk shows. The rowdy behavior of the studio audience in a live television program featuring candidates for prime minister got so bad that the Israel Broadcasting Authority will probably ban audiences from now on.

And state-run Israel Radio announced Tuesday that it will eliminate live call-in programs until after the May 17 elections.

Political campaigns are often pretty nasty in Israel, but this year’s race has taken on a more personal and bitter tone, say analysts who have been watching elections here for years.

For only the second time, Israelis are being asked to vote for a prime ministerial candidate instead of voting for a party. Consequently, personality takes a front seat to issues, ideology and convictions.

As Israeli campaigning becomes increasingly American in style, candidates who might have been bland but who stood for a party platform have been replaced by candidates who go for the glitz, the sound bite or the jugular.

And with divisions in Israel’s polarized society ever deeper, political attacks are more pointed and raw.

This week, among the rawest have been broadsides over campaign slogans.

Officials with the leftist Labor Party said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s new slogan, “A strong leader for a strong people,” has a distinct fascist ring to it and evokes memories of Nazi Germany. Netanyahu, the leader of the rightist Likud Party, countered that Labor candidate Ehud Barak’s “One Israel” motto sounds to him like something Adolf Hitler would say.

The acrimony descended to such levels that a Holocaust survivors group felt obliged to comment, appealing to Israeli politicians to keep the Holocaust out of the election campaign.

For Monday night’s broadcast of the weekly debate show “Politika,” Netanyahu was accompanied by a studio audience full of supporters who cheered him vigorously as he spoke.

Then it got rough. Netanyahu left the stage, and Barak, Netanyahu’s principal challenger, arrived. The audience erupted in jeers, boos and catcalls. Every time Barak spoke, the crowd shouted him down. He couldn’t finish a sentence.

An increasingly agitated Barak pleaded to be allowed to speak and was ignored. The show’s host also beseeched his audience to be quiet, to no avail.

“Disgrace!” Barak cried out.

Several Labor politicians, in the minority in the audience, said they were physically threatened and felt compelled to ask studio guards to escort them to their cars after the show. One said Likud militants in the audience spit on her.

“What happened there was not befitting a democracy,” Barak fumed Tuesday.

Netanyahu countered that the show was democracy in action because people were allowed to freely express themselves.

Besides, he said, “[Barak] shouldn’t get so excited over a few loud people in a studio; otherwise, how can he be prime minister . . . and face [Palestinian Authority President Yasser] Arafat and other pressures?”

Labor Party officials accused the state television network of “succumbing to thugs and bullies” by allowing the Likud supporters to gain the upper hand, adding that the whole episode was ominously reminiscent of the verbal violence that preceded the 1995 assassination of Labor Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

Uri Porat, director of the Israel Broadcasting Authority, conceded that the program was out of control, with 450 supporters of both candidates trying to flood the studio. “It was a danger to democracy,” he said.

The clearly flustered host of the program, Yaacov Ahimeir, emerged Tuesday to protest the “atmosphere of extreme violence” in the Channel One studio, saying he had been powerless to control it.