Netanyahu, the Incumbent, Plays the Outsider in Reelection Effort

Pointed political views have always been proffered as readily as the pickled eggplant, smoked fish and abundant ripe fruit at the Mahane Yehuda market here.

And Shimon Moshe isn’t shy about revealing his beliefs as he weighs giant heads of cauliflower for customers. With a raucous political campaign underway for Israel’s May 17 elections, the 29-year-old vegetable vendor says he will cast his ballot for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his right-wing Likud Party.

Netanyahu is a “strong leader who will stand up to the Arabs and won’t give all of Israel away,” Moshe recently declared above the din of the market.

What’s more, he said, Netanyahu battles for his positions “from the outside, like us.”

“Nobody gives him anything,” Moshe said. “He has to fight them all.”

Throughout his political career and already in this campaign, Netanyahu has used his long-standing feuds with the nation’s power elites--including the media, the military, and the academic and judicial establishments--to his advantage, honing an outsider message that resounds with his core constituencies.

To Netanyahu’s critics, it’s the politics of resentment, a cynical use of the deepening rifts in Israeli society between the religious and secular, left and right, Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews.

To the prime minister’s aides and supporters, it’s a skillful political strategy that has allowed Netanyahu to capitalize on the anger of the disenfranchised--including new immigrants, the working class and the ultra-religious--and become their champion.

“He’s made a career of this,” a close aide said. “He’s riding a certain wave, recognizing that there’s a time in every country where the have-nots have to become part of the haves and expressing that in his speeches.”

Following the Path of Likud Founder

In so doing, Netanyahu is following a path traced more than 20 years ago by Menachem Begin, the late founder of the Likud and its first prime minister. Begin was the first to grasp the electoral possibilities of joining forces with Sephardic and religious voters. Sephardic Jews trace their roots to the Middle East or North Africa; Ashkenazi Jews are of European or North American descent and have long dominated in Israel.

In 1977, Begin and Likud managed to oust the Labor Party, which along with its ideological predecessors had ruled Israel since independence in 1948.

But not even Begin, according to several analysts, came close to Netanyahu’s evident personal alienation from the elites, which may be rooted in events in his past.

“Despite his own elite personal and educational status, Netanyahu sees himself as an outsider and is able to tap into these resentments,” said Gerald Steinberg, political studies professor at Tel Aviv’s Bar Ilan University.

Netanyahu grew up in an upper-middle-class Jerusalem neighborhood, served in an elite army commando unit and graduated with degrees in architecture and business from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Steinberg and others noted that the prime minister’s father, Benzion Netanyahu, a militant right-wing Zionist, was a distinguished historian who was forced to move his family to the United States after he was unable to obtain a teaching position in Israel.

Netanyahu also had to battle the establishment during his meteoric rise to power, including fending off challenges from the second-generation “princes” of Likud, the sons of the party’s founding leaders. Many of these--including Begin’s son, Zeev Binyamin Begin--have since left the Likud to lead parties of their own.

Since he became prime minister in June 1996, Netanyahu has struck out at the elites, singling out the media for perhaps his sharpest criticism. He often has portrayed these institutions as dominated by opponents unwilling to accept his electoral victory.

“The attacks against me derived from one main purpose,” Netanyahu said in April 1997, after he narrowly avoided indictment in an influence-trading scandal. “They are an attempt to overthrow the government because of a basic disagreement on the part of our rivals with our path. They cannot accept the fact that the people voted for us and not for them.”

Whether the outsider theme will continue to play for Netanyahu is an open question after a recent decision by Yitzhak Mordechai, his Iraqi-born former defense minister and a longtime army general, to run against him at the head of a new centrist party.

Mordechai, a moderate and one of the most popular politicians in Israel, announced his decision Jan. 25, two days after the prime minister fired him on live television for publicly flirting with the opposition. Mordechai thus became the first Sephardic Jew to be a serious contender for prime minister and infused the still-unnamed center party with new electricity.

He is expected to draw support from religious traditionalists and the Middle Eastern Jews who have been among Likud’s--and Netanyahu’s--most loyal constituents.

“It will definitely hurt Netanyahu,” said political scientist Yaron Ezrahi of Jerusalem’s Hebrew University. “It’s too early to gauge the overall impact, but it will make it much harder for Netanyahu to claim to represent Oriental Jews, and even the religious.”

A ‘More Legitimate’ Outsider Challenges

Netanyahu’s supporters downplayed the potential effect of Mordechai’s candidacy, saying they expected no more than a percentage point or two of Likud voters to follow him. However, analysts said his departure could cut into the party’s support.

“Mordechai’s candidacy hollows out the Likud’s campaign,” Steinberg said. “He is a credible candidate who will be able to use the outsider card against the old elites in a way that is more legitimate than for anyone else. Mordechai doesn’t just represent outsiders; he is an outsider.”

Already, some damage is clear.

A few days after Mordechai’s defection, Netanyahu announced a leadership team that includes Foreign Minister Ariel Sharon and the newly appointed defense minister, Moshe Arens, a veteran Likud leader who served in several previous governments. Yet the trio’s shared Ashkenazi background left Netanyahu vulnerable to media criticism about the lack of diversity in the party leadership.

Netanyahu rejected the attacks.

“The Likud has opened the gates to all ethnic groups in Israel and to every person on the basis of their unique talents,” he told reporters last month.

He also made plans to showcase the party’s Sephardic leadership by establishing a national social affairs council whose leaders would include prominent Likud legislators and ministers of Middle Eastern background. The idea was dropped after several of those whose names had been mentioned said they would oppose it. Some appeared angry.

“I have no intention of being anyone’s token,” declared Meir Sheetrit, a Sephardic Jew and maverick legislator who is the Likud’s parliamentary whip.

Sephardic Jews Atop Likud’s List

In a vote last week, however, a gathering of 2,700 Likud members might have helped Netanyahu by choosing several Sephardic Jews to run at the top of the party’s list of candidates in the May election. Behind Netanyahu, four of the top five candidates are Sephardic, including Sheetrit.

Back at Mahane Yehuda, a poster of Netanyahu that reads “Bibi: The People Are With You” hangs alongside photographs of white-bearded Sephardic sages above a stall owned by a distant relative of Mordechai.

Sasson Mordechai, a beefy 42-year-old with a slight resemblance to the former defense minister, confesses to a measure of ambivalence about his relative’s centrist candidacy--anger at the older Mordechai’s decision to leave the party that nurtured his political career but pride that a Sephardic Jew and fellow Kurd is running for the highest post in Israel’s government.

“He should have stayed with the Likud,” groaned Mordechai, who said his wife had switched her allegiance from Netanyahu to Yitzhak Mordechai. “Now, I don’t know who to vote for.”

There was no such hesitation up the way at a shop selling soft Israeli cheeses and an array of garlicky dips. Avi Chuna, 26, said Mordechai’s candidacy made no difference to him. He is supporting Netanyahu for two reasons: his tough views on the peace process with the Palestinians and his status as an outsider among Israel’s elites.

“The media and all the powerful people in Israel, they hate Bibi,” Chuna said thoughtfully. “That’s why I like him.”