Defiant Mordechai Pumps Life Into Israeli Opposition

Popular Defense Minister Yitzhak Mordechai, abruptly fired on live television the night before, joined the fight Sunday to replace Israel’s current government by adding his prestigious name to a new centrist political party that suddenly seemed blessed with a fresh lease on life.

Defiant and smiling, Mordechai quoted the biblical Book of Psalms as he bade farewell to the Cabinet he had been a member of for 2 1/2 years.

“Deliver my soul, oh Lord, from lying lips, and from a deceitful tongue,” he read pointedly to his new chief rival, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “My soul hath long dwelt with him that hateth peace.”

Mordechai then prayed at the Western Wall, the holiest site in Judaism and an obligatory campaign stop for aspiring prime ministers, and sought the blessing of a leading rabbi.

Mordechai’s dismissal Saturday from the ruling Likud coalition and his enrollment in an emerging party rocked an already volatile election campaign ahead of a vote scheduled for May 17 and sent the bookies of Israeli politics off to recalculate the odds.

Newspapers and the airwaves were filled with assessments of Mordechai’s prospects, with many analysts predicting that the stocky retired army general will mount the most credible challenge yet to Netanyahu’s attempts at reelection.

Speaking Sunday night to a gathering of followers near Tel Aviv, Mordechai, 54, stopped short of saying he would be the candidate for the premiership, although others in the nascent leadership have indicated he will be.

“A new leadership is needed,” Mordechai said.

The still-unnamed party is being formed by several well-known politicians, including high-profile defectors from Netanyahu’s Likud Party. It had begun to lose steam, however, until Mordechai’s arrival.

“The flow of people running away from Likud, and from Netanyahu personally, has really reached a decisive point, and it looks as if this is the final catalyst that will pull everything together for the new center party,” Hebrew University political scientist Avraham Diskin said.

“I think we are going to have a totally new political map after May,” added Diskin, who was instrumental in forming a small centrist party before the 1996 election.

At the same time, analysts cautioned against dismissing Netanyahu, a deft, if increasingly isolated, politician and campaigner.

The centrist party will be competing with the third major force in the race, the venerable Labor Party, for much of the same constituency, leaving Netanyahu with a solid hard-core base of right-wing nationalists and the ultra-Orthodox. A runoff election is considered likely because no single candidate for prime minister is expected to receive 50% of the vote.

Mordechai, however, brings characteristics to the campaign that his supporters believe will give him an edge. Until now a voice of moderation in Netanyahu’s government, Mordechai is seen as a military man with the kind of security credentials that appeal to most Israelis, who have turned time and again to generals when looking for political leadership. But he is also a dove who has seemed committed to peace agreements with the Palestinians.

Significantly, if his candidacy is confirmed, the Iraqi-born Mordechai will become the first Sephardic Jew to run for prime minister. He will be able to appeal to the many Jews of Middle Eastern origin who, resentful of the power wielded by a European Jewish elite, traditionally have backed Netanyahu and Likud.

“Mordechai is a stereotype-busting politician,” commentator Nahum Barnea noted in Yediot Aharonot, Israel’s largest daily newspaper. “At long last there comes a man who just might be able to break the tribalism between east and west, between left and right, a tribalism that is terribly destructive.”

Politics in Israel are known for mudslinging and high-pitched rhetoric, yet the spat between Netanyahu and Mordechai surprised many with its bitter tone.

Netanyahu accused Mordechai of having “conspired to overthrow a government in which he was serving,” and he claimed he had shown “endless generosity” in trying to accommodate Mordechai. Netanyahu ridiculed the new centrist party.

“It’s a party of losers,” the prime minister told Voice of Israel radio. “They’re not going to get anywhere.”

Some Israelis worry that with Mordechai’s departure, the government has lost the member most interested in fulfilling peace accords with the Palestinians. Mordechai had opposed Netanyahu’s freezing of the latest U.S.-brokered agreement, which calls for additional Israeli troop withdrawals from the West Bank in exchange for a Palestinian fight against terrorism.

Netanyahu criticized Mordechai--and some of the prime minister’s enemies agreed--for engaging in a spectacle of openly negotiating with various political parties in a bid for the best possible position. Mordechai had vacillated endlessly over what to do, until Netanyahu preempted any move on his part by firing him Saturday night, reading the dismissal letter on television minutes after it was delivered to Mordechai.

The key figures in the centrist party, including former Likud Finance Minister Dan Meridor, admired former army Chief of Staff Amnon Lipkin-Shahak, and one of Labor’s stars, Uri Savir, have said they will allow opinion polls to determine the ranking of their leadership. The head of a party is usually the candidate for prime minister, while the others run for seats in the Knesset, or parliament. The lower one is ranked, the less likely he or she is to win a seat.

Critics say that letting notoriously unreliable opinion polls dictate who leads a party dramatizes just how void of ideology and conviction Israeli politics are becoming.

Netanyahu, himself a careful watcher of polls, said that allowing polls to determine policy and candidates is “the most absurd phenomenon I’ve ever seen.”

The leftist newspaper Haaretz, in an editorial Sunday, agreed: “The [centrist] party leadership has . . . turned public opinion polls which are supposed to simply describe a given political situation into an instrument of policy, and that is a development that undermines proper democracy.”

* U.S. JEWS AND ISRAEL

In West L.A., Jews discuss hopes for Israel as the nation prepares for elections. B3