Campaign to Lead Israel Pits Soldier vs. Survivor

Benjamin Netanyahu gazes earnestly into the camera and issues an appeal to disillusioned Israeli voters: “Come back home.”

Directly addressing former supporters of his center-right Likud Party, the Israeli prime minister acknowledges, in television ads aired this week, that he has made errors in office but asks for a second term.

“You who share our principles, our path, I beseech you to put aside all other considerations,” Netanyahu says. “I beseech you to come back home to the Likud.”

The ads are an extraordinary public admission by Israel’s youngest and first directly elected prime minister that his reelection campaign is in trouble. In the final days before Monday’s national elections, polls show Netanyahu trailing Ehud Barak of the center-left Labor Party.

But in other appearances, Netanyahu, a man with formidable political talents and a combative campaign style, sounds far from defeated. He insists that the polls are wrong and that he will win the election. And he balances his “humble pie” campaign spots with a new broadside against a favorite target--the left-leaning Israeli media.

“The press fears a repeat of 1996,” he told Israel Radio this week, referring to his come-from-behind, hairsbreadth victory over Labor’s Shimon Peres in the previous election. “I will not lose, despite massive brainwashing by the press and its attempts to demoralize” right-wing voters.

It would be a mistake to count out the man most Israelis refer to simply by his nickname, Bibi. Time and again, Netanyahu, 49, has used political adversity and even self-inflicted controversies to rally his core constituencies of “outsiders”--new immigrants, Jewish settlers, religious Jews and those of Middle Eastern or North African descent.

The question is whether he can do it again in a campaign that focuses not on issues of peace and security, economics and unemployment but increasingly, on his character and credibility. And it is in those areas, even some of those close to him acknowledge, that Netanyahu is most vulnerable.

In recent months, many of Netanyahu’s former Cabinet ministers and Likud allies have abandoned him, accusing him as they leave of breaking promises, misleading supporters or being unduly influenced by the small religious and political parties that helped make up his shaky government coalition.

Around Jerusalem and other major Israeli cities, campaign posters bearing Netanyahu’s picture were defaced this week, the word “Liar” scrawled across his countenance in large black letters.

David Cohen, 45, agrees with the criticism. Cohen, who has been largely unemployed for three years, watched impassively Wednesday as Netanyahu and his entourage descended upon the Carmel street market in Tel Aviv, a Likud stronghold.

Cohen supported Netanyahu in 1996 but says he won’t this time. “Bibi is a liar who hasn’t kept his promises to the people, to his friends in the Likud who have left the party,” he said. “There are people who believe him still. Not me.”

Campaign Reported to Be in Disarray

An Israeli official who has worked closely with Netanyahu said the premier’s campaign--now widely reported to be in disarray, with aides blaming one another for the poor showing in the polls--should have stayed away from the thorny issue of character.

“The conventional wisdom, unjustly, is now that he’s untrustworthy, susceptible to political pressures and has no credibility,” the official said. “That’s why his campaign made a major mistake in letting the election become a personality contest, where he’s extremely vulnerable; they should have focused on the issues, where he does well.”

Iddo Netanyahu said his older brother has been abused by the leftist opposition and the media. “Does he have faults?” the premier’s brother asked during a conversation at his Jerusalem home. “Of course he does, but he has tremendous attributes as well and is not treated fairly by the press.

“What is he so guilty of? We’ve had probably the most stable three years in the history of the country in terms of the security situation,” he added, choosing his words with care. “What is he guilty of, other than not complying with the wishes of the left” on the peace process?

The younger Netanyahu said his brother’s conservative politics and tough stands with the Palestinians stem, in part, from the influence of their father, Benzion, an eminent historian and onetime aide to Zeev Jabotinsky, the leader of the hard-line Revisionist movement at the time of the state’s founding.

Premier Very Much a Member of Elites

In his political life, Netanyahu often attacks Israel’s “elites”--the military, the media, academics--and casts himself as an outsider like many of his supporters. But he is very much a product of the elites himself.

He grew up in one of Jerusalem’s wealthiest neighborhoods and moved with his family to the United States as a teenager, when his father was teaching at Dropsie College, now known as the Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Netanyahu later received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

He served with distinction in the elite Sayeret Matkal commando unit. At one point, his commander in the unit was Barak, his current political rival.

Returning to the United States, Netanyahu became a spokesman extraordinaire for Israel, first as the second in charge at its embassy in Washington and later as the ambassador to the United Nations.

He returned to Israel to run for parliament and take a job as deputy foreign minister in 1988. He quickly took over the leadership of the Likud Party and became prime minister in May 1996.

Netanyahu’s term has been nothing if not tumultuous, marked by frequent political crises and paralysis in the peace process. He has had to rely often on his political skills to keep his coalition intact, juggling competing interests and demands.

Soon after his election, Netanyahu’s decision to open a new entrance to a tunnel in Jerusalem’s Old City sparked Israeli-Palestinian clashes that left at least 75 people dead and more than 1,000 hurt.

The following January, he signed the Hebron agreement with the Palestinians, fulfilling a promise made by the previous, Labor Party government to withdraw Israeli troops from that West Bank city. But two months later, his government launched construction of a Jewish housing project in disputed East Jerusalem, plunging talks with the Palestinians into a crisis that lasted until October 1998, when the Wye River agreement was signed.

Netanyahu defends his actions, saying the Palestinians simply had trouble adjusting to his decision to stop what he calls his predecessors’ headlong rush to peace. Israel should “give” in exchange for “getting,” he often says, not “give and give” without getting anything tangible in return.

Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, Dore Gold, said the international coolness to Netanyahu’s hard-line policies was inevitable too.

“The high expectations in the international community that we had reached the end of Middle East history, that the peace process was over, made it very difficult for Prime Minister Netanyahu to get a hearing globally for his conservative positions,” Gold said by telephone from New York.

Prodded by the U.S., Netanyahu agreed in October to sign the Wye accord with the Palestinians, ceding major chunks of the West Bank to the historical enemy.

Netanyahu carried out the first of three promised withdrawals but froze the accord in December after accusing Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat of failing to uphold his end of the bargain. The Palestinians insisted that they had met their obligations, and the Clinton administration, for the most part, agreed.

The pressures within Netanyahu’s fractious coalition, however, were too great. On Dec. 21, right-wing legislators, angry that a Likud leader had agreed to relinquish any land to the Palestinians, combined with Netanyahu’s left-wing opposition to force early elections.

Now, even some of his oldest friends are not certain that he can win. “If he loses now, he still has a great ability to learn,” said Rolando Eisen, his boss at a furniture company. “He has drive and ambition, and he could be prime minister again one day.”