Netanyahu to Challenge Barak if He Can Overcome Legal Hurdles

Launching his political comeback and perhaps a high-stakes legal battle as well, former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced plans Sunday to challenge his old rival Ehud Barak in an election triggered by Barak’s surprise resignation.

A self-assured Netanyahu announced his candidacy for the prime minister’s job in a nationally televised speech and news conference and said he is confident that legal obstacles that bar him from running will be overcome.

Crushed by Barak in elections just a year and a half ago, Netanyahu today tops opinion polls as the public’s preference for prime minister. Barak, mired in the deadliest Israeli-Palestinian violence in years and with few prospects for ending the bloodshed, would lose to Netanyahu by double digits if elections were held today, the polls show.

“An hour doesn’t pass when a citizen doesn’t come up to me and say, ‘Come back and make the country what it used to be--a place where we could live,’ ” Netanyahu said at Jerusalem’s elegant King David Hotel, in comments that amounted to his first campaign speech of the new electoral season.

Netanyahu was clearly savoring the moment. He made a grand entrance into the hotel conference room, flanked by secret service bodyguards. He paused at the lectern to open a water bottle and slowly pour himself a glass as cameras clicked away. He then flashed a brilliant smile.

Barak’s resignation, announced Saturday night to a stunned Israeli public and made formal Sunday, was widely seen as a ploy to eliminate Netanyahu as an opponent, through a legal quirk, in favor of the more easily defeatable Ariel Sharon, current chief of the Likud Party.

Under Israeli law, when a special election is called for prime minister, only sitting members of the Knesset, or parliament, may run. Israel, in fact, has never had a prime minister who was not also a Knesset member. Netanyahu resigned from the Knesset in the wake of his May 1999 loss to Barak.

But Netanyahu supporters spent a day of frantic legal maneuvering Sunday in search of a way to allow his candidacy in an election likely to be held within 60 days. Even some of his detractors argued that a true democracy cannot exclude someone as popular as Netanyahu.

“With all due respect to Barak or Sharon, if Netanyahu is the candidate preferred by most right-wing voters, no tricks from the lawbooks should close the option to him,” wrote columnist Nahum Barnea, considered a voice of progressive mainstream Israel. “What are we, America?”

In fact, quite a few comparisons to the U.S. electoral travails were being made here Sunday. The prospect of a Netanyahu candidacy has opened a can of mind-numbing legal complications and possibilities that may well have to be decided in Israel’s Supreme Court.

Barak’s candidacy was formalized Sunday by the central committee of his Labor Party, where a potential mutiny was defused.

Netanyahu is taking on more than Barak and the political system. He is also vying with Sharon for the Likud leadership, and that too is shaping up as a bitter fight. Sharon, 72, has vowed to retain the party post and challenge Barak. The same polls that show Barak being trounced by Netanyahu show him more or less even with Sharon.

Israeli Forces Kill 2 More Palestinians

Meanwhile, some Palestinian leaders took credit Sunday for the fall of Barak, but they warned that the political crisis will jeopardize any attempts to quell the violence raging in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. On Sunday, two more Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces, including one member of Arafat’s Fatah political movement who the Israeli army said was planting a roadside explosive south of Jerusalem. In addition, a car carrying Israel’s chief Ashkenazi rabbi, Yisrael Meir Lau, came under fire in the West Bank north of Ramallah, Israeli radio reported.

“Peace talks will stop until the elections are over,” Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat said.

News agencies reported that Arafat will meet with U.S. Middle East envoy Dennis B. Ross in the next few days in Morocco in an effort to assess the state of the crisis.

Barak two weeks ago agreed to hold early general elections sometime next year for both his own job and a new Knesset. But he suddenly changed gears Saturday night with the announcement that he was quitting. On Sunday afternoon, he went to the official residence of President Moshe Katsav and tendered his formal resignation.

Only a few hours later, the leadership of the Labor Party named Barak its candidate in the upcoming election. The nomination was expected, but leaders ignored the wishes of disgruntled party members who oppose Barak. Several, including the speaker of parliament and at least one Cabinet minister, made their displeasure known by refusing to applaud Barak’s candidacy.

The speaker, Avraham Burg, was also part of a group of anti-Barak Labor partisans kept out of the meeting hall during the vote, according to Israeli state television. A somber Burg later said it was a “big technical problem.”

The party’s elder statesman, Nobel peace laureate Shimon Peres, apparently made his protest known by not attending at all. Peres has been critical of Barak’s unsuccessful peacemaking efforts.

If he ultimately runs, Netanyahu is likely to seize on the same theme. In his speech Sunday and comments afterward to reporters, he harped on the violence that has claimed more than 300 lives in the last 10 weeks. Most of the dead are Palestinians, but many Israelis also feel under threat, especially after an increase in drive-by shootings in the West Bank.

Netanyahu blamed Barak for offering too many concessions to the Palestinians and then allowing the conflict to drag on. The way to deal with Palestinians, he said, is to lower their expectations.

Those promoting Netanyahu’s candidacy have essentially two options.

They can attempt to have the Knesset dissolved, either through a no-confidence vote or other legislation. If they muster 61 votes out of the 120-member chamber, new elections must be held for lawmakers and the prime minister. Netanyahu could run.

Or they can attempt to change the law that requires a prime minister to be a member of the Knesset. This would face legal challenges because it would mean altering basic precepts that govern the Israeli system, according to Moshe Negbi, legal affairs writer for the Maariv newspaper.

Barak’s resignation is to take effect 48 hours after he submitted it. After that, he will remain in office heading a caretaker government, whose legal authority will remain unchanged but whose moral authority will be sapped. If an election is held by the 60-day deadline, the most likely date is Feb. 6, Israeli officials said.

Israeli analysts were questioning Sunday whether Barak had not miscalculated in his resignation gambit. Some likened it to the last gasp of a dying man; if he doesn’t have to face Netanyahu and then wins election, he will be saddled with the same uncooperative Knesset. If he faces Netanyahu in a short, 60-day campaign, his chances for victory are slim.

Barak: ‘I Am Not a Kamikaze’

Barak, as usual, painted a less bleak picture.

“I am not a kamikaze,” he told the Yediot Aharonot newspaper. “I am not one to commit suicide.”

Since losing the election last year, Netanyahu has had a lucrative career consulting for a high-tech firm and delivering speeches in the U.S. He returned from his latest U.S. trip Sunday evening, just hours before announcing his election bid.

In a sign of the media melodrama that will probably characterize the campaign, Israeli television covered his arrival as though he were a movie star. Cameras were stationed on the tarmac and trained on the plane, tracing his every step as he descended the staircase.

Then the broadcasts on Israel’s two main television stations cut back and forth between Netanyahu’s arrival and Barak’s appearance before the Labor Party’s central committee meeting.

“A mere year and a half ago, I never dreamed that I would be back so soon,” Netanyahu said later. “But reality forces itself upon us, as it does in this crisis, which is the result of policy. We must return to the right way, the right policies and the right leadership--and this is why I am here.”