Before Votes Are Tallied, Israelis Already Pondering Life Under Sharon

Frightened and dispirited, Israelis began voting today in a special election for prime minister, and polls unanimously forecast right-wing hawk Ariel Sharon, alegendary and fearedformer military commander, as the winner.

Incumbent Prime Minister Ehud Barak made a last-minute appeal for support on the eve of the vote, casting his competition with Sharon as a choice between war and peace. But a senior Barak aide conceded Monday night that “it’s over.”

Sharon, confident of victory, spent Monday attempting to plan a Cabinet.

With little doubt in the minds of most Israelis about who will win today’s vote, the questions here focused on whether the new prime minister will be able to avert an escalation of Israel’s deadly conflict with Palestinians and whether he can form a stable government.

Sharon, architect of Israel’s disastrous invasion of Lebanon and implicated in several massacres of Arabs, is expected to take a hard line on land-for-peace deals with the Palestinians. Palestinian officials condemned his presumed victory as a “recipe for war.”

Yasser Abed-Rabbo, a senior Palestinian official, described Sharon as a “barrel of hatred” who, as foreign minister in 1998, made a point of refusing to shake the hand of Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat during U.S.-hosted peace talks. Abed-Rabbo predicted that a Sharon win will set back progress that was being achieved in the pursuit of a definitive peace deal.

Traumatized by the last four months of Israeli-Palestinian bloodshed, a sizable percentage of the Israeli electorate believes that something worse is inevitable. But these voters say they will feel safer under Sharon in such circumstances. Barak, who swept to a landslide victory just 20 months ago, is widely blamed for yielding too much to the Palestinians and getting nothing but violence in return.

Devorah Dahan, 40, and her husband, Yitzhak, 46, run a women’s clothing boutique in the Talpiot mall, a suburban neighborhood on the south side of Jerusalem. They are fed up. Both voted for Barak in the last election. Both are voting for Sharon, hoping the ex-general will take strong action against the Palestinians and restore the sense of personal security they say they lost under Barak’s leadership.

“Maybe Sharon will give the Arabs one big blow and they’ll stop with this,” Devorah Dahan said. “What, is it right that the Arabs feel free to come here to this mall, to sit and drink coffee here and to shop, and we don’t feel safe going to their towns and villages?”

She said she fears that war is coming, whoever wins. “I believe that what Sharon is going to do is simply destroy entire villages” if shooting resumes on Jewish neighborhoods, or if Jews continue to be shot while driving on West Bank roads, she said. “And I think that is very, very good.”

Yitzhak Dahan is less eager to punish the Arabs. He’s convinced that Sharon will negotiate with the Palestinians but without making far-reaching concessions that he thinks only weakened Israel.

“We should sit and talk,” Dahan said. “But maybe Sharon will be stronger and the Arabs will be afraid of him. He will talk with the Arabs in a different way than Barak.”

The most immediate challenge facing Sharon will be to form a so-called national unity government, considered key to his own political survival.

Sharon reiterated Monday that, if elected, he will immediately call on the leaders of other parties to attempt to cobble together such a coalition, the formation of which may be the only way to avoid being forced into another round of elections just months from now.

Barak is thought to be interested in joining a unity government, but it seems unlikely that the more leftist members of Barak’s Labor Party could stomach sharing power with Sharon and his entourage.

The margin of Barak’s anticipated defeat will determine what political future awaits him. He has said he will not resign as head of the Labor Party, as some party members are demanding.

There were no formal campaign appearances Monday, but both candidates made final pleas for votes on the front page of Israel’s top-selling newspaper, Yediot Aharonot.

Sharon vowed that security will take precedence over peace, and he forswore negotiating with the Palestinians until all violence stops. He has revealed few specifics of a peace plan but indicated that he will offer the Palestinians little more land than they already have and no significant control in Jerusalem, in sharp contrast to Barak’s proposals and those of former President Clinton.

He also says he will refuse to dismantle illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank, many of which he urged be built in the first place as a way to thwart eventual Palestinian rule.

Barak, meanwhile, cast the election as nothing short of a life-and-death choice.

“The Middle East is a powder keg,” Barak said. “We are called upon to decide whether to deposit the match in the hands of political extremists too extreme for Israel.”

Barak has been speaking in such apocalyptic terms recently as he sought to defend his attempts to reach a comprehensive peace settlement with Arafat.

The Palestinian leader rejected Barak’s proposals at last summer’s Camp David summit. About two months later, the new Palestinian uprising erupted, after a visit by Sharon to the holy compound in Jerusalem’s Old City known to Jews as the Temple Mount and to Arabs as Haram al Sharif, or “the noble sanctuary.” Palestinians saw Sharon’s actions as a provocation.

Violence continued as a backdrop to today’s vote. The Israeli army said Palestinian gunmen opened fire on several Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, including the playground of a Jewish neighborhood in the West Bank city of Hebron. One Israeli soldier was killed in a fierce gun battle in southern Gaza, and in reprisal the army closed the Palestinian airport and Gaza’s border with Egypt.

Though far more Palestinians have been killed in the last four months than Jews, Jewish citizens of Israel say they suddenly feel vulnerable and insecure. As if to dramatize the point and further undercut Barak, the trial began Monday of two Palestinians accused of participating in the October lynching in the West Bank city of Ramallah of two Israeli reserve soldiers, one of the most horrifying episodes in the recent chaos.

Meanwhile, about 15,000 Israeli police officers will deploy across the country for voting day, and the army slapped a full closure on the Palestinian territories to guard against terrorist attacks.

Israeli police commander Shlomo Aharonishki said he was bracing for violence in Israeli Arab towns, where residents will be attempting to enforce a boycott of the election. Israeli Arabs are furious with Barak for endemic discrimination and for a police crackdown in October that killed 13 Israeli Arabs when riots spilled over from Palestinian areas into Israel proper.

In the Palestinian-ruled Gaza Strip, meanwhile, the militant Islamic Jihad group threatened to detonate bombs in Tel Aviv and other key Israeli cities, the day after one of its members was killed by Israeli troops as he attempted to infiltrate into Israel.

For many Israelis, support for Sharon and the rejection of Barak is visceral. Barak looked weak, they say, offending a basic principle in Israeli society--the need not to appear like a freier, a sucker.

“Ehud Barak will lose the elections because under his leadership, many, many Israelis had a feeling they did not like: that they were suckers and that their country was a sucker,” commentator Amnon Dankner wrote Monday in the Maariv newspaper.

“The Israelis feel they are suckers because, after great concessions and promises of even greater concessions, the Palestinians informed them: Your concessions are in our pocket, but we want more, including things you never dreamed of giving, and then--there will be war.”

At the Talpiot mall, Michael Harush, 18, tended to agree. Scheduled to report to his army combat unit in two months, Harush’s vote today is his first in a national election. He says he is aware that the outcome of the election may be a fateful one for him. He is voting for Sharon.He trusts Sharon to be better at negotiations; Sharon, Harush said, will give less, get more.

His buddy, Tamir Nahum, another 18-year-old, disagreed. Nahum plans to vote for Barak. He too is about to enter the army, and he’ll be joining a combat unit--even though five members of his extended family have been killed in Israel’s wars.

“If Sharon is elected, there is a greater chance that there will be war,” Nahum said. “War will cost a lot of money and lives on both sides. I prefer to give land--although as little as possible--than to pay the price in lives. It is very scary to think that Barak will give them too much and the Palestinians will just come too close to us. But Sharon is more scary.”