Barak Takes Campaign to Airwaves

With Israeli elections just three weeks away, caretaker Prime Minister Ehud Barak leaped to the political offensive Tuesday, unveiling an advertising campaign that apologizes for mistakes and seeks to “unmask” challenger Ariel Sharon as a dangerous warmonger.

Front-runner Sharon countered with commercials that show the septuagenarian former army general planting trees with his grandchildren on bucolic farmland and promising “peace with security”--while pointedly attacking Barak for breaking his promises.

The contrasting images came in the first barrage of campaign television and radio spots, aired Tuesday in an event that, in effect, launches the homestretch dash to election day Feb. 6.

The peace process he championed in ruins amid continued Israeli-Palestinian bloodshed, Barak resigned last month and called the election more than two years ahead of schedule.

He faces a seemingly insurmountable uphill battle against right-wing opposition leader Sharon. Although ads have only limited impact on the Israeli public, they may be Barak’s last chance to turn things around, analysts said.

Barak’s strategy is to dredge up Sharon’s controversial roles in Israel’s wars to frighten and energize left-wing voters whose disappointment with Barak is prompting them to sit out this election.

“All his life, Sharon opposed peace and supported war,” intones a voice of dread in one radio ad. He opposed peace with Egypt, even Jordan, it continues. “There is no reason he should change now.”

Other commercials attempt to contrast Barak’s decision to end Israel’s most traumatic military adventure--its 22-year occupation of Lebanon--with Sharon’s decision to invade in the first place. One ad offers emotional pictures of young Israeli soldiers withdrawing joyfully from Lebanon in May. Another features a distorted image of Sharon repeating over and over that the war was Israel’s “most just,” against a background of disturbing pictures of wounded Israeli soldiers, bombings and combat.

“We must not return to the days of Sharon,” the ad concludes.

“We are trying to tell those who are sitting on the fence that they don’t have the luxury to abstain from voting,” Eli Goldschmidt, a lawmaker from Barak’s Labor Party, said from campaign headquarters in Tel Aviv. “They have to decide between two very different ways, with two very different outcomes.”

The theme may backfire, strategists conceded. Many Israelis, unnerved by a Palestinian uprising now more than 3 1/2 months old, favor the iron hand that Sharon represents.

Sharon campaign strategist Eyal Arad said his boss’ military history will work to his advantage because it demonstrates how he can be called upon to “save the day.”

“To say of any Israeli, especially Mr. Ariel Sharon, that he craves war is such a lie that it cannot wash,” Arad said.

While Barak is using his campaign propaganda to stir things up, Sharon is interested in maintaining the status quo, holding his comfortable lead and avoiding mistakes. He attempts to recast his hawkish reputation into that of a friendly grandpa to attract centrist voters.

His centerpiece ad plays a soothing jingle promising a “peace that will keep us safe” while featuring a collage of feel-good pictures of Israelis from all walks of life: immigrants, the secular and religious, the young and old. In another, Israeli citizens being interviewed say they fear for their lives in a new wave of Palestinian terrorism.

“Barak promised. He disappointed. He must be replaced,” Sharon’s ads conclude.

All the ads carried subtitles in Russian, but only Sharon addressed his audience in Russian. Immigrants from the former Soviet Union now make up about a fifth of Israel’s electorate and have proven themselves a decisive swing vote. They tipped the balance in Barak’s favor in 1999 but this year appear headed the other way.

Israeli analysts said Barak is relying heavily on the advertising campaign. Barak will look to Friday’s publication of weekly polls with the hope that the initial flurry of ads has chipped away at Sharon’s double-digit lead. In a snap Gallup Poll on Tuesday night after the first run of ads, however, 45% of respondents favored Sharon and 24% supported Barak.

In Israel, television ads are not as crucial to elections as they are in America. In U.S. elections, candidates who start out relatively unknown nationally--like President-elect George W. Bush--use the spots to introduce their image to the wider electorate.

In Israel, candidates for prime minister are usually already well known to the voters. The ads, instead, are important for seizing and changing the political agenda, or for wooing disaffected former supporters back to the fold.

To win in 1999, Barak successfully hit on themes of unemployment, neglected social causes and undue religious influence on the state to undercut his opponent, incumbent Benjamin Netanyahu.

Netanyahu, in his upset victory over the popular Shimon Peres in 1996, ran television ads that dramatized a spate of bus bombings and stoked fears of terrorism at a time of very sensitive relations with the Palestinians. Peres lost by less than 1%.

And today, with polls showing that a large percentage of the electorate--as much as a third, in one survey--is undecided or will not vote, the campaign ads could have a sizable influence, analysts said.

“The TV ads are in fact Ehud Barak’s last weapon,” political media consultant Roni Rimon told Israeli radio. “If he fails to wake up the campaign, if he fails to break through the news bulletins and make people talk about the ads and create debates, then his reelection effort will be over.”