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Unity? In Israel?
Until a couple of months ago, conventional wisdom said Mr. Barak, leader of the Labor Party, could not defeat Benjamin Netanyahu and the Likud Party. Yitzhak Mordechai, the independent candidate for Prime Minister, even produced television advertisements with polling numbers showing that Mr. Barak was doomed to lose. Yet, Mr. Barak won 56 percent of the vote, a historic margin in Israeli terms. No new Prime Minister since Golda Meir three decades ago achieved such a decisive vote at the polls -- not Menachem Begin, not Yitzhak Rabin. According to my exit polls, Mr. Barak won a majority of the Arab vote but also a majority of Jewish voters. Shimon Peres had lost the Jewish vote by 12 points in 1996 when he ran against Mr. Netanyahu. Mr. Barak even won a majority of the new Russian immigrants, who just a month ago seemed a secure part of the Netanyahu camp. So how did the Israeli electorate overcome the division and polarization to give Mr. Barak his majority? It is tempting to focus on Mr. Netanyahu as the source of that unified opposition. And it's true that many in his Likud Government resigned in anger. His failure to keep promises was legendary. But that analysis misses the point. Mr. Barak won because he diminished the divisions and the polarization in Israel, not by preaching unity, but by challenging the underlying premises that divided the country. Take peace and security. Mr. Netanyahu attacked Mr. Barak as a handmaiden of Yasir Arafat, as soft on terrorists and as ready to concede Jerusalem as the capital of a Palestinian state. Such tactics worked against Mr. Peres three years ago, but they did not work against Mr. Barak, who is the most decorated soldier in Israeli history. At the time of the election, according to campaign polls, Mr. Barak was more trusted than Mr. Netanyahu on making Israel secure (43 to 41 percent among Jewish voters). For decades, the Likud Party had exploited Labor's elitist image to win the working-class Sephardic voters and new Russia immigrants, and Labor campaigns of the past dwelled almost exclusively on peace and security. But Mr. Barak focused relentlessly on unemployment, poverty and social inequality. He promoted his plan to shift state resources from the ultra-Orthodox schools to expanded financing for mainstream education. And exit polls show that 57 percent of the voters trusted Mr. Barak to improve the economy, versus only 28 percent for Mr. Netanyahu. This helped the Labor Party produce big gains with both Sephardic and Russian voters. By effectively dominating the issues of security and the economy, Mr. Barak reformed Labor and left the right without a platform. In the past, all the diverse elements in the Likud's coalition could unite by attacking the arrogant and soft leftists. But absent the usual target, the various factions fell out in bitter acrimony. Tzomet, a libertarian party close to Likud, attacked the ultra-Orthodox. The National Religious Party, which highlighted its colorful knitted kippah, distanced itself from the ultra-Orthodox blackhatted haredim. Yisrael Baaliyah, the leading Russian party of Natan Sharansky, attacked Shas, the ultra-Orthodox Sephardic party. When, in the last week of the campaign, Mr. Netanyahu's party used its advertising to call on the disaffected voters "to come home to Likud," it was too late. With its coalition in disarray, the Netanyahu campaign stopped talking about the economy, it offered no domestic agenda, it spoke only blandly about the role of the ultra-Orthodox, and it expressed no aspiration to achieve peace. Israelis, it turned out, did yearn for peace, though they didn't dare count on it, with the country so divided, facing so many uncertainties internally and externally. But Mr. Barak allowed voters to think beyond the polarized politics of the past. For the large majority that voted for him, the most important issues were his commitment to break the impasse on peace (65 percent), his economic plan to create 300,000 jobs (44 percent) and his education plans from preschool to university (28 percent). Mr. Barak changed the Labor Party and made it possible for Israelis to vote their hopes. The result was the landslide that may change Israel's future. * Published in the New York Times, May 19, 1999 |
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