Texas Jewish Post (Fort Worth, Tex.), Vol. 63, No. 6, Ed. 1 Thursday, February 5, 2009 Page: 2 of 36
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2 I February 5,2009
CANDIDATE PROFILE
TEXAS JEWISH POST & SINCE 1947
Netanyahu is the one to beat in Feb. 10 election
By Leslie Susser
JERUSALEM (JTA)—On the fourth
day of the recent war in Gaza, Likud
Party leader Benjamin Netanyahu
hurried from one Jerusalem studio
to another, doing more than a dozen
TV interviews with networks from
Hong Kong to New York within the
space of 12 hours.
In each case Netanyahu asked the
host from where he or she was broad-
casting, and then asked the question:
What would your government do if
your city came under rocket fire?
Netanyahu, the leader of the op-
position, had met the day before with
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and
agreed to take on a major role in ex-
plaining Israel's war against Hamas
to the world. Just six weeks away
from the February election, Netan-
yahu knew his bipartisanship would
go down well with Israeli voters.
But just to make sure they no-
ticed, he invited Israel's Channel 2
/tV\lbertsons
It means a great deal'
TV news to document his contribu-
tion to the war effort.
The ploy — playing the states-
man who is above politics while ac-
tually electioneering — helped Ne-
tanyahu, the front-runner in the race
for prime minister, stay in the public
eye. It kept Likud up in the polls,
even though Netanyahu's main po-
litical rivals — Kadima's Tzipi Livni,
the foreign minister, and Labor's
Ehud Barak, the defense minister —
were the ones actually conducting
the popular war.
Then, when the cease-fire was an-
nounced Jan. 17, Netanyahu played
his trump card, turning against the
government and accusing it of wast-
ing a golden opportunity to topple
the Hamas regime in Gaza. The new
message resonated with many Israe-
lis across the country, and the few
seats Netanyahu had lost during the
war came back with interest.
Polls taken in the first week after
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the war showed the margin between
Netanyahu's Likud and Livni's Kadi-
ma widening from a near-tie to as
many as eight or nine seats in Likud's
favor.
Netanyahu's tough line on Hamas
resonates in an Israel that has moved
sharply to the right, as peace efforts
and disengagement efforts have
proven fruitless.
Both the Oslo process launched
in 1993 and the 2005 withdrawal
from Gaza are widely seen as major
failures. The Oslo process and its
culmination, the 2000 Camp Da-
vid summit at which Yasser Arafat
rejected a wide-ranging peace deal
from Barak, is seen as having led to
the wave of terrorism of the second
intifada. Ariel Sharon's 2005 disen-
gagement from Gaza is seen as hav-
ing led to Israel's showdown with
Hamas.
On the Palestinian issue, Ne-
tanyahu presents a two-pronged
approach: economic sanctions and
force if necessary to smash Hamas—
a tougher line against Hamas than
Kadima or Labor — and slowing
down the peace process with Presi-
dent Mahmoud Abbas' Palestinian
Authority in the West Bank.
Netanyahu advocates first creat-
ing an "economic peace" with Pales-
tinians in the West Bank as a neces-
sary stage for creating conditions for
political peace. He promises to use
his economic expertise to help bring
prosperity to the West Bank that ul-
timately will pave the way for peace.
Netanyahu also takes a tough line
on Syria, insisting that there is no
way his government would agree to
withdraw from the Golan Heights.
His Achilles heel as a candidate is
the fear among Israelis of a confron-
tation between a Netanyahu-led gov-
ernment unwilling to move on either
the Palestinian or Syrian tracks and
the new Obama administration in
Washington. President Obama is
keen on solving the Palestinian is-
sue to improve America's standing
in the Middle East and prying Syria
away from the radical Iranian axis
through an Israeli-Syrian peace deal
that entails returning the Golan.
Livni is playing on this fear, argu-
ing that when Netanyahu was prime
minister in the 1990s he ran afoul
of the Clinton administration, and
likely will do so again with Obama.
If Netanyahu forms a government
with the far right and refuses to
move on peace, she warns that there
will be an unavoidable rift with the
United States, and Israel could find
itself increasingly isolated in the in-
ternational community.
One of Netanyahu's problems as
prime minister in the 1990s was the
d efection of powerful people around
Photo: Brian Hendler
A campaign poster for Likud Party candidate Benjamin Netanyahu is displayed
on the side of a Jerusalem bus on Jan. 28.
him, including Benny Begin on the
right and Dan Meridor on the left.
Now, to show that he has regained
their respect, he has recruited both,
as well as several "stars," including
former army Chief of Staff Moshe
(Boogie) Ya'alon.
Netanyahu also has waged a de-
termined fight to place himself at the
center rather than on the far right
of the Israeli political spectrum. He
"Netanyahu's
tough line on
Hamas resonates
in an Israel that
has moved
sharply to
the right."
forced Moshe Feiglin, whose far-
right Jewish leadership movement
advocates transfer of Israeli Arab cit-
izens out of Israel, well down the Li-
kud list, to the 36th slot. Netanyahu
also has given the moderate Meridor
a prominent role in the campaign.
Netanyahu's critics in Kadima
and Labor tend to highlight the
hawks around him, like Begin and
Ya'alon. They also say he is too close
to the Orthodox Shas Party and that
in a crisis he can't stand the heat.
More tellingly, they pick on his
perceived lack of credibility, high-
lighting the fact that although he
claims he was against the idea of
disengagement all along, he actu-
ally voted for it in the Knesset. And
although Netanyahu says he would
not give up the Golan, his detrac-
tors point out that he almost did so
in secret negotiations with Syria in
the late 1990s, when he was prime
minister.
Netanyahu is focusing his cam-
paign on two key issues: security
and the economy. He argues that
his tough policies are the best way
to keep Israel safe and that his eco-
nomic expertise will see the country
through the current global crisis.
The Likud's negative campaign
suggests Livni would not be able
to handle either and that the job of
prime minister is several sizes "too
big for her."
Meanwhile, Netanyahu says he
has no intention of forming a nar-
row right-wing administration and
maintains that if he wins, he will
invite both Kadima and Labor to
join his government. Insiders, how-
ever, say he will choose only one of
the two, and chances are it will be
Labor. Netanyahu makes no secret
of the fact that he wants Barak as his
defense minister, and Netanyahu
predicts that Kadima in opposition
quickly will disintegrate as a political
force. Kadima is less than four years
old, founded by Ariel Sharon as a
centrist alternative to Likud.
Netanyahu hopes that having La-
bor in his government will give him
real political latitude: In a coalition
with Labor on the left and the hawk-
ish Yisrael Beiteinu and Shas parties
on the right, for example, Netanyahu
would be able to count on Labor's
votes for a peace move and votes on
the right should he decide to reject a
peace deal.
If he wins, Netanyahu is almost
certain to include Shas in his govern-
ment. For more than a year he has
been cultivating what he calls a "stra-
tegic alliance" with the Sephardic
Orthodox party. The first payoff
of the alliance came in September,
when Shas prevented Livni from
forming a coalition after she took the
reins of Kadima following Olmert's
resignation in luly.
Now Netanyahu owes Shas,
but he'd want to nurture the alli-
ance anyway by bringing it into the
see NETANYAHU, pl4
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Wisch, Rene. Texas Jewish Post (Fort Worth, Tex.), Vol. 63, No. 6, Ed. 1 Thursday, February 5, 2009, newspaper, February 5, 2009; Fort Worth, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth188227/m1/2/: accessed July 17, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; .