ISRAELI ELECTIONS Imm pagel
peace. That was now dead.
Shimon Peres and Yasser Arafat are still struggling to unscramble the egg of all those Kilon Morehs. If Likud's Binyamin "Bibi" Netanyahu emulates Mr. Begin and overthrows another Labor government even more committed to territorial com]jn)mise, ain we exixxl a sim-ilai- revolution after the May 29 elections?
Blurred Differences
Mr. Netanyahu, competing with Mr. Peres for the middle ground in Israel's first direct prime ministerial ballot, is trying to blui' their differences. Yet, between the bkrnd lines of his policy pronouncements, the gap exists. If the peace process, the hallmark of this Labor government, survives under Mr. Ne-timyahu, it will not be the pixxxjss of Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres.
The Likud leader has reluc-tiuitly acknowledged that the two Oslo agreements signed since September 1993 are a fact, though he hopes to renegotiate some of their terms.
He says he won't try to reoc-cupy Gaza or any of the six major West Bank towns from which Israel has ceded. He also has reversed an earlier pledge never to meet Mr. Arafat. In the north, he believes he can win peace with Syria without sacrificing the Golan, though how is far from clear.
In economics, Mr. Netanyahu is an ardent advocate of market economics, a legacy perhaps of his di]3lomatic stint in the United States during the I-{onald Reagan administration. But Labor, once the guai'dian of socialism, is now no less committed to privatization and opening the economy to foreign investment and comjietition. If the past few yeiirs of .selling oO'public-sector assets liave bet'ii slow and faltering, it is because of the sti-uggle to attract buyei-s at a price that would make the switch worthwhile. And tii(,' economy is thriving at an annual growth rate of 6 percent.
If Likud does win, there are i-umblings in the business community about losing this "peace dividend." In fact, in early May, some 350 of Israel's top private industrialists, bankers and retailers turned out for a rally in support of Mr. Peres.
Michael Strauss, of the Strauss daily mneem, told them: "Thanks to the peace process, I
Eric Silver is a contributing writer to the Jerusalem Report.
I hanks to the peace process, I have built a network of relations with multinational
companies
— Michael Strauss, Strauss dairy concern
have built a network of relations with multinational companies. Their directors are constantly asking me what will be after the elections. They are very concerned. I tell myself, if they are worried I should be worried, too."
So Mr. Netanyahu is keeping his neo-capitalism to himself He is hinting, however, that he would like to put together a national-unity administration. His spin doctors are projecting him as a consensus candidate, the one who can deliver peace and security.
But Mr. Netanyahu diverges drastically from Mr. Peres in wanting limited autonomy to be the permanent, not the interim, status of the two million Palestinian inhabitants of the West Bank. He rejects any idea of a Palestinian state. Labor recently deleted resistance to such an entity from its platform.
Without being too specific, Mr. Netanyahu promises to expand settlement, largely frozen outside "greater Jerusalem" by the present administration since 1992. And he threatens to combat ter-
rorism by sending Israeli troops back on search-and-destroy missions in the evacuated Palestinian towns.
The Real Bibi
But the real speculation is over what Mr. Netanyahu will do once in office. Will the 46-year-old Likud leopard surprise us by making the kind of concessions that another arch-nationalist, Charles de Gaulle, made to get out of Algeria — and sold to the French people as no left-winger could have done?
Some pundits predict that Mr. Netanyahu's appetite for power will force him toward the centre. Others argue that ideology still drives the party that Mr. Begin built, and that the hard-line, expansionist ex-generals — Ariel Sharon and Rafael Eitan — will call the shots.
"He has not had a change of mind. It's only tactics," says Yonatan Shapiro, a Tel Aviv University political sociologist and author of a history of Mr. Begin's road to power. "I expect him to expand settlements. It's too basic to the whole conception of the Likud's Greater Israel ideology for him to abandon it overnight. His supporters are militant nationalists, and the basis of their nationalism is territory."
Mr. Shapiro fears that "unless the Americans put a lot of pressure on him, Netanyaliu could turn the whole world against Israel... But Netanyahu won't yield willingly."
Yaron Ezrahi, a Hebrew University political science professor and senior fellow of the Israel Democracy Institute, disagrees. "(NetanyaliuJ will move to weaken the extreme right of his own party to increase his ability to govern in the direction of the centre," Mr. Ezrahi says. "He may try to recruit other parties, possibly even Labor, into his coalition to neutralize Sharon and Eitan. The alternative is returning to the intifada and violence."
Meanwhile, the left fears the worst. They already are gearing up for a campaign to stress that Mr. Netanyahu is no moderate.
"The difference between Peres and Netanyahu is very clear," insists Tsali Reshef, a Peace Now founder and first-time Labor Knesset candidate. "It may be the difference between the historic reconciliation between Israel and the Palestinians on the one hand and a continuation of the confrontation, wath all that involves.
"Netanyahu will do his best not to send the army into the Arab towns," she says. "But once he resorts to power policies, he may find himself doing it.... If Bibi is elected, we'll be back in the not-so-good old days."
And the settlers? "What we'd like," says Yechiel Leiter, a
spokesman for the Yesha (Judea, Samaria and Gaza) Council, "is a full-scale renewal of Mr. Sharon's 1990-92 strategy under the last Likud government. The master plan then was to put one million Jews in Judea and Samaria in as short a time as possible, say four or five years.
"What we think Bibi will end up doing is something less than that," he says. "That's where our traditional role will come in. The same way Meretz sits on the left shoulder of a Labor government and pulls it in the direction of its radical policies, it's our job to puU a Likud government toward the right." []
A floating key
The 20 percent who are up in the air about whom to vote for will decide the election.
LARRY DERFNER ISRAEL CORRESPONDENT
Yavin
S:
Yavne
ince the bus bombings in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv evened the race between Shimon Peres and Binyamin Netanyahu, it has been almost unanimously agreed that the key to the May 29 election is the "floating voter" — the one who could go either way.
There are many demographic "bloc votes" in Israel — the Orthodox (Mr. Netanyahu), the Israeli Arabs (Mr. Peres), the poor and poorly educated (Mr. Ne-tanyjihu), the well-to-do and well-educated (Mr. Peres). Beyond them, many other Israelis are ideologically committed to the right or the left. These voters already have made up their minds; Messrs. Peres' and Netanyahu's campaigns can do little to change them.
But neither Mr. Peres nor Mr. Netanyahu can win with just his true believers. Floating voters — those who are undecided, or who say they may change their decision by election day — account for about 20 percent of the electorate, said Dr. Avi Degani, a Tel Aviv University social scientist and head of the geocartography research institute.
So the candidates have focused almost exclusively on this uncommitted, malleable mass of votes in the political centre. Mr. Netanyahu, trying to attract those who fear he's too hawkish, stresses the goal of peace. Mr. Peres, go-
ing after voters who think he's "soft on the Arabs," speaks of strength.
It is impossible to draw a composite profile of the floating voter. A slight majority are women. The young are over represented in these ranks, but so are the old. A large number are Russian immigrants.
But the bulk, said Dr. Degani, are made up of lower-middle-class Sephardim in their 30s and older.
Politically they lean to the right. Among those with a tentative preference, those favoring Mr. Peres are "softer" in their support than those for Mr. Netanyahu, Dr. Degani added.
"A lot of them are traditional Likud supporters who switched to [the late Ptime Minister Yitzhak] Rabin in 1992," said public opinion pollster Rafi Smith. "But they had such high expectations, and when these weren't fulfilled, they started moving back to the Likud and Netanyahu."
Away From Tlie Centre
Yavne is a town where one might expect to find a considerable number of floating voters. About 20 miles south of Tel Aviv, it is one of the more successful "development towns" set up to absorb North African immigrants in the 1950s. It is now more lower middle class than poor. While traditionally pro-Likud, its best-known politician, former mayor and current Knesset Member Meir