Israeli election dubbed 'The War of Smears'

By Jeffrey Heller

JERUSALEM (Reuters): The gloves are off just days into an election campaign in Israel that is shaping into a four-month slugfest.

"The War of Smears" was how Israel's biggest newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth described a regimen of personal attacks apparently prescribed by U.S. political "spin doctors" advising top candidates for prime minister.

"It's character, stupid," seems to be the main message, now that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's land-for-security deal with the Palestinians last October has blurred mainstream political lines.

And the bitterness can raise fears of worse than words.

Police are investigating reports of a death threat shouted at centrist candidate Amnon Lipkin-Shahak, who was a protege of Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli leader killed in 1995 by an Orthodox Jew opposed to peace moves with the Palestinians.

Lipkin-Shahak was stumping for votes in a crowded Tel Aviv open-air market, a right-wing bastion, last Thursday when, according to one of his campaign workers, a man wearing the black skullcap of a religious Jew called out: "The next bullet will be in your head."

A silver-haired retired general and former army chief, Lipkin- Shahak kicked off his campaign the last May 17 poll on Wednesday with an attack on Netanyahu.

"Netanyahu is dangerous to Israel. Netanyahu must go," he told a news conference.

Dismissing Lipkin-Shahak as a political novice, Netanyahu's Likud party focused instead on opposition Labor party contender Ehud Barak, also a former army chief who Likud officials regard as the stronger challenger.

In newspaper advertisements last Friday, Likud trumpeted its main slogan, "Barak is running away from the truth", and printed a reported quote from the center-left candidate: "I'm not voicing dovish positions because I want to win the elections."

But to many Israelis familiar with Barak's past, Likud's ad seemed also to allude to allegations that as army chief he abandoned wounded soldiers during a training accident in 1992.

Barak has said the commandos were already on evacuation helicopters when he left the scene.

At a Labor party assembly last Thursday Barak hit back.

"I am really sorry the prime minister is dragging the election campaign into the gutter," Barak said against the backdrop of Labor's slogans: "Netanyahu is for the extremists. Barak is for everyone" and "Too many lies for too long".

Netanyahu's spokesman Aviv Bushinsky insisted last Friday that Likud's advertisements were simply using Barak's own words to paint a true picture of his positions.

"Likud's message is not one of personal slander or to call someone a liar," Bushinsky said in a television interview.

He acknowledged that U.S. political consultant Arthur Finkelstein had helped Netanyahu chart his campaign course but said the adviser had focused mainly on "technical issues" such as voter demographics.

Israeli political commentators say Finkelstein wields far greater influence and was the moving force behind Likud's effective use, in the 1996 campaign won by Netanyahu, of graphic footage of Israeli buses blown up by Palestinian suicide bombers.

Barak -- who has adopted a more aggressive, take-charge oratory style on television these days -- has his own team of American experts, including James Carville, the media-meister who managed Bill Clinton's first presidential campaign.

A Barak campaign official said Labor's 1996 strategy, under then Prime Minister Shimon Peres, of not responding to every Likud attack was now a relic of the past.

Political commentators have said Labor's low-key approach -- in a country in which one-upmanship is a national trait -- contributed to its defeat.

"Any time Benjamin Netanyahu and his campaign propaganda attack, they will be hit by an immediate counter-attack that is no less strong," said the official, Tal Silberstein.

Warning of trouble ahead, centrist contender Lipkin-Shahak said he wanted to bridge divisions in the Jewish state which he accused Netanyahu of accentuating.

"I think there were cracks in Israeli society beforehand, but they've broken wide open in the past 2-1/2 years," he said in an interview in the Ha'aretz newspaper.

"And if we don't stop it -- and soon -- I wouldn't be surprised if young people sitting in the cafes don't start killing one another."