Israel's Netanyahu turns criticism to gain
By Howard Goller
JERUSALEM (Reuters): A prize fighter in the face of political adversity, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu looks anything but a loser in the campaign for Israeli national elections on May 17.
While hated by former allies who call him a liar, and haunted by a peace deal he detests, the Israeli leader manages time and again to turn the attacks of political foes to partisan gain.
Regaled by followers who, using his nickname, chant "Bibi, King of Israel", Netanyahu never misses an opportunity to assail perceived foes, whether Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, the Labor opposition or an Israeli media he calls biased.
Next Monday, the biggest day so far of a four-month election campaign, Netanyahu expects to win handily his rightist Likud party's nomination to represent it in the battle to lead Israel.
Up to 170,000 Likud members will cast ballots during a 12-hour nationwide vote, choosing between Netanyahu and his mentor, former Defense Minister Moshe Arens.
When the results come in at mid-day on Tuesday, "Netanyahu will win by an overwhelming majority," said Likud spokeswoman Ronit Eckstein.
Israel's parliament decided to bring elections forward from late 2000 in a vote this month that united rightists angry at Netanyahu for signing a Palestinian peace deal in October and leftists angry at him for freezing it in December.
Critics accuse Netanyahu of mishandling peace moves. But even at his lowest ebb, newspaper opinion polls show him neck-and-neck in a face-off either with the Labor party's Ehud Barak or self- styled centrist Amnon Lipkin-Shahak.
The polls appear to defy logic, considering Netanyahu ousted Nobel laureate Shimon Peres by fewer than 30,000 votes in 1996 and has since made enough enemies to prompt rightist challenges from Arens and Likud defectors Benny Begin and Dan Meridor.
Likely to boost Netanyahu's chances of overall success are the half-a-million new voters -- young people, newcomers and religious Jews who analysts say will lean towards Netanyahu. Likud loyalists moreover are not easily budged from Likud.
Sephardic Jews from Arabic-speaking countries, traditionally observant Jews, and other Israelis still bear a grudge against the Labor party establishment that ruled Israel during the first 29 years of the state's existence.
Likud activist Yossi Olmert, a professor of Middle East studies who backs Arens, said Likud members typically view Jews as an oppressed minority fighting for survival and haunted by their enemies.
"Likud is still in the position of claiming to be the party of the under-privileged and discriminated against, and Bibi Netanyahu has been able to combine his personal sense of humiliation and being looked down upon with the same sense of many other Israelis," Olmert said.
Chief diplomatic correspondent Shimon Shiffer of Israel's largest newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth says most voters do not care about Netanyahu's truthfulness or that he appears, albeit reluctantly, to be leading Israel along the peace trail blazed by Peres.
As the first Likud leader to cede West Bank land to Palestinians and buoyed by overwhelming support for his peace deals, Netanyahu has forced Israeli politicians of every stripe to scramble for a place on the new political map he has drawn.
But what counts with voters is that Palestinian suicide bombers are blowing up fewer buses and that Netanyahu talks tough with Arab neighbors perceived by a majority of Israelis as wanting to throw the Jewish state into the sea, Shiffer said.
"Terrorism means a way of life which is more relevant to a majority of the electorate than ideological issues. Bibi doesn't discuss ideology -- he tells interviewers to ask people in the streets if they're more afraid now," Olmert said.
"What's flawed is that Bibi -- despite his rhetoric and demagoguery -- does not really control the state of affairs with regard to terrorism. It's entirely in the hands of the Palestinians, which means if their interest will be to use it, they will," Olmert told Reuters.
Even if Arafat has managed after years in power finally to keep a lid on guerrilla attacks, in the eyes of most Israelis the credit belongs to Netanyahu, Shiffer said.
"The Israeli opposition says he is a liar. The average Israeli would say, 'OK, but who did he lie to? He didn't lie to us. He lied to Arafat. We need such a liar. We need a prime minister who can stand up to Arafat and against the whole world and cheat them'," Shiffer said.
Netanyahu offers something attractive also for centrist voters who decide Israeli elections. To them he can say he has pressed ahead reluctantly with peace deals popular in Israel, even while taking an ostensibly tougher stance than Labor.
"He is the best campaigner in the democratic world," Olmert said. "The tragedy of Israel is that the best campaigner is the worst possible prime minister and will continue to be if he is re-elected ..."