Israel goes to the polls:

...In the Likud, the seventy-three-year-old Shamir's power is now circumscribed by the battle, already underway, to succeed him...

...Two parties in basic disagreement on most policies, but in agreement to "rotate" the premiership between their respective leaders, would run the cabinet...

...The combination of the intifadah, the rise of fundamentalist influence within it, and the refusal, or inability, of the PLO to translate the rebellion of its constituents into an intelligent political initiative, is fodder for the Likud's electoral cannons...

...it accepted, for example, the partition of Palestine into Jewish and Palestinian Arab states in 1947, despite the furious opposition of Menachem Begin and the right...

...Imagine, if you will, an American government under President Michael Dukakis with George Bush serving as both vice-president and secretary of state that, as of 1991, becomes a government of President George Bush with Michael Dukakis as vice-president and secretary of state...

...Kahane is battling an attempt to bar his party from running on the grounds that it is racist...

...Israelis also pay attention to the fate of the Kurds...

...As these words are written, four weeks before the vote, it is too close to call, but the Likud probably has an edge.ll, but the Likud probably has an edge...

...After its defeat in 1977, Labor made it clear that it was not interested in playing a junior role in a Likud government...

...Unless, that is, he continues to prefer an occupation that could give Israel a future of ceaseless strife resembling today's Northern Ireland...

...This is how Kakh, Meir Kahane's extremist party, obtained its one seat in 1984...

...Since 1948, some 11,000 Israelis have died in wars, and another 800 in terrorist attacks or counter-terror retaliations...

...Eliav, a former party secretary general, split from Labor in the early 1970s because of a dispute with Premier Golda Meir on the Palestinian question...

...In the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, Iraq sent troops and two armored divisions into the fray...

...And although Rabin's personal popularity has risen, the intifadah has helped the Likud politically...

...In this decade Syria, Jordan, Egypt, and Israel will invest some $75 billion in increasingly sophisticated weapons...

...Shamir warns the Israeli public that even partial withdrawal poses a "mortal threat" to the country's future...

...While never achieving an electoral majority, Labor was by far the largest party...

...Surveys point to a fairly even base of support for both sides of the political spectrum today...

...Labor historically championed policies combining toughness with flexibility in the Arab-Israeli conflict...

...In the 1960s, however, the right began to broaden its base...

...Prominent among them are Begin's son, Benjamin, and former Israeli UN ambassador, Benjamin Netanyahu...

...Since there are more hawks than doves, Likud will have the advantage here...

...The next government will be determined, on the one hand, by the estimated 150,000 undecided voters, and on the other, by which major party can co-opt the smaller ones...

...Nonetheless, the "oriental" vote is a weak spot for Labor...

...However, both Peres and Rabin, the senior Labor party figures, will face challenges if Labor loses on November 1. Politically, Peres is not only fearful of what another Likud government-with Shamir as premier and the possible return of Sharon to the defense ministry-might bring, he is, according to a Labor activist close to him, haunted by the possibility that had Labor accepted Begin's offer of junior partnership in the 1981 cabinet, there might have been no Lebanon war the following year...

...Outside observers often discount these fears because of Israel's military prowess and the Likud's habit of conflating its irredentist nationalist goals with the country's self-defense as a whole...

...To be seated, a list requires but one percent of the total vote (in contrast, West Germany's threshold is five percent...

...Shamir's two years at the helm were characterized by his successful thwarting of Peres's effort to convene an international peace conference, and the government's inability to suppress the Palestinian intifadah (uprising) in the West Bank and Gaza Strip...

...And Libya has a factory to produce such weapons...

...In internal party elections late last spring, young doves did especially well and the grand old man of the Israeli peace movement, Arie Lova Eliav, secured a "safe-spot" on Labor's Knesset list...

...Neither was very good at its new role...

...The last general election produced a political ' stalemate...

...But now that the Jewish religious holidays are over, the contest is bound to intensify...

...And Arafat's initial response was not to seize that moment as the national leader of a besieged people, but to complain that he had not been consulted...

...One must differentiate, however, between Likud rhetoric and the very real security issues confronting the Jewish state-issues of equal concern to Labor...

...Iraq has a substantial arsenal of mobile SCUD missiles that can deliver the chemical weapons and poison gases already employed against Iran into Israeli civilian centers...

...However, it is unlikely that Iraqi land forces would play a major role in a future conflagration as they would have to cross the territory either of Syria, which harbors deep animosity towards Iraq, or Jordan...

...So here is another irony: although Hussein's surprise action may give the Likud an electoral advantage by undermining Peres's "Jordanian option," Israel is left with only one negotiating partner-the Palestinians...

...While Israel's peace with Egypt seems secure and Jordan has no appetite for war, Israelis must plan for all military eventualities because of the instability of the area...

...By 1984, however, Peres saw Labor's re-entry into government as a desperate matter, both personally and politically...

...Labor had been tarnished by Israeli losses in the Yom Kippur War, its image was compromised by scandals and a split, and there was a justified popular perception that it was exhausted and closed to new faces and new ideas...

...What is uncertain is whether the upcoming elections will produce a government up to the challenges...

...Israel's population has faced a major war every decade since the 1940s...

...Most dangerous, however, is Syria's deployment of a vast arsenal of advanced Soviet missiles capable of striking virtually anywhere in Israel in approximately five minutes-from civilian targets to airfields to military assembly points...

...It was his third unsuccessful election at the head of the party list, and his role as its leader would have been threatened had Labor returned to the opposition benches...

...Just as the Likud had to learn to govern, Labor had to learn to be an opposition party...

...Few took seriously the boisterous irredent-ism that was the right wing's hallmark...

...Labor presents an attractive slate this year...

...The"young guard" of the National Religious party was swept by messianic currents and as its strength grew, the NRP's "historic partnership" with Labor became more tenuous...

...we are ready for an historic compromise...

...Former defense minister Ariel Sharon and Moroccan-born David Levy were strengthened...

...Baghdad has some 6,500 tanks and an experienced war machine whose size has quadrupled since the war began...

...Labor's peace program called for a negotiated settlement with Jordan or a Jordanian-Palestinian delegation to achieve a territorial compromise...

...The muted international response to Iraqi use of lethal mustard, nerve, and cyanide gases, all outlawed by the 1925 Geneva Treaty, rings loud in Jerusalem...

...The extremism of Begin and his backers marginalized them in the young state...

...In the last phase of the Iran-Iraq war the capabilities of the Iraqi air force improved substantially, especially in long-range strategic bombing...

...Israel's long-dominant party collapsed at the polls and Begin formed a governing coalition with the NRP and others...

...Following the 1981 elections, in which Peres was just edged out by Begin, Labor took the same stand...

...If an independent Palestinian state ever emerges in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Yitzhak Shamir will, consequently, be one of its fathers...

...Labor has now shifted to a somewhat ambiguous formula according to which it would first seek an interim agreement with Palestinians willing both to recognize Israel's existence and renounce terrorism...

...As this provides perilously short warning time before a devastating attack, one cannot rule out a pre-emptive Israeli action to eliminate these missiles...

...Indeed, the only major political move since the intifadah began almost a year ago was Hussein's waiver of the occupied lands...

...Concurrently, the nationalist and religious right within Israel pressed for keeping the territories and slowly gained support...

...In the meantime "Hamas" ("zeal"), the Palestinian fundamentalist movement, has proclaimed that "The solution to the Palestinian question will only take place by holy war...[I]nternational conferences only waste time...

...The assumption was that Amman's participation would stymie the emergence of a radical Palestinian state, feared by most Israelis...

...This was forestalled when he became prime minister...

...Peres asks "are the territories defending us or are we defending the territories...

...With the single, important exception of the Camp David Accords, Begin's tenure was characterized by mismanagement of both foreign and domestic affairs, culminating in the Lebanon war of 1982 and rampant inflation...

...To form a stable government the largest party seeks allies among the smaller ones who obtain cabinet portfolios and other concessions...

...MITCHELL COHEN is author of Zion and State: Nation, Class and the Shaping of Modern Israel (Blackwell...

...Here the failures of Arafat's leadership become evident...

...ISRAEL GOES TO THE POLLS THE FUTURE OF A DIVIDED NATION MITCHELL COHEN On November 1, Israelis will go to the ballot box in one of the most important elections since the founding of the Jewish state...

...In early September, he declared that, "We don't want to oppress the Palestinians...

...The Likud's "no nonsense" approach towards the Arabs appeals to many Jews who came to Israel from Arab lands where they were badly mistreated...

...Women and Jews of Middle Eastern origins are much better represented among Labor's 1988 nominees than they are among Likud's...

...Labor's difficult task, then, is to persuade anxious Israelis that however legitimate their fears, the maintenance of the status quo is a dead end that will ever tear at their country's fiber...

...And Yasir Arafat, currently cementing his ties with Iraq, has not had a word to say about the vicious repression of a non-Arab people's struggle for self-determination by an Arab government...

...The 1981 and 1984 contests were the most raucous in Israel's short history...

...Israelis, including those who bitterly oppose their government's policies in the occupied territories, are struck that Baghdad, committing incomparably more violence than Israel, receives infinitely less chastisement...

...Ironically, it is Peres's long-time rival within Labor, Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who presides over the heavy-handed attempts to quell the rebellion...

...What is different, however, is the low-keyed nature of the campaign so far...

...This national group, which has its own language and culture and was promised "Kurdistan'' after World War I, has as strong a case for self-determination as any people in the world today...

...From the 1930s until 1977, the salient characteristic of internal politics in the Zionist movement and (after 1948) in Israel was the dominance of the left...

...No party has ever won a majority in Israeli elections and, consequently, coalition governments have been the norm...

...He is associate professor of political science at the Graduate School and Baruch College of the City University of New York...

...There appears to be an intense debate in the PLO on this issue...

...This brings us directly to the Palestinians...

...Depending on the percentage of the national vote received by a party, that proportion of its list becomes "MKs'' (members of the Knesset, Israel's parliament...

...Bearing in mind that the Mideast, a nervous region, is prone to rapid transformations, consider the following constellation: • The arms race continues at a frantic pace, and not just in the zone of the Iran-Iraq war...

...Such an initiative, if it were to be serious, would have to include explicit recognition of Israel...

...Its 475,000 front-line troops, 450,000 "Popular Army" troops, and 75,000 reservists equals almost a quarter of the population of Israel...

...Eshkol's initial postwar policy-willingness to exchange lands taken in the war for peace-gradually eroded as the Arab world refused to come to the bargaining table...

...It has doubled the number of its army divisions since 1982, and its armored corps now has more tanks than Nazi Germany used on the eastern front during all of World War II...

...Neither of the country's major blocs secured a decisive edge...

...But Peres has been also sending out some important new signals...

...The Likud exploits the trepidations most Israelis share when it comes to war and peace...

...Thus much will depend on several fractious and increasingly fragmented religious parties, which include both hawks and doves...

...With the end of the Gulf conflict, the future role of Iraq becomes uncertain...

...it led the struggle for statehood, and, as the country's architect, it was regarded as its natural governor...

...Until 1977, this was always a matter of the secular Labor party or its chief predecessor, Mapai, usually in a "historic partnership" with the-once but no longer moderate-religious nationalists of the smaller National Religious party (NRP...

...Later in the month he stated that he wasn't interested in "the biography" of a Palestinian negotiating partner...

...For all these reasons recent statements by Peres that he will not join another "unity" coalition must be taken cautiously...

...And shortcomings in the immigrant absorption policies of Labor governments in the 1950s left long-standing resentments towards the former ruling party...

...Israel is a small country with slightly over four million people, and virtually everyone there has lost family and friends in the past conflicts...

...Since the Arab armies vastly outnumber Israel's-whose strategists have, since 1948, assumed at least three to one odds against the Jewish state-maintaining a technological edge is crucial for Jerusalem...

...A report in the Israeli press last summer estimated that another war against a coalition of Arab states (including Egypt and Jordan) would result in 40,000 Israeli casualties (10,000 dead and 30,000 wounded) at the cost of $1 billion...

...This is partly the result of an electoral system of proportional representation in which citizens vote not for individuals but for candidate lists, nominated and rank-ordered by each party...

...In the Israeli case, the Labor party's Shimon Peres became prime minister in 1984 and the Likud's Yitzhak Shamir became vice-premier and foreign minister...

...The "rejectionists" in the PLO have the strength to make any such move very costly for Arafat, that is if he is actually inclined to make it...

...During Peres's premiership Israel withdrew from its Lebanese imbroglio, and began to stabilize an economy reeling from the reckless policies pursued by Likud governments between 1977 and 1984...

...The Israeli victory in the Six Day War destroyed an overt military threat, but it also reopened the question of borders...

...Rather,"We are going to look at his positions.'' This is a way of saying that significant change on the Palestinian side, including within the PLO, might find an Israeli response...

...While this prospect is distant, and while Damascus is isolated in the Arab world because it supported Iran in the Gulf war, Syria is Israel's greatest immediate threat...

...In the Knesset elected in 1984, 23 percent of Labor MKs were of Afro-Asian background as opposed to 17 percent of the Likud...

...In American terms, one need only imagine who, or what, might get elected to Congress under a similar system...

...The more significant Iraqi threat comes from the air...

...It is deeply divided on solving the country's very pressing problems, including peace, the Palestinians, and an economy again beginning to sour, and this will be reflected in the election results...

...It is difficult to imagine any prospect more distant from the original Zionist dream...

...in 1986, they exchanged jobs...

...When Begin stepped down and Shamir became premier in 1983, the right wing lost its charismatic father figure, but none of its dogmatism...

...For example, if Labor wins a third of the vote, it will get a third of the seats in the legislature (forty MKs...

...The consequence was the curious phenomenon known as a "national unity government...

...The dovish Civil Rights List and the Arab parties will never back a Likud government, and the ultrana-tionalists of Tehiyah (renaissance) have the same attitude toward Labor...

...The very existence of the national unity government seems to have lowered the generally feverish political temperature of the country...

...Atop its list is a party's candidate for premier- Peres for Labor and Shamir for the Likud, this time around...

...His supporters were somewhat weakened in preelection jockeying last spring...

...This much is certain: Israel will have dramatic decisions to make...

...Indications are that the outcome may not be far different from the last time...

...Yet while Iraq forcibly depopulates its mountainous Kurdish regions, razes villages in over 4000 square miles, and apparently uses chemical weapons and gas against masses of civilians, creating tens of thousands of refugees, there has been, again, but modest international outrage and no action...

...Counterbalancing them, however, is an emerging younger generation that will, after this election, be a force to contend with...

...From the end of Israel's War of Liberation in 1949 through 1967, the vast majority of Israelis saw the question of borders as settled...

...This system, criticized as "ultra-democratic" by some, encourages a proliferation of minor parties, especially since Israel has a very low "threshold" clause in its electoral law...

...The secretary of Begin's cabinet, Arye Naor, was expelled from the party for supporting Peres's plan for an international peace conference...

...Labor's plan to fight this fall's campaign on the peace issue was upset by King Hussein's unexpected renunciation of Jordanian claims to the West Bank and Gaza this past summer...

...Finally, in 1977, the sea change took place...

...Labor, a social democratic party, favors a flexible policy of territorial compromise with Israel's Arab neighbors in order to attain peace, while the right-wing Likud opposes conceding any land Israel conquered in the 1967 war...

...And when, in June 1967, Prime Minister Levi Eshkol included Begin in the national unity government formed to face the threat of the Egyptian, Syrian, and Jordanian armies mobilized on Israel's borders, the right-wing leader gained new legitimacy...

...Syria, headed by the brutal Hafez al-Assad, vows it will attain military "parity" with Israel...

...Should he try to do so, however, he will face stiff opposition within his own party...

...The PLO chief is in a bind on all fronts: the longer he stalls, the stronger the fundamentalists in the Gaza Strip and West Bank become, and the more likely it is that the remarkable discipline of the intifadah-a discipline in marked contrast to the PLO itself-will break down...