Israel's Uncertain Elections

...Although Foreign Minister Yigal Allon, his main rival, acknowleged the futility of a contest, his backers in the kibbutz movement applied some leverage...

...That, of course, made possible the selection of junior partners who presented the least painful conditions, usually the National Religious party (NRP) and the Independent Liberals...

...Then there is the candidate who is running to stay out of jail, Samuel Flatto-Sharon, a multimillionaire wanted in France for fraud...

...Other high-ranking figures stepped down to avoid the possibility of embarrassment...

...He is campaigning industriously, mainly among the poor, pledging to improve their plight if elected...

...it is most vulnerable: on its inability to cope either with inflation or the recent wave of crippling strikes, and on the wave of scandals in Labor's ranks (including the suicide of Housing Minister Avraham Ofer and the resignation of Yitzhak Rabin...

...They threatened to put up a separate list of candidates in the elections, which would have sharply increased Likud's chances of victory, unless their man was guaranteed his pick of portfolios in the next government...

...Such shenanigans would not be possible under the reforms advocated by the DMC...

...Another of the DMC's proposals would require parties to pick their Parliamentary nominees in American-style primaries, a procedure the Movement itself followed in composing its first slate of candidates...

...This gives Knesset representation to any organization capable of polling 1 per cent of the national vote, encouraging splinter parties and pressure groups...

...Under Israel's present system of proportional representation, the entire country is one constituency...

...Shalom Cohen, another Black Panther leader and the originator of a party called Freedom, has likewise spent much of the campaign in jail...

...The Communists have always scored better in Israel with Arab nationalists than with Jews, and in an attempt to broaden their appeal in the Jewish community they placed one Charlie Briton high in their sequence of candidates...

...Yitzhak Rabin's decision to step down as prime minister after he was found to have violated foreign currency regulations again opened the nomination, but Defense Minister Shimon Peres, who previously had lost out to Rabin in a close vote, had it sewn up...

...Even without the initial support of Sharon and Dayan, analysts here believe, it is possible that Likud will top the polls and present Begin with a mandate to form a government...

...Begin also tried to woo General Moshe Dayan...

...Indeed, after listening to the established parties uttering slogans instead of taking clear stands, one cannot help seconding a comment of the Jerusalem Post: "Unequalled inanities...

...The new organizations each had to put up a $4,000 deposit—forfeitable by parties that fail to poll 1 per cent of the ballots cast and are thus unable to qualify for participation in the distribution of seats...

...In part, this would also seem to be guaranteed by the fact that there are a record number of 23 parties in the field, of which only 10 are represented in the outgoing Parliament...

...In such a situation the DMC, a first-time party, would probably turn out to be the fulcrum...

...At the 11th hour he put forward General Ariel Sharon, hero of the Yom Kippur War...

...The United Arabs, led by a Moslem, a Druse and a Bedouin who are members of the current Knesset and have supported the government consistently, enjoy the backing of the Israeli Establishment...

...The crucial question would then become whether he could mobilize enough support in Parliament among the liberals, the religious parties and the Democratic Movement for Change (DMC) to win a vote of confidence...

...In the subsequent coalition negotiations it was always in a commanding position, since no combination of parties to the Right or Left could ever offer a feasible alternative...

...The General is now running under his own banner...

...Over the last eight years, however, Menahem Begin's Likud, a bloc of Right-wing parties, has advanced at the Alignment's expense, cutting down its Knesset margin from 37 seats to the present 12...

...Still, he must be regarded as a potential time bomb: If he feels Labor has gone soft on the question of the territories, he could cross the floor at a critical moment, taking others with him...

...The challenge comes from an assortment of political parties that are divided among themselves ideologically, but can nevertheless be classified as "Right of Labor": in favor of a freer economy and to varying degrees less inclined to give up occupied Arab territory...

...And in some cases there were astonishing outcomes...

...All froth, no substance...

...Their advocacy of Israeli withdrawal from all land taken in the 1967 War and their amenability to a Palestinian state between Jordan and Israel are so unpopular, they dream these days not of power but merely of returning a handful of their vociferous deputies to the Knesset...

...The parties on the Left, on the other hand, pose no problem for Labor...

...It was a unique phenomenon in Israeli politics, and the next Knesset will have an unprecedented number of new faces...

...Yadin, commander of the Israeli Defense Forces in the War of Independence and a famous archaeologist, has won over some highly respected personalities from Labor who have given up achieving reforms from within, as well as some mavericks from Likud...

...For example, oriental Jews from developing Israeli towns and women were both underrepre-sented...

...The DMC, the Black PantheTS, Flatto-Sharon, and Kahane have all added some spice to what would otherwise have been a rather dull, albeit significant, campaign...

...Decisions were brought to large party forums rather than left to a handful of backroom leaders...

...Both would prefer a partial reform: the election of 40 Knesset members under the present system, with the other 80 coming from 16 regional constituencies that would choose five deputies each by proportional representation...

...Party leaders stuck to their principles, and resisted pressure to shuffle the list...

...Likud refused, and Dayan will return to the Knesset as a Labor deputy...

...Two ministers in Rabin's Cabinet, the Speaker of the House, the coalition whip, and other veterans were all defeated in their bids for renomination...

...They have the potential of gathering enough seats in the Knesset elections to form Israel's first non-Labor government...

...Not content with urging annexation of the occupied West Bank of the Jordan, he proposes that any Arab who refuses to declare allegiance to the Jewish State should be taken to a border and forced across...

...Peres balked at first, but he soon came around and Allon decided on the ministry of defense...

...The new party appears likely to catch the fancy of tens of thousands of alienated Labor voters whom Likud, the religious parties and the Leftists could not have hoped to sway...

...Unfortunately for Begin, Dayan considered Likud's demand for Israeli sovereignty over all of the captured areas too extreme...

...He is personally well off and could have paid the fine, he explained, but he did not want to exploit his wealth...

...The ticket that has resulted is headed by the new party's outstanding leaders, yet it is in some respects unbalanced...

...The deal was torpedoed, though, by party officials who considered Sharon a troublemaker...

...Much of the Movement's appeal stems from its central demand: the introduction of direct elections for Parliament within two years...

...Given the alternative of paying a fine or spending 60 days behind bars for participating in a violent riot in Tel Aviv protesting price increases, Cohen chose prison...

...Similar maneuvering takes place within the parties, too, as last month's Labor party Central Committee meeting in Tel Aviv demonstrated...

...While Labor has never won a clear majority in a national election, it has for three uninterrupted decades constituted the country's largest political grouping, and hence after each contest has received a Presidential mandate to form a government...

...A somewhat less offbeat candidate is Jewish Defense League leader Meir Kahane, who now lives in Jerusalem and makes Likud and General Sharon seem like gentle doves...

...the Druse community somehow came out overrepresented...

...Labor agreed to some programmatic concessions—such as Sabbath enforcement regulations as a sop to the NRP—but gave its allies minor ministerial portfolios, like tourism, welfare, religious affairs, and interior, jealously retaining the positions of major political power for itself...

...Seeking to improve the personal image of his party's slate, Begin, from his bed in the Tel Aviv hospital where he was recovering from a heart attack, scouted up to the April 11 filing deadline for charismatic figures who might join the ticket...

...Gaining a seat in the Knesset would not guarantee Flatto-Sharon safety here, yet it would constitute another obstacle for the French to overcome...

...The heads of the other two slates cooperated with Rabin's administration too, but were disgruntled at not being nominated by Labor...

...Founded by an attractive group of political novices and led by Professor Yigael Yadin, it seeks to take advantage of the groundswell of discontent brought on by the trauma of the Yom Kippur War—the demand for a change in the leadership that allowed the country to be caught unprepared...

...Arabs hostile to Israel unexpectedly did not put up separate tickets this year, uniting instead with the Communists to create the Democratic Front for Peace and Equality...

...This year, campaigning as the "one party . . . able to bring about a change and lead the nation," Likud is attacking the government where Moshe Brilliant, a new contributor, is a member of the Tel Aviv bureau of the New York Times...

...THE CHALLENGE FROM THE RIGHT Israel's Uncertain Elections BY MOSHE BRILLIANT Tel Aviv When Israelis go to the polls on May 17, the perenially ruling Labor Alignment will face the toughest test of its hegemony since David Ben Gurion proclaimed the Jewish State in 1948...

...He was willing to switch parties only if the challengers would dilute their platform by stating the land would not be annexed until peace talks with Jordan were fully exhausted...

...The former defense minister was particularly unhappy with Labor's expressed readiness to cede to Jordan part of the West Bank territory occupied during the Six Day War...

...Earlier this year, some 132,000 Israelis signed a petition calling upon the government not to send him back in retaliation for Paris' refusal to extradite Abu Daoud, who reputedly organized the massacre of the Israeli contingent at the 1972 Munich Olympic Games...

...Despite having been accorded a safe place on the Labor party slate, Dayan held back his signature of acceptance until the last day while he talked discreetly with Likud leaders...

...Israel's Black Panthers are militant Jews originally from Arab countries who claim they are victimized by the Jews of European stock that dominate the Israeli Establishment...

...Labor, claiming credit for the cessation of bloodshed on the borders while focusing on the territorial policies of its main opposition that could lead to war, has tended to snicker benignly at the DMC and dismiss its members as dilettantes...

...The Movement has served notice that if it is in a position after the elections to tip the scales toward Peres or Begin, it will ignore its ideological proximity to Labor and lean to the side that endorses its reform plan...

...Three of the lists are Arab...

...As of now, Labor and Likud have indicated a commitment to electoral reform but are in no hurry...

...citizens vote for whole slates, not their individual choices, and the Knesset's 120 seats are divided among the parties according to the number of votes received...

...Briton was sentenced to three months in jail recently for breaking into a Jerusalem dairy and stealing cheeses that his organization, the Black Panthers, later distributed to the poor...

...Assuming an 80 per cent turnout of the country's 2.2 million eligible voters, 18,000 votes would be needed to avoid forfeiture...

...The kibbutz vote would be spread among election districts located throughout the country, and Allon's supporters would therefore be deprived of their power base...

...The party thus seems to be practicing one of the very abuses it is seeking to prevent—a minority exploiting the balance of power to force a majority to accept its views...

...It has prevented any one party from winning a clear majority, and enabled groups needed for a coalition to exact demands that would otherwise be denied them...

...This could prove to be a fatal mistake...

...While rival parties may have chortled at the DMC's "runaway democracy," they democratized their nomination procedures as well...