Israel Prepares to Vote

...Closer examination, though, reveals that style divides them more than substance...

...In sum, the country's financial performance will surely be one of the Labor party's burdens in the campaign...

...Himself a member of the thrifty and almost painfully honest generation, he was nevertheless sur-> prisingly insensitive to rumors that some of his subordinates and a number of entrepreneurs had benefited from state assistance...

...Moreover, events have shown that the Arab camp remains deeply divided...

...The first, of course, concerns relations with the Arabs...

...His embezzlements were discovered when Swiss-Jewish financier Tibor Rosen-baum's bank ran into difficulties...

...Despite the fact that the party machine had not then fully forgiven him for joining Ben Gurion and Moshe Dayan in 1965 to form the splinter Rafi party, he made a very good showing and was given the second most powerful post in the Cabinet...

...But the Yom Kippur war suddenly threw a different light on the issue...

...That the Communists and other Leftists could join with the Orthodox and the Right-wing Likud to bring down the government on this "religious" issue was proof once more, if proof was still necessary, of the instability created by Israel's electoral system...

...As intended, this greatly embarrassed the Torah Front's rival, the bigger and less zealous National Religious party (NRP), whose participation in the Rabin coalition was vital to its survival...

...Il already has 39 seats in the Knesset, more than any other party except Labor...

...On January 3, Yadlin had suffered a heart attack upon learning of the suicide of his friend Avraham Ofer, the Minister of Housing, who was the center of an investigation about unsavory land dealings, bribes and illicit profits by Shikun Ovdim, the gigantic Histadrut-affiliated housing company where he had been director general...

...From Sadat's "end of beligerency?but no formal relations," through the PLO's rejection of a Palestinian state if its price is formal recognition, to Saudi Arabia's continued refusal to agree Israel has a right to exist, the movements toward peace appear far smaller than had been hoped for...

...Meanwhile, the colossal growth of the first 15 years of nationhood saw budgets skyrocket, and an all-out effort to speed up industrialization via ever-expanding government aid and subsidies resulted in frequent "corner-cutting" in the name of circumventing cumbersome bureaucracy...

...How much withdrawal from the occupied territories can be risked for what degree of normalization became an important point of contention among and inside the parties...

...And no amount of maneuvering could enEliahu Salpeter, a regular New Leader contributor, is currently European correspondent of Ha'aretz...

...Since announcing the formation of his Movement for Democratic Change a few months ago, he has attracted a considerable number of well-known personalities from the political and cultural scene as well as from the government bureaucracy, including some who resigned high posts to become active in the Movement.Yadin's main attraction is his promise of fundamental change, of a new start in the way things are run in Israel, and that is something the citizenry has been longing for ever since October 1973...

...This method of cutting deficits would have received warm praise had it been the result of a solid chance for peace...

...Offer's suicide did not settle doubts concerning the culpability of his colleagues...

...He has an easier time relating to people than does Rabin, and he does not hesitate to make decisions before all the facts are in...

...This assessment may be too optimistic...

...A number of developments over the past few weeks, though, have produced something of a new concensus here, blurring differences on the overall subject and making it extremely doubtful that it will loom large at the polls...

...Making the picture still gloomier for Labor is the connection in thf: public mind between the economic situation and the recent spate i>t scandals that have racked the country...

...Rabin digests enormous quantities of information, makes intelligent judgments, and effectively implements his decisions...

...But its no-retreat-from-the-occupied-territories policy, attractive to many of the religious parties' adherents as well as to some of Labor's hawks, deters middle-class voters, the backbone of Likud's General Zionist component.The great unknown is the showing Professor Yigael Yadin, a former Army Chief of Staff turned world-known expert on Palestine archeology, and one of the most respected figures in Israel, will make in the May elections...

...Compared to the reported activities of Tammany Hall in its heyday, the corruption in many Third-World countries and France's recent run of scandals, this nation's dirty-dealings may appear amateurish...

...Two of the three NRP Cabinet ministers abstained on the vote...

...Rabin's decisions are mostly solid and unoriginal, Peres' are often snap and innovative...

...So far, Yadin has made good progress assembling the various groups and remnants of the protest movements that sprang up after the Yom Kippur War, and seems to have a good deal of support among the educated city-dwellers...

...The press played a leading role in this and other cases...

...But by the time the welcoming ceremonies ended it was close to the beginning of the Sabbath—ostensibly respected by the govern ment—when Jews are not supposed to work or travel, and some of the guests had to complete their trips home after sunset.Consequently, the small, ultra-Orthodox Torah Front party introduced a no-confidence motion in the Knesset, charging the government with deliberately desecrating the Sabbath...

...On the contrary, his protestations of innocence, even those in the letters he left behind, only strengthened suspicions that while the illegal money may not have gone into his or friends' pockets, it probably wound up in Labor Party election coffers...

...Unfortunately, the Rabin government and its economists did not produce a fiscal miracle...

...But it was Peres who, in the '50s, realized the importance of possessing nuclear capability, and seized the French-Israeli honeymoon as an opportunity to obtain the foundations for it...

...The accomplishments of the two illustrate their dissimilar characters...

...Picking between the two is more difficult than a rundown of this kind might suggest, though, and the voters will have to decide whether the central committee made the right choice...

...His case has culminated in probably the most serious blow thus far to Labor party election hopes...

...By the '60s the situation had changed...

...Defense Minister Shimon Peres has mounted a very strong campaign against his long-time adversary, and when the party central committee selects the man to head the Labor list in May, it could decide that under present circumstances a new face is necessary...

...But given the uncertainties about what could suddenly occur across the borders, the cuts are widely seen as, at best, temporary and rather risky—a minus instead of a plus on the scorecards of Finance Minister Yehoshua Ra-binowitz and the Rabin government in general...

...But now there is a chance that on May 17 the accumulated quantitative changes in Israeli life since the Yom Kippur War will lead to a qualitative change in the way the country is governed...

...That same evening, the Minister of Housing drove to a deserted beach near Tel Aviv and shot himself...

...For instance, Peres is considered a "hawk" and Rabin a "moderate" in matters of foreign policy and territorial concessions...

...An understanding of the specific issues that are likely to be most prominent in the upcoming contest, however, requires a review of international conditions, the internal economic situation, and the shifting allegiances within and outside the Labor grouping...

...After first simply following clues revealed by several business failures, it moved into the forefront of the demand for police investigations of rumors that involved people in high places...

...And the Yadlin confession has virtually removed all doubt about this...

...It would then have to pay much of Yadin's largely unknown price for such a combination...

...In 1976, per capita private consumption and nonmilitary public consumption grew by 2-3 per cent, and the foreign payments deficit was reduced by $300 million more than a projected $500 million—from $3.8 billion to $3 billion...

...In other words, because less was spent on guns, Israelis had more money to buy butter...

...Everything I ever did," he said, "was for the party and the movement...

...While nobody here expects Yadin's party to come out of the elections even in second place, ahead of Likud, some analysts believe the Movement may end up third, with as many as 18 seats...

...Meanwhile, the possibility that for the first time a government not led by Labor could assemble a working majority in the Knesset, or that Labor could find it difficult to get a majority for its own leadership, has raised the hopes of other parties old and new...

...Under the existing setup, the nation is considered one big electoral district and parliamentary seats are divided in proportion to the total number of ballots cast for each party...

...The next day, when Ofer asked the Prime Minister to order a faster-paced investigation, Rabin told him he believed in his innocence, but that the police inquiry had to be allowed to take its course...

...The clamor soon led to Sa-pir's departure from his post, and with him gone there was no one to bail out his proteges when the worldwide recession halted their questionable business deals and bared occasional criminal practices...

...Even though no formal charges were ever brought against the Cabinet member, after a meeting attended by Rabin and his ministers of Justice and Police, Ofer was told he could not serve as the Labor party's campaign manager...

...These factors lent the country's public life a high degree of immunity from the corruption symptomatic of many newly-independent nations...

...In addition, the food price riots in Egypt and the stepped-up competition for leadership of the Islamic world have underscored the unlikelihood that the Arabs could come to the negotiating table sufficiently unified to grant the concessions necessary on their part for peace to become a possibility.Interestingly, Arab divisive-ness, combined with a restored faith in the rebuilt Army that was confirmed by the dramatic Entebbe rescue, apparently encouraged Israeli authorities to risk creating the illusion of an economic miracle...

...The strongest contestant (though not necessarily the most likely to succeed) will again be Menahem Begin's Likud party...

...Yet the Yadin phenomenon is so new and the decline of the Labor Alignment prestige so marked, that major changes in the political spectrum cannot be ruled out—especially if a few more scandals surface...

...Under such circumstances, relatively little harm was done by the cavalier attitude of some top government officials toward the elementary rules of accounting and accountability in handling public finances...

...Peres is thought to be a determined, fast decision-maker...

...In the Labor party itself, where the Prime Minister is already in the unusual position of facing a stiff fight for renomination, the Yadlin and Ofer affairs added to his woes, too: Both were thought of as "Rabin's men...

...His weaknesses include a rather vague foreign policy (he numbers among his supporters prominent hawks and loudly-cooing doves) and an equally vague program for restoring the country's economic health...

...For the Israeli voter is less jaded these days to proven or suspected wrongdoings...

...It was Rabin who, as Chief of Staff, shaped the Israeli Army into the clockwork machine that won the Six Day War...

...The reduction in imports without a matching decline in the standard of living, or any noteworthy growth in production, was brought about by a 12 per cent outback in defense spending...

...A CHANCE OF CHANGE Israel Prepares to Vote BY ELIAHU SALPETER Tel Aviv The forces that may ultimately reshape the face of Israeli politics were unleashed on a beautiful Friday afternoon last December, as the first F-15 fighter planes purchased from the United States arrived at one ot this country's major airbases...

...Many citizens saw their country's initial war losses as one of the consequences of weakening social values, and felt that cupidity and lax attitudes toward the spirit and letter of the law were partly responsible for those frightening early reverses...

...What is more all this was accompanied a scant 1 per cent growth in domestic production...

...How many corners they cut and where the money saved went were not momentous questions for Sapir...

...The Lebanese war and the reawakened Jordanian interest in the West Bank have reinforced Israel's belief that it is right in contending the PLO is not the spokesman for all Palestinians...

...The younger generation of executives now in key government and business positions continued the old-timers' casual disregard for the formalities of fiscal management, but they lacked the ideologically motivated frugality...

...A prime patron of this practice was the late Finance Minister Pin-chas Sapir...

...One result was the arrest last October of Asher Yad-lin, outgoing general manager of the huge health insurance and medical services section of the Histadrut (the Israeli trade union confederation...

...Optimists here speak not so much of the Socialists' displacement from the center—although the long-term trend may be accelerated, eliminating the inevitability of Labor domination—as of an eventual complete overhaul of the current party structures and mechanisms...

...But once the "moderate" Arabs began holding out the prospect of recognition?perhaps in the next generation," as Egyptian President Anwar Sadat likes to tell Western visitors?domestic reaction grew more complex...

...In the past year, relations between the two leaders have steadily deteriorated, adding to the impression built up by all that has been said and written about the conflicting positions they hold on vital issues...

...Furthermore, while the overall standard of living is somewhat higher, everybody is aghast at the 35-40 per cent inflation rate that has begun to inflict real damage on workers and many salaried civil servants in the lower and middle income brackets...

...Most Israelis now tend to agree that some of their unfriendly neighbors are showing signs of coming to the realization that Israel is here to stay (and few would deny that this in itself is significant...

...True, there has been a steady erosion of Labor's strength, yet even the traumatic Yom Kippur War failed to produce the expected political "earthquake...

...They tended to be regarded more as unethical behavior than as outright crime...

...He seemed least concerned when the allegations involved go-getter types who were adept at pushing development projects to a quick and apparently successful conclusion...

...Yet their seriousness cannot be minimized, particularly so far as political impact is concerned...

...His appeal to rural voters and urban workers, however, does not appear to be as strong...

...So long as its neighbors pursued their primitive policy of unconditional hostility, denying that Israel had the right to exist, this was hardly a question...

...His explanation for the shocking headlines is that the "Establishment" —meaning the Labor Alignment and its coalition partners—has been in power for long, and it may now be time for a change...

...Rabin declared the abstentions an abdication of collective responsibility and fired them, in effect expelling the whole NRP from the government...

...But whatever happens in the polling booths on May 17,it seems a safe prediction that the politics of this country will no longer be the same afterward...

...Rabin—who genuinely believes he is a very successful prime minister—is seen by the population as a hesitant, vacillating leader...

...Two months later, on December 31, 1973, Labor's main opposition, Likud (itself comprising three parties), received just about 30 per cent of the vote...

...At the same time, they have become increasingly aware of the enormous distance the Arabs still have to travel between realization and acceptance of Israel as a permanent part of the Middle Eastern fabric...

...In Israel's small and intimate society, the shady goings-on were fairly common knowledge...

...Peres also challenged Rabin after Golda Meir's 1974 resignation...

...Police moved in two days after Yadlin was nominated to be the new governor general of the Bank of Israel, a post equivalent to that of chairman of the Federal Reserve Board in the United States...

...Only the Communists, who took the Arab view, offered the option of capitulation, and they were rejected by 95 per cent of the electorate...

...Able it to find, among the other seven small parties, enough potential allies for an alternative to a Labor-led coalition...

...Considerable truth lurks in these caricatures, but the reality is more complicated...

...Personal frugality and scrupulous honesty were trademarks of Israel's leaders in the early years of statehood, and there happened to be little money around then as well...

...On that level they are indeed dramatically different, as their public images demonstrate...

...Reduced to the 53 votes of the Labor Alignment plus four from the tiny Independent Liberal party?four short of a majority in the 120-seat Knesset—the Premier was forced to call for new elections in May, six months sooner than constitutionally required...

...Peres grasps meanings instantly, intuitively—and sometimes superficially...

...Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, Defense Minister Shimon Peres and most of the nation's top military and political brass were on hand for the occasion...

...Paradoxically, because voter behavior has been fairly stable, every election in the past 20 years has resulted in the largest single vote-getter, the Labor party, needing at least two partners to form a working government...

...An example was Michael Tzur, a former director general of the Ministry of Commerce who became the head of several publicly- and semi-publicly-owned companies...

...A weakened defense posture is deemed too dear a price to pay for an array of impressive statistics...

...For on February 15 Yadlin not only pleaded guilty to accepting kickbacks, but insisted he did so under pressure to raise funds for the party...

...But all this takes him a very long time and a situation may suddenly change, leaving him with the choice of delaying while further data is studied or sticking to his previous, no longer relevant conclusions...

...Another aspect of the same argument, the proper attitude toward the Palestinians, and particularly Yasir Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), emerged during the so-called Arab "peace-offensive" following the end of the Lebanese Civil War...

...Even if Labor wins the elections, there is an outside chance that it would find a coalition with the Movement for Democratic Change the only practical way to maintain power in the government...