Israel Elections Go Into High Gear
Israel's truncated election campaign gained intensity Tuesday with radio and TV spots in which Ariel Sharon promised unspecified "solutions" while his dovish challenger blasted the prime minister for allegedly preferring territory to the security of Israelis.
The campaign ads were dominated by the still-fresh memory of a double suicide bombing that killed 22 bystanders in Tel Aviv on Sunday, ending a lull of six weeks in such attacks and briefly shifting attention from a corruption scandal that has been eating away at the advantage enjoyed by Sharon's Likud in public opinion.
Meanwhile Israel carried out fresh raids in the West Bank and Gaza Strip Tuesday, reports CBS News Correspondent Robert Berger, following Sunday's bombing.
Israeli troops raided a refugee camp in the Gaza Strip, killing three Palestinian gunmen in a fierce battle that lasted several hours. In the West Bank, troops demolished the homes of two senior Palestinian militants near the town of Nablus. One home belonged to a wanted fugitive, the other to a gunman who attacked a nearby settlement last summer and killed five Israelis. The gunman was killed in that attack, and Tuesday his family was left homeless.
Among the three gunmen killed were two members of the Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade, a militia linked to Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement, and an activist in the militant Islamic Jihad group, according to followers of the two groups.
"I'm the one who can bring security and peace," intoned the 74-year-old Sharon in his first radio ad, invoking a cliché that no recent Israeli campaign has been without. "I can give the solutions," he added, without going into details.
Anonymous supporters were heard praising the incumbent as "a father" and "real leader." One said Sharon "knows what's good for the country" and another said he will vote for Sharon "despite all the reports and what is happening recently."
The Labor Party offered a specific solution: that Israel should erect an impenetrable border — an idea widely known in Israeli parlance as "the fence" — between itself and most of the West Bank. Such a fence already exists around Gaza, and no suicide bomber has come from the coastal strip in the current fighting.
The most controversial campaign ad was one by Israel's most hawkish anti-Arab party. It featured Israel's national anthem being sung in Arabic and praising suicide bombers, reports Berger. The message is that the Palestinian goal is the destruction of Israel. The Election Committee banned the ad after Tuesday, on grounds that it defames the national anthem.
The construction of the border fence began last year at the insistence of Labor — a member of Sharon's coalition until it bolted in November. But the pace has been leisurely, with only a few kilometers (miles) completed — reflecting Sharon's discomfort with the project opposed by Jewish settlers, a key Sharon constituency whose members would mostly be left on the other, "Palestinian" side of the fence.
"We are asking why — why did the Sharon government not build a security fence?" demanded Mitzna, who like Sharon is a retired general. "This fence was not built solely for political reasons — preferring the idea of the Greater Land of Israel to all our well-being."
Mitzna downplayed the other part of his plan — a return to peace negotiations with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat more or less at 6he point where they broke down as fighting erupted in September 2000.
The Labor government at the time was proposing a Palestinian state in Gaza and most of the West Bank, with a foothold in Jerusalem. Even though it failed to meet the Palestinians' goals, such a plan is seen by many as an electoral liability today, given the near-total breakdown of trust between the two sides.
The Likud ads, consequently, advised voters that what they could expect of Mitzna — in the words of one identified Likud supporter — was "to give away everything but not get anything in return."
Despite Israel's tough military measures, more than 700 people have died on the Israeli side and more than 2,000 on the Palestinian side in the 27 months since fighting erupted — the vast majority of casualties coming after Sharon took office in March 2001.
The National Union and Herut, extreme-right parties that support Sharon for premier, said that was because the outgoing government was too soft.
"It's not enough to win," argued Herut. "You have to hit (the Palestinians) so hard that the idea of a 100-year war will leave their heads... It's us or them."
Televised ads — which begin later Tuesday — must by law be aired during certain blocs of time on the three main stations for the next three weeks, with time apportioned in accordance with a party's representation in the outgoing Knesset.