Marie Colvin - On the Front Line

Israel’s peace hopes wither: Netanyahu victory gives voice to the hardliners

2 June 1996

Marie Colvin, Gaza; Andy Goldberg, Tel Aviv

It was a mournful gathering. Meeting for lunch in Gaza yesterday, Palestinian politicians mulled over the results of Israel’s election with an air of grieving relatives at a wake. The surprise election of Binyamin Netanyahu as prime minister, they grimly concurred, could prove a mortal blow to peace. Even the menu seemed to symbolise their worst fears. They were eating roast dove.

The Likud leader, they recalled, had vowed his first act would be to close Orient House, the Palestinians’ diplomatic outpost in Jerusalem.

What is more, he plans to ignore Shimon Peres’s promise to withdraw Israeli troops from the West Bank city of Hebron, which was to be the next step on the road to a permanent peace. ‘We feel the Israelis have voted against peace,’ sighed Um Jihad, a Palestinian minister. ‘There are difficult days for us ahead.’

The shock at the rise of Netanyahu was not limited to the Palestinian camp. President Bill Clinton congratulated him, as did Peres, his defeated rival and Labour leader. Yet they were stunned. Clinton had urged Israelis to vote for peace, in a thinly disguised endorsement of Peres.

Another worried man was Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian leader. He had stayed awake until 7am on Thursday after the previous day’s voting. He watched the returns on television in anxious disbelief. Netanyahu won the vote by just one percentage point. Yesterday an adviser said the Palestinian leader was ‘in a state of shock’. Israel’s political status quo had been turned on its head.

The man responsible relaxed yesterday with his wife and children at their home in Jerusalem. Within hours of his victory he had begun to look as if he had been a prime minister all his life. He waved regally to a crowd before stepping into a chauffeur-driven Cadillac for a trip to the Wailing Wall, where he slipped a thank you note to God into a crack. To the delight of cameramen, he ruffled the blond locks of his two young sons as they arrived home.

He has never even held a cabinet post and at 46 is a beginner by contrast with Peres, who had counted on five decades of experience and a Nobel prize for peace to secure him victory. Yet Netanyahu espouses an old idea: Israel’s paramount need, he believes, is for strong government that can provide security for Jews. He has consequently ruled out an Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights, effectively scuttling any chance of a peace deal with Syria. He has promised to resume Jewish settlement in the West Bank and said he would send the army and Shin Bet, the Israeli intelligence service, back into what is now autonomous territory patrolled by Palestinian soldiers.

By contrast, Peres seems to have believed he was leading a nation converted to peace, satisfied with a booming industry and improved economy. It was a fatal miscalculation. A wave of suicide bombings by Hamas extremists in which dozens of people were killed left the country feeling pessimistic about Peres’s vision of a new and peaceful Middle East.

Supporters of Peres made pilgrimages to the grave of Yitzhak Rabin, the prime minister who was assassinated in November by Yigal Amir, a right-wing student. One left a note saying ‘Sorry, friend’, a melancholy echo of Clinton’s ‘Goodbye, friend’ uttered at Rabin’s funeral.

Netanyahu had been unrelenting in his opposition to Rabin, who led his country into the historic peace agreement with the Palestinians in 1993. Netanyahu would stand among the corpses left by an Islamic fundamentalist attack aimed at stopping the peace process, blame the government for the deaths and call for the revocation of the Oslo accord. He turned a blind eye to posters at Likud rallies depicting Rabin in Nazi uniform. Rabin’s widow, Leah, refused to shake Netanyahu’s hand at his funeral and was said to be in despair at Likud’s victory.

Rabin’s death had left Peres with a seemingly unassailable 26-point lead. But ironically, it was Peres’s attempt to ‘get tough’ that led to his downfall. With his approval, Israel’s security services used a booby-trapped mobile phone to assassinate Yehia Ayyash, a Hamas bomber revered by the Islamic fundamentalist group. Israel hailed the death as a glorious blow against terrorism: but then Hamas struck, killing 63 people in revenge suicide bombings. Peres’s lead was wiped out overnight.

Sensing the newly subdued mood in Israel, Netanyahu restrained his accusations and let the bloody scenes on television do the talking. He moved to capture the political centre, refining his position on the Oslo accord from outright rejection to acceptance of the agreement as a fait accompli that needed revision.

And, in what would be the deciding factor in the campaign, the worldly Netanyahu wooed the ultra-orthodox vote, 10% of the electorate. Netanyahu took to wearing a skullcap and adopted the phrase ‘with God’s help’. He persuaded the rabbis that Likud’s belief in Eretz Israel or the greater Israel that includes the biblical land of the Jews was preferable to Labour’s commitment to territorial compromise.

One of the most dramatic moments of Netanyahu’s campaign came with his endorsement by Rabbi Yitzhak Kadurie, a 106-year-old mystic, 36 hours before polling. Every Israeli newspaper and television station showed pictures of the frail rabbi, his hands resting on the head of a reverential Netanyahu, saying: ‘Bibi, Bibi, Bibi, may God grant that next week you will be premier.’ More than 90% of the ultra-orthodox community voted for Netanyahu. This tipped the election.

Netanyahu was also helped by the disastrous Labour campaign. While Likud was stealing Labour’s message of peace, Labour tried to dress up as Likud. Peres bombed southern Lebanon to hit Hezbollah, the Islamic fundamentalist group, but everyone saw it as an election ploy. The operation backfired when Israeli artillery fire killed 100 Lebanese civilians in a United Nations camp at Qana, losing Peres some of the Israeli Arab support.

In a final blow, Likud mounted a scare campaign that touched on racist themes. Posters proclaimed ‘Netanyahu is good for the Jews’ and warned them that Peres was the candidate of the Arabs.

But Netanyahu still might not have won had Peres not practically given the election away. While a brash and confident Netanyahu pressed ahead, Peres was advised to ignore him and act like a statesman. It is a role that has never worked for him. He has lost every election campaign he has waged, including two earlier runs for prime minister. He could not shake off his image of a loser. The contrast between the two could not have been more noticeable when the results were announced on Friday night. A jubilant Netanyahu greeted crowds as he entered his home in what was an old Arab neighbourhood before 1967, shouting they should welcome ‘a new Israel of peace and security’.

Peres spent the day in seclusion in his 12th-floor apartment in a luxurious suburb of Tel Aviv. He emerged briefly, looking exhausted and speaking in a flat voice. ‘This was not a choice between two parties,’ he told waiting reporters. ‘It was a choice between two different ways. We shall remain loyal to our way.’ But at 72, he can do little to implement his vision. There will be no more elections.

This week will see the first steps towards Netanyahu’s ‘new Israel’. The West and Israel’s Arab neighbours are hoping Netanyahu will be more pragmatic than his campaign rhetoric suggested.

But there are few early signs of moderation. He owes enormous debts to right-wing nationalist and ultra-orthodox religious parties, which themselves won unprecedented numbers of seats in the Knesset. To put together a governing coalition Netanyahu will have to give the right-wing and religious parties ministries and a say in policy.