Israeli Party Picks a New Leader to Succeed Scandal-Plagued Olmert
A contest between "Mrs. Clean" Livni and "Mr. Security" Mofaz
JERUSALEM—Hillary Clinton's famous hypothetical question about the 3 a.m. phone call has been repeated ad nauseam here in the run-up to Wednesday's vote to determine who succeeds Ehud Olmert as leader of Israel's ruling Kadima (Forward) Party and, very possibly, as prime minister.
It's hard to say which candidate has Clinton's role—the security maven, Shaul Mofaz, or the woman, Tzipi Livni—but when Kadima voters were asked in a weekend poll, "Who would you prefer answering the red phone at 3 a.m.?" 41 percent said Livni, 34 percent Mofaz.
And that wasn't the only bad omen for Mofaz, the former army chief and defense minister. On the overriding question of who would make the better prime minister, he trailed Livni, currently the foreign minister, by 15 percentage points in weekend polls of Kadima voters conducted for Israel's two leading newspapers.
The vote on September 17 could turn out much closer than those polls indicate, however. Mofaz, currently the transportation minister, is thought to have the stronger get-out-the-vote machine. He also may benefit from a backlash over a news story this week that quoted an unnamed Livni campaign staffer calling his supporters "chach-chachim"—a Hebrew ethnic slur meaning riff-raff and used in reference to Israeli Jews of Middle Eastern background. (Mofaz was born in Iran.)
A last-minute urgency, if not desperation, seems to have energized Mofaz's campaign. "I believe that on Wednesday, I will win... with 43.7 percent of the vote," he told reporters, citing nothing more than his advisers' polls.
Livni, meanwhile, is trying to shake her troops out of complacency. "Don't get intoxicated by the perfume of the polls," she urged supporters.
Although there are two other candidates in the race, they are distant long shots, so the winner is almost certain to receive more than the 40 percent needed to avoid a runoff.
Olmert, who faces a welter of corruption investigations, has promised to resign as prime minister after the election. But he'll remain in office for at least several weeks until the new Kadima leader can win a majority in the Knesset behind a new a coalition government.
Olmert's successor could find this a difficult task. And if neither the new Kadima head nor opposition Likud Party leader Binyamin Netanyahu can put together a government, new elections would be called, leaving the country with a legally embattled, caretaker prime minister until as late as next spring.
In the meantime, in this week's first step toward a power shift in Jerusalem, Livni is the clear favorite.
Fifty years old, a tall, formidable, deliberative attorney and former Mossad agent, she is the "peace candidate" in a rivalry for national leadership that includes Labor Party leader Ehud Barak as well as Mofaz and Netanyahu.
Two years ago, she was alone among cabinet ministers in calling for an early end to the war in Lebanon. She's skeptical about the national consensus that says Iran will use nuclear weapons against Israel if it gets the chance. "The approach that says, 'Doomsday is coming, we're finished,' is incorrect," she told the Yediot Aharonot newspaper. She supports the land-for-peace negotiations with Syria and leads the land-for-peace negotiations with the Palestinians.
But with Israeli politics awash in corruption and acrimony, Livni's popularity may owe more to her "Mrs. Clean" reputation and quiet determination than to her dovish politics.
As for her gender, it does bring a new, fresh, Palinesque element to her candidacy. For some Israelis, though, it also brings to mind the late Golda Meir, who is blamed for the costly 1973 Yom Kippur War and generally is considered one of Israel's worst premiers.
Against Mrs. Clean, Mofaz is running as Mr. Security. Given the facts of life in the Middle East, Israel has often turned to ex-generals to run its political affairs. But after the Olmert era, which has been marked mainly by corruption and a war in which the generals didn't exactly shine, Israeli voters might be in the mood for change.
Reader Comments
ISRAEL WANTED DEAD OR ALIVE BY NEMESIS
Judeofascist Israel, being of negative net military and economic value to America, England, France, Russia, and China risks surprise retaliatory nuclear annihilation by Russia and China, if it initiates total war on any of its wealthy Middle Eastern neighbors, such as Iran, who are immensely valuable for their cultural contributions and great wealth in oil. And, by popular agreement of the United Nations of the World, the World would be happier and safer with Israel transformed into star dust in Holocaust III.
Israel’s net negative value is derived from its arsenal of 150 nuclear missiles, and notorious Marxist practice of systematically inciting people to hate and kill one another, nationally and inter-nationally, over cunningly fabricated irreconcilable economic or religious differences. Familiar historical examples are the catastrophically disastrous Russian, German, and Spanish Marxist revolutions; and most recently, the American unprovoked illegal bombing and occupation of Iraq, which sacrificed over a trillion dollars and 4,000 lives for the sole benefit of Israel.
Now, Israel and its supporting Diaspora are notoriously engaged in fanatically desperate propaganda efforts to provoke total war between the patriotic Christian American and Muslim Iranian peoples. But they are failing to incite enough fear and hatred to start a war, because of increasingly popular recognition that they are the common enemy of Iran and these nuclear superpowers.
The Israeli People, from their long exposure to European democratic and Christian culture, know perfectly well the moral and ethical rules that they must inevitably follow to secure their own survival. Every injustice that they have committed against their neighbors, in killing innocent civilians and robbing them of their infrastructure and land, must be fully addressed with apologies and monetary compensation. All of the incessant wailing, ranting, propaganda, extortion, and bribery by the universally condemned People of Israel are to no avail. Inevitably, Nemesis shall have her just retribution upon Israel, dead or alive.
OBAMAPHOBIA
Israel and the Diaspora, hysterically Obamaphobic, have been screaming for the bombing of Iran as she steadily grows in economic and military power. But now, since instigating the bombing of Iraq, no one hears these screams of the damned.
Why is it taking President Bush and Prime Minister Brown so long to again don their beanies and head for Israel, to renew their sacred vows of undying allegiance to Israel? Is it possible that these political prostitutes have betrayed the honor entrusted with them?
Why is it taking Supreme Mullah Khamenei so long to call for a fresh flood of Iranian blood, a great martyrdom that would lend credibility to Israel’s Obamaphobia? It is possible that the Iranians and Arabs have finally grown wise to Israel’s Neo-Marxist tactic of inciting mortal strife between Muslims and Christians?
Europeans, wildly Obamaphilic, have been cheering for peacemaker Obama and sneering at warmonger McCain. Is it possible that they condemn Israel’s land robbery and war crimes against the Palestinian People and instigation of the Iraq War, enabled by their sustainable parasitism on the wealth and blood of the American People? Is Obama their hope for a friendlier and safer World?
Why do the Russians and Chinese have loaded nuclear weapons pointed at the head of Israel? Is it possible that Israel’s arsenal of 150 nuclear weapons is a threat to some of their vital defenses?
Are Israel and the Diaspora inherently incapable of realizing that Nemesis eternally determines their special fate? What do these Judeofascist Land Robbers not see when they look in the mirror?
ISRAELI COLONIZATION BY PALESTINIAN EMIGRATION
Israel occupies that land usurped at the end of World War II from Palestinian territory, by the victorious British, for the colonial establishment of the millions of undesirable Marxist Jews, pathetic refugees from Hitler’s Nazi Germany and the USSR, who were categorically denied immigration into the United Kingdom and Europe.
Historically, entire populations of Europeanized Jews had previously been forcefully expelled democratically by England, France, Spain, and Germany after experiencing their culturally unacceptable patterns of anti-Christian and criminal competition. Their recent notorious adherence to Marxist revolutionary ideology stigmatized them further, as morally despicable and politically dangerous people, except in America where a large competitive population of this type had never previously been experienced.
Now, it is in the vital best interests of the United Nations of the World to formally accept Israel’s illegal existence as a permanent independent colony for all undesirable Jews from everywhere in World; after Israel and her supporting Diaspora formally apologizes, and justly and honorably agrees to fully compensate the Palestinians for all of their stolen territory, their destroyed infrastructure, and their losses of innocent lives.
Because it is the Palestinians, not the Israelis, who have been unjustly denied the inalienable Human rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for the past 60 years; only the Palestinians have the moral power to sanction Israel’s right to permanently colonize Palestinian territory; and they shall grant that occupation right only after having received sufficient economic retribution to enable all desirable Palestinians to then happily emigrate and acquire education, property, and immigrant citizenship in those countries where their social and economic contributions are welcome.
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