But compared with whom? In a contest with the beleaguered 76-year-old Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, Rabin, 70, appeared vigorous and tough. The Labor Party itself underwent a similar campaign makeover. To shed its reputation for being too conciliatory toward Palestinians and Arab neighbors, the left-of-center party kept a lid on its doves. It also sold Israelis on the illusion of direct elections in a country where they don’t yet exist: a ballot cast for the party, Labor argued, was a vote for Rabin.
Likud, meanwhile, proved to be an easy target. It presided over 11.6 percent unemployment, a historic high. Ariel Sharon’s overzealous housing program forced the government to buy back thousands of empty new homes built for immigrants from the former Soviet Union. And Shamir’s failure to win the $10 billion U.S. loan guarantee to resettle Russian Jews hurt, too. Immigrant rage, according to Israeli pollsters, cost Likud four or five Knesset seats. Labor made much of the $1 billion-plus spent yearly on West Bank settlers, many of them Ashkenazi Jews of Eastern European descent. Those funds, Rabin argued, could have been better spent in the drug- and crime-infested neighborhoods of Tel Aviv, where many Sephardic Jews (originally from Spain, Portugal and Arab lands) live.
Labor didn’t have to exploit the ancient animosity between Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews. Likud did it all by itself. Early in the campaign, Moroccan-born Foreign Minister David Levy, who represents the Sephardic camp, objected that his Likud followers were getting low-rent treatment compared with old-line Ashkenazi politicians like Sharon and Defense Minister Moshe Arens. After Shamir dismissed the complaint as a joke, Levy sat out the election and Likud lost the support of many Sephardic Jews who had helped bring the party to power in 1977.
While Shamir crumbled under party disputes and national crises, Rabin grew more attractive. He successfully dismissed accusations that a failure of nerve caused him to disappear, if not break down, during critical hours in both the 1948 and 1967 wars.
As Israelis pondered the 25th anniversary of the Six Day War, Rabin, who trained and led the Israel Defense Forces to victory, reassured the electorate that he wouldn’t give up all the spoils of battle. His brutal policy against the Palestinian uprising when he was defense minister (1984 to 1990)–“might, power and beatings”–suddenly looked judicious to voters indignant over the stabbing death of a Jewish schoolgirl, allegedly by an Arab youth. (Likud seemed bereft of new ideas on handling the intifada.) Forgiven, too, were the failed opportunities for peace while Rabin was ambassador to Washington (1968-73) and prime minister in the 1970s, as well as the scandal of his wife’s foreign bank account and the flap over the arrival of U.S.made F-15s in Israel on the Sabbath that brought down his government and secured Likud’s lock on power.
Even teaming up with the left-wing Meretz still leaves Labor five seats short of a majority in the 120-member Knesset, and forces Rabin to reach out to either ultra-Orthodox parties or disaffected Likud allies. But his success last week transcended such haggling. In the past, the country’s system of proportional representation has all but ruled out a single-party majority. Now, by subordinating his party to the appeal of his personality, Rabin may usher in a new political era that transforms that system permanently.
