Avigdor Lieberman, a burly, bearded politician who came to Israel from Moldova in 1978, is a divisive figure.
To his backers, he is a straight-talker who has clear-cut solutions to Israel’s problems. To his critics, he is a thinly disguised racist and a threat to Israeli democracy.
The leader of the ultranationalist Yisrael Beiteinu party, whose strongest power base is among fellow Russian speakers from the former Soviet Union, Lieberman is emerging as a potent force in the Israeli election race. He could be positioned to play a key role in the formation of the next Israeli government after voting this Tuesday.
Polls show Lieberman’s party winning as many as 19 seats in the 120-member parliament, overtaking the center-left Labor party as the third-largest faction in the legislature. Both leading contenders for prime minister, opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, could find it hard to form a coalition without Lieberman.
His popularity has been boosted by the nationalist fervor generated by the recent war against Hamas in Gaza and by discontent with leaders of mainstream parties who are seen as offering little new, analysts say.
At a time when the Obama administration is pushing to revive Mideast peace efforts, Lieberman opposes talks with the Palestinians based on an exchange of land for peace.
But Lieberman’s main targets are Israel’s Arab citizens, who he insists should be made to sign a loyalty oath and commit to national service before receiving the standard identity card that affirms citizenship.
“Without loyalty, there is no citizenship,” says his party’s campaign slogan, plastered on billboards and repeated on television ads.
Lieberman also advocates a land swap in which areas of Israel with large concentrations of Arabs would become part of a Palestinian state while Israel would annex areas of the West Bank with large blocs of Jewish settlements.
About 20 percent of Israel’s 7 million citizens are Arabs, and a dozen serve in parliament.
Lieberman says extremism and identification with Israel’s enemies are spreading among its Arab citizens, some of whom took to the streets last month to demonstrate support for Palestinians who were under Israeli bombardment in Gaza.
“Israel is under a dual terrorist attack, from within and from without,” Lieberman told a security conference on Monday. “Terrorism from within is always more dangerous than terrorism from without.”
Ahmad Tibi, an Arab lawmaker who is a frequent target of Lieberman’s broadsides, said he expected the international community to boycott an Israeli government that would include Lieberman, as European leaders did when far-right leader Joerg Haider joined Austria’s government in 2000.
“Haider was local, and his racism was directed against immigrants and foreigners,” Tibi said. “The Israeli fascist model is unique, because we are talking about an immigrant who directs his racism against the indigenous people, against us.”
Tibi said Lieberman was promoting a “politics of hate, which is very popular in the aftermath of a war, and he is touching the lowest common denominator of the Israeli public.”
Yehuda Ben Meir, a public opinion expert at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv, said that while Lieberman’s party started off representing Russian-speaking immigrants, it has now broken into the Israeli mainstream, bolstered by candidates who are not newcomers, like Danny Ayalon, a former ambassador to Washington.
Ben Meir said the party gained further ground during the Gaza war when Israeli Arab legislators loudly denounced the military campaign, riling many Jewish Israelis who saw them as giving comfort to the enemy.
“The war in Gaza, like any war, raises patriotic feelings, and there was a sense of being isolated internationally, with your back to the wall, a feeling of sticking to your tribe, and he answers to this,” Ben Meir said.
Riding the patriotic wave during the fighting, Lieberman led an attempt in parliament to have Arab parties disqualified from running in the elections, but the move was overruled by the Supreme Court.
A resident of the West Bank settlement of Nokdim, Lieberman, 50, served as a minister in the outgoing Israeli government but resigned to protest the renewal of peace talks with the Palestinians at a conference in Annapolis, Md., in 2007.
His ministerial portfolio was the threat from Iran, and he has been outspoken about the subject. “A nuclear Iran is like Hitler with nuclear weapons,” Lieberman told the Haaretz newspaper in a recent interview.
In 2005, Lieberman was fired from the Cabinet by then Prime Minister Ariel Sharon when he opposed Israel’s withdrawal of settlements and troops from the Gaza Strip.
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jogreenberg@tribune.com
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