Russian Bloc in Israel Looks to a Strongman
High-Security, Anti-Arab Platform Finds Favor With Swing Voter Group

By Scott Wilson
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, March 22, 2006

BEERSHEBA, Israel -- The night began in Hebrew, then shifted to Russian.

That's when the fun began at the Desert Inn hotel, where Avigdor Lieberman, head of the Israel Is Our Home party, delivered a pair of speeches one recent evening that demonstrated why his party is rising faster than any other with less than a week to go before Israel's elections.

The hall was only half full for his Hebrew speech, which he used to outline his plan to draw Israel's final border in a way that would exclude many of the country's Arab citizens. Then the bouncy Russian folk tunes started, hands began clapping, and a lifeless rally became a dynamic standing-room-only event.

Elderly men and women called out "Ivet," Lieberman's Russian name, as he took the microphone to deliver the same message in his mother tongue and urge a show of Russian unity behind his candidacy. The response was electric.

"This is a crucial moment" for the hundreds of thousands of immigrants who came to Israel after the Soviet Union's collapse, Lieberman said, "a last chance to be integrated. After 15 or 16 years here, they are still an isolated community."

Once the secular backbone of support for Ariel Sharon, Israel's Russian-speaking citizens have been searching for a new strongman since the prime minister's debilitating stroke. Most of them are turning to Lieberman, a 47-year-old immigrant from Moldova whose program has proved most appealing to the campaign's only bloc of floating voters.

Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union now number 1.3 million, and the 740,000 eligible voters among them make up about 15 percent of Israel's electorate. By voting as a cohesive unit, they have traditionally exercised far greater clout than their numbers would suggest.

Mostly poor, secular and preoccupied with Israel's security, the Russians -- as the group is collectively known even though they come from a number of former Soviet republics -- have often been decisive in determining which party governs the country. Pollsters estimate that the Russian bloc, on its own, will elect the equivalent of 19 of the Israeli parliament's 120 seats in the March 28 elections.

"The whole game for them this year is finding a new a leader," said Eliezer Feldman, a Russian immigrant and a leading pollster in the community. "They have come to realize that political programs don't mean much -- either they are impossible to implement or take too long to matter. What's most important is the personality."

The Russians are concentrated in several cities along the coastal plain, in the Galilee region and here in the Negev, Israel's poorest region, where resentment runs high among Russian Jews because of the soaring Arab birthrate, building by Arabs without permits and the competition for low-wage jobs.

Many Russian immigrants have never learned Hebrew and rely for information on their own newspapers, commonly xenophobic in tone, and two Russian-language television stations. They worry about rising crime rates, the Jewish state's prohibition of civil marriages and funerals, and the flagging of government services on which many depend.

But security is an overriding concern. A high proportion of Russians serve in the military, and many also use Israel's public transportation system, a prime target of Palestinian suicide bombers during the recent uprising.

"Most of us came from a big empire, so we want a secure Israel," said Sergei Podrazhansky, editor of the Russian-language daily Vesty, who arrived from Ukraine in 1990. "This matters more to immigrants of the former Soviet Union than having an open democracy."

In recent elections, the Russians rallied around Sharon, the bluff, Russian-speaking war hero whom Feldman described as a "mythological figure" to many of them. Sharon was serving as housing minister when the Soviet Jews arrived in huge numbers in the early 1990s, an influx that Israel encouraged to strengthen the state's Jewish majority.

But their reception was rocky, and Natan Sharansky, the Soviet political dissident who arrived in Israel in 1986 after nine years in prison, founded an ethnic Russian party to promote their integration into Israeli society. The party won seven parliamentary seats in the 1996 elections, the first it contested.

Sharansky's Aliyah party merged with Sharon's Likud in 2003 after suffering a steep decline at the polls. Sharansky served as a minister without portfolio until May 2005, when he resigned to protest Sharon's plan to withdraw Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip. Now he is No. 10 on the candidate list put forward by Likud, which Sharon and many of his followers quit late last year to form their own party, called Kadima. The prominent spot on the Likud slate virtually assures Sharansky of a place in the next Knesset, as Israel's parliament is known.

"I said at the time that if it were successful, we wouldn't need a Russian party in 10 years," Sharansky said in an interview. "Now the idea of a separate Russian party is an idea that belongs in the past."

Likud's Russian-language posters appear on the sides of buses in Jerusalem, and the party imported a campaign consultant from Moscow to help recruit Russian support. But Likud, now led by former prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu, is projected to receive only about 14 percent of the Russian vote.

That is about the same share as predicted for the front-running Kadima, now led by Sharon's former deputy, Ehud Olmert. Kadima has included six Russian-speaking candidates on its list and invokes Sharon in its appeals to the group.

"The Russian vote and its rising voice is expected to be very right-wing," said Marina Solodkin, the deputy minister of immigrant absorption, who is the highest-ranking Russian immigrant on Kadima's list. "The Russians who vote for Kadima will be the ones who have succeeded here."

The more dovish Labor Party, headed by the Moroccan-born union leader Amir Peretz, has mostly given up on the Russian vote. The Russians are wary of his socialist-sounding rhetoric -- and his bristly mustache reminds many of Stalin's.

Since mid-February, Lieberman's party has jumped from a projected five Knesset seats to 10 in recent polls. That strength could help give Lieberman an important role in the next governing coalition, although Peretz has said the Labor Party would not join a government that included Lieberman.

Lieberman was 20 when he arrived in Israel in 1978, ahead of the post-Soviet wave. He served in the military and worked as a baggage handler for the national airline, El Al, which he privatized decades later as Sharon's transportation minister. His Russian supporters, he said, understand his life story as "the American dream of a self-made man."

For years, his political home was Likud, the party devoted to the ideal of Greater Israel, a Jewish state stretching from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River. He lives with his family in the West Bank settlement of Nokdim, although like Sharon he abandoned the idea that Israel can hold all of the West Bank and still maintain its Jewish majority. "For me," he told his audience here, "there is no point in being here if this is not a Jewish state."

Lieberman proposes the redrawing of Israel's border in a way that would exclude a strip of Arab cities adjacent to it. The roughly 150,000 Arab citizens of Israel who live in those areas would join the Palestinian territories. In return, Lieberman would annex the largest Jewish settlements in the West Bank.

"In all of our documents it says we are a Jewish democratic state, but no one knows what to do with the Arabs," said Podrazhansky, the newspaper editor. "I know that even the most left-wing person in Israel wants to wake up and not see any Arabs here. That is a dream."

Lieberman would also require all Israelis to sign an oath at the age of 16 pledging acceptance of the flag, which bears the Star of David, and a national anthem that is a Zionist hymn predating Israel's creation. Those who refused to sign would be allowed to work inside Israel but would not have the right to vote.

"The problem with the Arabs inside Israel must come before the Palestinian problem," Lieberman told the crowd. "Once the state is more homogeneous, it will develop faster."

Alex Odovosky, a truck driver from Beersheba whose father was killed by a roadside bomb near Gaza a few years ago, agreed.

"His is a different way than Kadima, Labor or Likud," said Odovosky, 25, whose family emigrated from Ukraine. "He has the resource and self-will to implement this. His plan is Jewish, Zionist and correct."