Count Doron as one more bearer of bad news for Ehud Barak. As the lackluster campaign for Israel’s next prime minister drew to a close last week, polls showed Likud candidate Sharon beating Barak by as much as 20 percent, with the gap growing wider. True, Israeli polls aren’t always accurate, and there’s always a chance that the genuine prospect of a Sharon victory could cause many nervous voters to change their minds at the last moment. But a tour of the country conducted by NEWSWEEK on the eve of the election revealed that the disappointment of many former Barak supporters far outweighs the dread they feel about Sharon. From kibbutzniks in the Jordan Valley to Russian immigrants in the capital to Arab Israelis around the Sea of Galilee, Labor Party stalwarts say they want drastic change. They’re fed up with the man who came in promising peace but who presided over the worst outbreak of Palestinian-Israeli violence in a decade. “Barak keeps trying different medication, but nothing is working,” says Arieh Partuk, 42, an entrepreneur who lives in a prosperous Tel Aviv suburb. “We need major surgery.”
For many, Sharon represents a drastic but necessary remedy. Moscow-born Alexandra Aronin, 30, immigrated to Jerusalem in 1992. Like almost all members of her family and friends in the Russian-immigrant community, the environmental engineer embraced the Labor Party as “more European, more logical and more intelligent” than Likud. She voted for Barak in 1999. “I was impressed by the stability he seemed to radiate,” she says. But Aronin’s anxiety has deepened since the shooting erupted last fall. Her younger brother is a soldier serving in the violent West Bank town of Hebron, and her father works in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Atarot, where an Orthodox Jew was shot to death in his car by snipers last week. Aronin doesn’t really understand the reasons for the intifada, but she blames Barak for failing to control the violence. “I will vote for Sharon, but I will do so with a heavy heart,” says Aronin. “No one knows what lies behind Sharon’s slogans, and I realize I may have to pay the consequences of this decision.”
Barak’s perceived weakness has doomed him in some of Labor’s most reliable strongholds. Kibbutz Kalia, an oasis of date palms and irrigated gardens on the northern edge of the Dead Sea, has voted almost unanimously for the Labor Party since Golda Meir’s government carved the agricultural settlement out of the desert in 1974. One Labor government after another has poured money into Kalia and the other kibbutzim in the Jordan Valley, which is on the West Bank; during his 1999 campaign Barak promised its 5,400 settlers that the valley and its environs would always remain a part of Israel. But in the last round of peace talks sponsored by the then U.S. President Bill Clinton in December, Barak included the narrow strip of territory in his final offer to Yasir Arafat. For Conny Barghoorn, 42, a German Catholic convert to Judaism who’s lived in the kibbutz since 1987, Barak’s concession was a betrayal. “I’ve always believed in the right of Palestinians to have their own state,” says Barghoorn. “But there’s a limit to what I’ll suffer.” Barghoorn fears that by surrendering the Jordan Valley, Israel would lose an important buffer zone against Jordan and neighboring Iraq. “Maybe Sharon is what we need,” she says, “not someone with a beautiful soul who wants to make peace.”
Many Arab Israelis question how sincere Barak’s peace overtures were to begin with. Hassan Asleh, 52, and his wife, Jamila, 49, live in Arrabeh in the High Galilee, a neglected region of rocky hills and dusty Arab villages around Nazareth. The prosperous owner of a grocery store, Hassan Asleh, like more than 95 percent of Israel’s half-million Arab voters, went with Barak in 1999. “I believed that Barak would bring us peace,” he says. “I believed in coexistence.” So did his son Asel, 17, a top student who spent three summers at the Seeds of Peace camp in Otisfield, Maine, which brings together Israeli and Palestinian teenagers to study conflict resolution and share life experiences. When anti- Israeli rioting broke out in Arrabeh last October, Asel sat on the sidelines, Arab witnesses say. It didn’t save him. According to these witnesses, Asel was observing street battles when he was beaten to the ground by an Israeli soldier and executed with a bullet in the neck. “Barak never gave one centimeter to the Palestinians, and he even kills our people,” Asleh says. He’ll sit on the sidelines himself on Tuesday, and guesses that three quarters of Arrabeh will do the same: “We don’t see any difference between Barak and Sharon,” he says.
Nor does Yitzhak Laor, a well-known leftist Jewish poet and playwright whose writing often highlights the severity of Israeli rule over Palestinians. Barak’s handling of the Palestinian uprising, his government’s policy of assassinating Palestinian militants and the killing of 13 Arab Israelis in riots in October have all alienated him from a leader he supported. “Barak played a very strange game,” Laor says. “One day he was the toughest guy on earth, a frightening bully, and the next day he was a softie. He broke every taboo that existed here in terms of violence.” Like Asleh, he’ll abstain from voting this week, even though he knows that Sharon could be even harsher on the Palestinians than Barak.
Back at Jaffa port, catamaran owner Oded Doron is also bracing for tougher times. “I bought this boat 10 years ago, after the gulf war, as a way of escaping,” says Doron. “If things get really bad here, I can always leave by sea.” Unfortunately, not many Israelis have that option.
