Israeli right nips at Kadima

Russian immigrants who came to Israel after 1989 have a tendency to vote right-wing - anything that smacks of socialism brings back memories of Red Square.

Their most pressing problems remain socioeconomic; many educated people were unable to find work in their fields after moving here. Others complain of discrimination and stigmatization at the hands of Israeli officials. On the whole, most are secular, and constantly face problems with personal issues such as marriage and burial, as the Israeli Rabbinate doesn't recognize many of the newcomers as Jewish by religious law. Civil marriages, for example, are not allowed, and many Russian immigrants demand that their leaders fight for this issue.

The negative experience means that Russian voters here are less interested in the party than the personality - one of many reasons Lieberman has attracted so much support.

"Russians really vote for the person, not the party," says Lazar Kaplun, who, as the head of Kadima's Russian headquarters in Haifa, is trying to convince voters to switch over. "We try to explain to them that Kadima's the ruling party and that it's the only one that can bring us to a new reality, while these others will just come and go."

But his challenge, he readily admits, sitting and strategizing with other activists in the final days of the campaign, is that no other party has a figure who is viewed as equally charismatic.

Beyond Lieberman, several other right-wing parties look likely to draw away support from Kadima.

The Likud party, which has been Israel's most powerful rightist party since the 1970s, is predicted to come in a distant third. But many voters who have told pollsters in the past that they were undecided have turned up as 11th-hour Likud voters, and the party knows it, judging from one of its simple slogans: "Come Home."

Hagay Lober, from the West Bank settlement of Beit El, says that he's usually voted for the National Religious Party (NRP), long a bulwark of the settlement movement. Now, however, many settlers are disillusioned by the party's failure to impede Sharon's disengagement plan last year.

"People trusted them a lot before the last election," says Mr. Lober, who is a rabbi and a director of a religious theater troupe. The pullout from the Gaza Strip has left many former settlers jobless and without permanent homes, he notes, and some people are so dismayed they don't want to vote at all.

"It's caused a disengagement from the army and the state. It's a huge crisis for the whole country," he says. He says he might vote Likud "so I can push Olmert to partner with the right."

Even further along the spectrum is politician Baruch Marzel, who has roots in the outlawed Kach Movement founded by the late Rabbi Meir Kahane. His party was banned from running for Knesset on the grounds that it was blatantly racist, something Mr. Marzel - an American-born settler - has managed to avoid.

In the settlement of Ofra, near the Amona outpost that was violently dismantled, Russian immigrants Chaim and Tanya Briskin sat on a bench recently and watched the youngest of their 11 children play. Their 18-year-old son is under house arrest for being involved in the clashes - during which 220 people, most of them young protesters, were injured. Gabriel, 11, says he and his friends are carving bats to fend off the next attempt by the army.

"We're voting Lieberman," says Mr. Briskin, an electrician. "We voted for other right-wing parties in the past, like Likud, and they went in a completely different direction from what we expected - to the left."

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