Word: barak
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...polls may have chosen Israel's next prime minister. Yitzhak Mordechai, a former defense minister who entered the campaign for Monday's election with the sole aim of unseating Netanyahu, finally withdrew Sunday, recognizing that Netanyahu would be the main beneficiary if he stayed in the race. "Barak's best chance of winning was if Mordechai withdrew and allowed him a clear shot at winning it in the first round," says TIME Jerusalem bureau chief Lisa Beyer. "If no candidate had won a clear majority in a three-way race, the two leading candidates would have fought a runoff election...
...that this time around, Benjamin Netanyahu is up against the electoral wiles of James Carville, the U.S. pollster who got Bill Clinton into office by bushwhacking a foreign-policy president with a deluge of domestic grievances and is now trying to do the same for Labor party leader Ehud Barak. Netanyahu had planned to scare up a majority by retreading his 1996 strategy of invoking a Palestinian menace -- his campaign is even running TV ads filled with gruesome footage from pre-1996 suicide bombings -- but voters don't appear to be taking the bait. Israelis have become accustomed, since...
While the prime minister struggles to ignite his campaign, Barak, under Carville's tutelage, is making hay of a hot-button domestic issue. "Barak has found his wedge in the seething resentment of Israel's huge Russian immigrant population," says Beyer. "Israel's big parties each have their long-established voting bloc, and those tend to cancel each other out. But although there are some core voters for the left and the right among the Russians, the majority can still go either...
...election has turned into an ethnic brawl between the Moroccans and the Russians, with a lot of name-calling back and forth," says Beyer. And that major headache for Netanyahu is an opportunity for Barak to wean a key constituency away from the government. "Labor calculated early on that it couldn't win much support among the ultra-orthodox, and therefore, unlike Netanyahu, Barak could afford to alienate them if that could win votes from undecided secular Russians," says Beyer. "Barak has mounted a secular challenge to the ultra-orthodox, and promised to consider Sharansky for the Interior Ministry. That...
...Labor's Ehud Barak is currently ten points ahead of Bibi Netanyahu in the polls, and will try to keep his lead by talking tough on peace. But Palestinian violence could turn things around. "Terror attacks work in Bibi's favor," says Beyer. "If the Palestinians want him out, they'll have to do their utmost to prevent new violence." But with the peace process on ice for the next five months, that may be a tall order...