A little more "Inside Politics" with Arik.
INSIDE POLITICS
Gil Hoffman Nov. 29, 2002
A surprising call to Beit She'an
Three hours after the attack in Beit She'an, Likud MK Eli Cohen-Artzi was talking outside the branch to Ilan, a local Likud activist.
He told Ilan that he sent a message to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon an hour before calling upon him to cancel the election.
He got his answer when Ilan's cellphone rang. It was Sharon's headquarters calling him to see if he had voted yet.
Worried about figures streaming into his headquarters indicating unexpectedly low turnout, Sharon called on his campaign team to call as many Likud members as possible to get them out to the polling stations. Sharon then called the press conference in which he repeated more than a dozen times the urgency of voting and insisting on living normally in spite of terror.
"Who cares about these elections," Cohen-Artzi said. "We need to stop this nonsense about normalcy. We are living an illusion. This isn't normalcy. We need to stop the election, declare war, and destroy terror. Then maybe we can start saying we are living normally."
Netanyahu spars with the press
Foreign Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's campaign team changed its strategy in the last few days of the campaign. After emphasizing the economy and making the election a referendum on the Palestinian state issue, Netanyahu fell back on his approach from his unsuccessful re-election campaign in 1999 making the media the enemy.
He told The Jerusalem Post on November 6 that the main lesson he learned from that race was he needs to improve his ties with the media.
"I think I concentrated an enormous amount of time on policy and less on politics, and I think a balance of the two is required," he said. "You have to spend time on people. You cannot just concentrate on policy. This requires spending effort and time with colleagues and reporters."
But the week after the interview, Netanyahu's office threatened Channel 2 with a lawsuit for broadcasting outtakes of him telling the cameraman which angle to shoot from and where to position himself.
By this week, his campaign team was charging the press with conspiring to keep Sharon in office.
The Yehoshua Matza factor
In a campaign rally in Hadera on Tuesday, Sharon listed the Likud ministers in an order that looked like the order of their loyalty to him.
After starting out formally with Shaul Mofaz and Netanyahu, he immediately singled out his closest ally, Reuven Rivlin. He thanked longtime allies Silvan Shalom and Tzipi Livni, and Center Party refugees Roni Milo and Dan Meridor, and only then mentioned IUzi Landau and Limor Livnat, who declined to endorse anyone in the leadership race.
He then named Dan Naveh and Tzahi Hanegbi, who privately support Netanyahu, but have also remained neutral, and finished with Netanyahu's only open supporter in the cabinet, Meir Sheetrit.
When asked why they remained neutral, the ministers noted that with the central committee divided, independence from either camp is a blessing for an MK seeking reelection to a top spot on the party list.
But they also remember that aside from Rivlin, the only Likud MK who endorsed Sharon when it looked like he would face a leadership challenge from Netanyahu in 2001 was Yehoshua Matza. When it came to distributing portfolios, Sharon left his ally with nothing. |
