PROFILE: Controversial Lieberman rides wave of Gaza violence

By Ofira Koopmans Feb 9, 2009, 4:11 GMT

Tel Aviv - The Israel Beiteinu (Israel Our Home) party is the surprise package of Tuesday's election, a development due mainly to its leader Avigdor Lieberman.

The belligerent hawk has been riding a wave of rising support since a six-month truce in Gaza collapsed in early November, rocket attacks from the strip at southern Israeli towns and villages resumed, and Israel consequently launched a 22-day offensive in Gaza which ended little more than three weeks ago.

The ultra-nationalist party is largely a one-man show, with other candidates keeping mostly in the background, letting Lieberman take centre stage to explain the party's often controversial policies, which he does in slow, Russian-accented Hebrew.

The 50-year-old immigrant from the former Soviet Union has focused his campaign almost exclusively on what he calls the 'radicalization' of Israel's Arab minority, saying Arab Israelis should be stripped of their citizenship if they show no 'loyalty' to Israel.

That has earned him the wrath of Arab legislators, who have called him a 'fascist,' a 'racist,' and 'worse' than extreme-right French leader Jean-Marie Le Pen and Austria's late Joerg Haider.

'No loyalty, no citizenship!' trumpets Lieberman's campaign slogan and television ad.

'Our problem is not with the Palestinians. Our problem is with Arab Israelis,' says the voice-over in the television spot.

Lieberman wants to stop social security hand-outs to the families of Arab Israelis and Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem, who carried out or aided militants attacks in Israel, such as that of the gunman who killed eight Jewish students in a West Jerusalem yeshiva (religious school) in March 2008.

He wants Israel to stop paying the pension of an Arab-Israeli lawmaker who fled Israel on suspicion of committing 'treason' by allegedly aiding Hezbollah during Israel's 2006 second Lebanon war with the radical Shiite movement. And he wants Arab Israelis who do not serve in the army to carry out civic service.

Lieberman, a married father of three with a BA in Social Sciences from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, was born in the Moldovan capital of Kishinev and immigrated to Israel in 1978, around the age of 20.

He served as infrastructure and transportation minister in Likud- led governments of former Israeli premier Ariel Sharon between 2002 and 2004.

The burly, bearded and thick-set politician joined the centrist Kadima-led government of outgoing Israeli premier Ehud Olmert after the second Lebanon war, but quit last January in protest of Olmert's renewal of peace negotiations with moderate Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

He was deputy prime minister and minister of strategic affairs, a post designed by Olmert to allow him to join the coalition and to take charge of the 'Iran file' - Israel regards Iran's nuclear programme as its biggest existential threat.

Israel Beitenu is the fifth largest party in the outgoing Knesset, with 11 mandates in the 120-seat parliament. But according to opinion polls, it could now for the first time ever become the third-largest party with as many as 18 or 19 seats, ahead even of the Labour Party. At the very least, it seems, it can count on coming in fourth.

Lieberman's rise is part of a general strengthening of the right- wing bloc in Israeli politics, from which also front-runner Benjamin Netanyahu of the more mainstream hardline Likud has profited.

Israelis have explained the rise of the right by pointing to concerns over security, with many saying they want a 'strong' leader well-suited to deal decisively with such threats as Iran and the radical Islamist Hamas movement ruling Gaza.

The core of Lieberman's support comes from Russian immigrants and hardliners who seek a robust response to the threats they see facing their country, but are fed up with mainstream parties whose candidates they say have taken turns at the premiership in the past and failed to deal with Israel's problems.

Another key - and controversial - point in Lieberman's platform is his plan for 'territorial exchange,' which calls for transferring heavily-populated Arab areas of Israel to Palestinian sovereignty in exchange for Israel retaining control of Jewish settlements in the West Bank.