An American-funded “smear campaign” is trying to topple Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister’s allies claimed on Tuesday, as the country voted in a knife-edge election.
Mr Netanyahu, the longest-serving Israeli leader since David Ben Gurion, is fighting for his political life.
Recent polls have shown his right-wing Likud party trailing three or four seats behind Zionist Union, a left-wing alliance led by Isaac Herzog of the Labour party.
Leader Labour party
2013 – present
Social services minister
2007 – 2011
Party: Labour (Zionist Union)
Until as recently as 2013, Isaac Herzog was a second-rank politician who almost nobody saw as a future prime minister of Israel. In that year, he became leader of the Labour party and the polls suggest that he now stands on the brink of unseating Benjamin Netanyahu.
Mr Herzog has benefited from a makeover designed to spruce up his nerdish appearance and improve his high-pitched speaking voice.
He may not look like a leader, but Mr Herzog comes from the aristocracy of Israeli politics. His father, Chaim, was the sixth president of Israel and his grandfather was the Chief Rabbi. His uncle by marriage was Abba Eban, who was Israel’s face to the world during almost a decade as foreign minister in the 1960s and 70s.
Mr Herzog, known to Israelis by his nickname “Bougie”, was born in 1960 and entered the Knesset in 2003. He has taken Labour into an alliance with a centrist party led by a former rival, Tzipi Livni, to create the “Zionist Union”.
If this block wins enough seats to lead the next government, Mr Herzog will be prime minister for the first half of the four-year term, handing over to Ms Livni for the second half.
After a bitterly acrimonious campaign, Mr Netanyahu cast his own vote in Jerusalem and then issued a statement claiming that Zionist Union had allied with Israel’s Arab minority to drive him from power.
"The right-wing government is in danger,” said the prime minister. “Arab voters are coming out in droves to the polls. Left-wing organisations are bussing them out. Get out to vote, bring your friends and family, vote Likud in order to close the gap between us and Labour.”
Mr Herzog, a former minister for social welfare, acidly replied that anyone voting for Mr Netanyahu would be "following his path of despair and disappointment".
But the prime minister’s allies are the ones who feel aggrieved. Earlier this year, Mr Netanyahu was damaged by a series of revelations about his extravagant use of public funds on personal and official residences. A grass-roots organisation called “Victory 15” has emerged with the sole purpose of campaigning against him.
Aron Shaviv, the Likud campaign manager, said that Mr Netanyahu had been the target of a “very serious smear campaign” financed by foreign interests.
“I think it’s been funded by outside groups,” he added. “It’s been funded by a lot of US money - private and, I think, even some government grants.”
Mr Shaviv pointed out that last year the US State Department gave money to two organisations which subsequently funded Victory 15. “Was State Department money being spent to unseat Netanyahu?” he asked. “I don’t know, but certainly money went into these organisations and the State Department has no mechanism for tracking how it was spent.”
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