True blue and right

Forget everything you thought you knew about immigrants from the Confederation of Independent States (CIS – the former Soviet Union). Forget the assumption that they are utterly secular, forget the assumption that although they are rightist, they are pragmatic. Start thinking in terms of characters from a telenovela: A beauty queen, an immigrant from Ukraine, who married a nephew of the Baba Sali; a lawyer whose father was a general in the Red Army in Stalin’s day and he, the lawyer, is an ultra-Orthodox Jew who takes his every step as instructed by the Lubavitcher Rebbe’s Igrot Kodesh, and a singer who became a politician and is married to a prisoner who was sentenced to death for an attempt to hijack a plane in Leningrad in order to fly to Israel.

These characters are not imaginary, but rather flesh and blood people who have assembled in the Herut Party, headed by former MK Michael Kleiner. This is the second time that Kleiner, who for four terms was a Likud MK, is attempting to get elected at the head of the Herut list. In the 2003 elections, in which he ran on a joint list with Baruch Marzel, he received more than 40,000 votes, slightly under the electoral threshold.

The main points of his plan are: the Greater Land of Israel, including the right of return to Gush Katif and including Jordan – if the kingdom dares to go to war with Israel; active encouragement of emigration by Arab Israelis, greater strictness with respect to the Law of Return and the establishment of a government ministry for demographic matters.

“We are the only true right,” asserts Kleiner. “All the other parties are talking about territorial concessions nowadays. Even Avigdor Lieberman is no longer of the right. If the Russians know about us, many will come with us.”

It could be said that Herut is an ephemeral party that doesn’t stand a chance, and why bother to discuss it? However, in the large shadow of Kadima and the obsessive concern with Ehud Barak’s involvement in the Labor Party campaign, a number of things are happening in this election race, some of them very disturbing.

How cynical: Kleiner’s immigrants, who came here only recently, are trying to edge out citizens far more veteran than they. In pleasant ways, of course, because in the Land of Israel a courteous nation has arisen. The plan includes the granting of an emigration basket, identical to the absorption basket of benefits that new immigrants receive. Who is more cognizant than they are of the tribulations of emigration and immigration?

The beauty queen and the model

In contrast to other elections, this time Kleiner is banking a great deal on the immigrants. Dr. Eliezer Feldman, a researcher of public opinion on the Russian street, says this is not unrealistic. “There is a market for extreme ideas like these on the Russian street,” explains Feldman. “There are the immigrant settlers and there are all kinds of people with messianic ideas who came to Israel in order to save it from veteran Israelis who have lost their way. I estimate this ‘market’ at about 20,000 people.” Even now, without publicity and without a campaign, the Herut Party often appears in the open questions Feldman asks on the Russian street, although it is still hard to estimate its real strength.

At the helm of Herut’s immigrant headquarters is number 4 on the list, Yana Chudriker. Chudriker was chosen Israel’s beauty queen in 1993, only two years after she immigrated to Israel from Ukraine. She definitely recommends winning a beauty title as a method of absorption: “Thanks to the title, I traveled the world and compared life there to life in Israel,” she recalls at our meeting at the Herut offices. “I received offers to work in New York, but I returned here. In reality, I chose Israel a second time.”

She studied biochemistry at Tel Aviv University, but in the end changed her major and completed a bachelor’s degree in administration. In between, she met male model Kobi Knafo. Knafo’s grandfather, Rabbi Yitzhak Abu Hatzeira, was a brother of the Baba Sali. Local nobility. In those days, Knafo, the graduate of a yeshiva, was considered “the black sheep of the family,” as his wife says. They met at auditions and events of the modeling business, married and have two children. Knafo has gone back to wearing a skullcap.

In the 1999 election race both of them supported Avigdor (Yvet) Lieberman, who was enthusiastic about the connection between them. “Yvet has an unresolved problem with this identity,” diagnoses Chudriker. “He very much wants Israeli society to accept him absolutely. The connection between me and Kobi seems very Israeli to him.” But now Chudriker is going with Kleiner. “It used to be that Lieberman would say that ‘to the right of me there is only the wall,’” she says in explanation of her choice. “Now, we are to the right of him. After all, even he has already said that for the sake of peace he would be prepared to be evacuated from his home in the settlement of Nokdim.”

Chudriker anchors her ideology in sources in the country of her birth. “We grew up with values of land and territory, which in Israel translates into the right,” she explains. “We were also raised on values of patriotism and loyalty to the state. The education system preached patriotism in an aggressive way. I cannot accept the behavior of the Arabs of Israel in October 2003. We are offering them a fair solution – an emigration basket identical in value to our immigration basket. This sum enables a standard of living in the Arab countries that is far higher than it can buy in Israel.”

The Messiah will arrange

Attorney Arkady Pugatch, number 8 on the list, doesn’t deal with such trivia. As far as he is concerned, King Messiah, the Lubavitcher Rebbe, will arrange everything. All that remains for Pugatch himself is to obey the orders the rebbe transmits to him and receive his blessing for the journey. He also arrived at Herut on the basis of the direction and the blessing. He asked a question, slipped it between the pages of the Lubavitcher’s Igrot Kodesh, and received a clear answer. The pages between which he slipped his question at random were letters that the Rebbe wrote to Menachem Begin on the 11th of the Hebrew month of Nisan in 1962, in which everything is clear: The date is also the Lubavitcher’s birthday, a day when stronger forces than usual are at work. Begin was a political person and the founder of Herut. And as if that were not enough, one of the lines in the letter says explicitly: “May it come to pass that Herut [literally, ”liberty“] will be in all the areas [or ”territories’] and matters ….“ Even a great skeptic would have been convinced. And Pugatch is no skeptic.

Gazing from the pictures Pugatch keeps in his office in Tel Aviv is a figure completely different from the ultra-Orthodox man who deals with sad cases of discrimination and oppression of immigrants from the CIS. In the photographs from Tajikistan, from which he came here in 1989, he still looks like a secular person, who also served as a criminal prosecutor in the Soviet state prosecution. His father was a Communist, a great general whose military career was truncated by Stalin when he learned that his senior officer had had a ritual circumcision performed on his son. His mother was a member of the Hashomer Hatzair Zionist-socialist youth movement. But both of them were believers.

Before he immigrated to Israel, Pugatch served for eight years as head of the Jewish community in Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan. When the civil war broke out there in 1992, he applied to the Israeli prime minister at the time, Yitzhak Shamir, and asked him to rescue the community. Shamir did so. In an operation the details of which have not yet been made public, a plane was sent out week after week to the Muslim republic to take the Jews out. Pugatch is pinning his electoral hopes on this community, with which he has maintained close ties.

”Political program?“ he utters the words almost scornfully. ”About that you can talk to Kleiner. I don’t have a program, only a way and the rebbe’s blessing. Kleiner is a friend of mine, but he’s not the one who is going to arrange things, even with eight seats in the Knesset. The King Messiah will arrange matters.“

Kleiner, however, most probably believes that it is worthwhile doing something while waiting for the Messiah to arrange things. The immigrants from Russia have become a key target, and not only they, but also the ”people from KGB“ – Caucasians, Georgians and Bukharans (the joke sounds better in Russian). For the first time, he has set up an immigrants’ headquarters and has taken on a special spokesman for the Russian-language media. At a meeting of the immigrants’ headquarters this week, Kleiner reported that in a survey he commissioned from Rafi Smith it emerged that 60 percent of the immigrant public support the idea of encouraging ”voluntary emigration.“ Four percent said they are certain they will vote for Herut and another 4 percent said they were considering the option. ”The most important thing is to explain to the immigrants that Lieberman is no longer a rightist,“ said Kleiner at the headquarters meeting. ”If we succeed in getting this message across, our chances will increase.“

Larissa Gerstein does not need to be convinced. A deputy mayor of Jerusalem when Ehud Olmert was mayor, in the past she supported Lieberman and now she is helping Kleiner. Her husband, the well-known prisoner of Zion Edward Kuznetsov, not long ago signed a Russian-speaking intellectuals’ letter of support for Lieberman. Kuznetsov made history when in 1970 he headed the ”Leningrad“ group that tried to hijack a plane in order to defect to Israel. The death sentence he received was commuted to imprisonment, from which he was released after 11 years.

Gerstein herself has navigated between politics and a career as a singer ever since she immigrated to Israel 30 years ago from the Muslim republic of Khirgizstan. This combination has created grim-colored glasses for her: ”The conflict is indeed heading toward an end,“ she says, ”but the end is the end of the state. All we are doing is gaining time in face of the strengthening of Nazi Islam. This has to be spoken about without political correctness, without laundered words like ‘territories’ instead of ‘land’ and ‘disturbances’ by Arabs instead of ‘pogroms.’ So at the moment, Kleiner is at least the option of a decent man, whom it is possible to support without embarrassment. I’m not an extremist, the situation is extreme.“

The strategic advisor to Herut, Ilya Vasiliev, is certain that the party’s chances are not bad. He divides his time between Israel and Russia, where he serves as an advisor to the democratic parties. He also has an explanation for Kleiner’s chances among the Russian-speaking public, not only because of inbuilt right-wing tendencies among the Russians, but also because of imported xenophobia, about which he speaks openly.

”In the Russian public the element of xenophobia is strong with respect to the Arabs, too,“ says Vasiliev. ”They also don’t understand the difference between Palestinians and Arab Israelis. This distinction is not clear to the simple Russian.“ In addition, he is building on Russian-speaking young people, aged 18-25, for whom everything that has happened since 2000 has been their first encounter with war. ”For Israelis, including the young people, the war is imprinted on the collective memory,“ explains Vasiliev. ”For Russians, the army is the first physical encounter with the Arabs and the hatred. This is our biggest potential.”

The chances that Kleiner will make it into the Knesset are less hallucinatory than his platform. The telephone at the Herut offices does not stop ringing. In recent days, 250 volunteers have joined the movement.