U.S. 'hired guns' leave their mark on Israeli politics
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Polls, sound bites and camera-savvy candidates
(CNN) -- In the 1981 Israeli elections, Prime Minister Menachem Begin hired New York political consultant David Garth to help with his re-election campaign. His opponent, Shimon Peres, turned to U.S. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy's campaign adviser, Davis Sawyer -- and Israeli politics haven't been the same since.
Garth -- adviser to U.S. presidential candidate John Anderson and former New York Mayor Ed Koch -- won the battle of the "hired guns," as they were called, when Begin was re-elected.
The Americanization of Israeli politics intensified in 1992 when major political parties began holding primaries. In 1996, Israel switched to direct elections for prime minister. Voters are now exposed to sophisticated polls, camera-savvy candidates and pithy one-liners tailored to the evening news.
For his 1996 campaign, Benjamin Netanyahu hired U.S. election guru Arthur Finkelstein to help him defeat Peres (sound bite: "Peres will divide Jerusalem") and has retained him since at $4,000 a month.
An Israeli Watergate
This year's Labor Party candidate, Ehud Barak, has hired not one, but three Americans: Democratic consultant Bob Shrum, Clinton pollster Stanley Greenberg and former Clinton strategist James Carville. (Sound bite: "Netanyahu is beholden to extremists.")
Not only have Israeli politicians turned to the United States for consultants and contributions -- they expect to collect more than $10 million from U.S. sources this year -- they even have their own version of the Watergate break-in.
Greenberg's Washington offices were broken into in January 1999, and among the items stolen were computer files containing Barak's financial records. Despite predictable finger-pointing at Barak's rivals, no arrests have been made.
An outspoken foe of the Americanization, surprisingly, is Edward Walker, U.S. ambassador to Israel, who says images and sound bites are unnecessary in Israel: "You can actually get out and talk to people and hope to have an impact."
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