Israel's Likud presents hawkish roster for general election

Israel's main opposition party Likud has hammered out a hawk-dominated list of candidates for the upcoming parliamentary election, polling results showed Tuesday, drawing fire from rival parties for being ultraright for the nation's peace prospect.

The roster, determined by an internal ballot on Monday, marks a blow to Likud chief and former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's bid to cast his group as a moderate consensus party that would garner support from centrist voters in the Feb. 10 general election, said local daily Ha'aretz.

The top ten slots went mostly to hard-liners, including Benny Begin, the son of former Prime Minister Menachem Begin and a former cabinet minister, who once broke away from Likud and joined other right-wing parties to form an alliance opposing the Oslo Accords.

A major setback for Netanyahu, according to local media, is the fact that Moshe Feiglin, an extremist rightist who has been banned from entering Britain due to his previous calls to launch a war against the Palestinians, secured the 20th place on the list, making him very likely to enter the next parliament, despite Netanyahu's strenuous efforts to sideline him.

"The Likud was, the Likud is, and the Likud will remain a right-wing party that will isolate Israel in a corner and return us to times that we wanted to escape from," another newspaper The Jerusalem Post quoted outgoing Prime Minister and former Kadima party leader Ehud Olmert, who used to be a Likud member, as commenting on the Likud lineup.

The caretaker leader, who has been meeting Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas regularly during the past year to advance the historic peace process, added that Likud used to be a party of peace, but "now it is unfortunately a right-wing extremist party," which would cause significant diplomatic damage to the Jewish state should they come to power.

Yet in a speech to party loyalists, Netanyahu brushed away various criticism from the current ruling party Kadima and other parties, calling the list "the best possible" and pledging to "improve security, strengthen the economy and continue a responsible diplomatic process" with the Palestinians.

Recent opinion surveys indicated a duel between Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, chairwoman of the centrist Kadima party and also a former Likud member, in the February race for national leadership, and most of them showed that Likud would win out with about 30 seats in the 120-seat parliament.

Yet the Likud's primary results might help Kadima, which favors advancing current Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, gain more ground as analysts were quoted as saying that one key to Likud's success was a public perception of the traditionally right-wing party as essentially centrist in outlook, the strategy that crowned Kadima in 2006.

Although opposing many of the concessions Olmert and Livni madeto the Palestinians, Netanyahu does not categorically reject peace negotiations. However, his "economic peace" proposal, which would shift the focus from political negotiations to development of Palestinian economy, was firmly rejected by the Palestinian side.

Partly due to Israel's political turmoil, which impaired its diplomatic efforts, the two sides have abandoned the ambitious goal of reaching a comprehensive peace deal by the end of 2008, which Olmert and Abbas set up when they resumed the long-stalled peace process at a U.S.-hosted international conference in Annapolis last November.

The hawkish dominance of the Likud roster is set to deepen worries that should the party controls the next government, the already sluggish Middle East peace process would face an even murkier future.