1999apr25 NYT Finkelstein | Sound Bites Over Jerusalem
By Adam Nagourney
April 25, 1999, Section 6,Page 42 | New York Times Magazine
It was a warm and sunny Saturday morning, the heart of the Sabbath, and most of Jerusalem was shuttered -- except for a second-floor corner suite in the King David Hotel, looking out over the Jaffa Gate and the rough stone walls guarding the Old City. Inside, the fax machine beeped, a cell phone trilled and Israeli newspapers and campaign memos were scattered across the floor. An easel displaying scribbled poll numbers was perched in a corner, and dirty plates, half-filled coffee cups and wineglasses littered the tables, the remnants of 12 hours of breakfast and dinner meetings. There was no sign on the door, but the suite served as the headquarters for the re-election campaign of Benjamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel, if only for one reason: Arthur J. Finkelstein, the Republican political consultant from the United States, was in Jerusalem today, and this is where he was staying.
Finkelstein himself seemed tense and preoccupied as he opened the door to his suite. Netanyahu's main opponent in the May 17 election, the Labor Party candidate Ehud Barak, had recently announced on television that, if elected, he would withdraw all Israeli troops from Lebanon by the middle of 2000. ''His secret plan to end the war in Lebanon -- it's absolutely Nixon,'' Finkelstein says caustically as he pours a cup of coffee, recalling Richard Nixon's 1972 promise to end the war in Vietnam. Barak's pledge was sketchy, but coming at the end of an anxious week in which three Israeli soldiers died in Lebanon, it had captured the public's attention.
Even before he left the United States for Jerusalem, Finkelstein had ordered the Likud campaign into action: it conducted a poll of Israeli voters on Barak's pledge and his party's surprisingly vivid suggestion that Netanyahu was ''stuck in the Lebanon mud.'' The results were waiting for Finkelstein when he checked into the King David. By a margin of ''better than 2 to 1,'' Finkelstein says, voters saw the Barak declaration as politics as usual. This finding guided the response Netanyahu and Finkelstein scripted that weekend. The Prime Minister would not even pretend to address the issue directly, but would instead attack the character of his opponent for raising it, underscoring what Netanyahu wants to be the campaign's central question: Which of these two men is tough and steady enough to assure Israel's survival?
Over the course of the weekend they drafted the slogan, ''Ehud Barak: Too Many Ambitions, Too Few Principles.'' By Monday morning -- with Finkelstein back in the United States -- those words would be posted on the wall of Netanyahu's party headquarters, published in his newspaper advertisements and incorporated into the daily talking points that guide his cabinet ministers' conversations with Israeli reporters.
Finkelstein did not know it, but the attack he was responding to that weekend was largely the handiwork of another American political consultant, one he has never met and does not particularly admire, but who is also working in Israel this spring. James Carville had flown to Tel Aviv two weeks earlier to join Bob Shrum -- one of two other Washington consultants working for Barak -- to present the American recommendations on how the Labor Party challenger could boost his struggling campaign. Seize control of the daily debate, said the Americans -- Carville, Shrum and Stanley Greenberg, who was President Clinton's pollster in 1992 and is Barak's pollster now.
Speak in short, declarative sentences and jettison the bulky arguments that had been the quaint mainstay of Israeli political dialogue. Every interview, every speech, must include a fundamental assault on those parts of Netanyahu's record where three months of polling had found voters' reservations to be most pronounced. ''Netanyahu,'' said Carville, ''is stuck.'' He was stuck on the economy, stuck on the peace process, stuck in how he ran his Government. And. . .stuck in the Lebanon mud.
American consultants have been flying in and out of Israel since Prime Minister Menachem Begin called in David Garth of New York in 1981, playing a low-key (and not particularly significant) role in how campaigns are conducted.
But this year's contest -- which many politicians think will most likely be decided by no more than a percentage point or two and seems sure to result in a June 1 runoff -- is different.
Sound bites, rapid response, repetition, wedge issues, ethnic exploitation, nightly polling, negative research, searing attack advertisements on television -- the familiar tools of American elections have now arrived in the Middle East.
The 1999 contest for Prime Minister of Israel is providing a stage for a struggle between the seminal Democratic and Republican consultants of the past 15 years, the principal architects of what has become the signature American style of political discourse -- one that rewards simplicity over complexity, shock over substance and Election Day victory over governing and nearly everything else. (The third major candidate in the Israeli race, Yitzhak Mordechai of the new Center Party, has not retained his own American consultant for one reason, an aide said: he can't afford it.)
The evidence of the Americans' influence piles up with each passing campaign day. An Israeli news cycle hardly ever goes by now without Barak describing Netanyahu's Government as ''stuck,'' as Barak tries to anchor the election in domestic and economic issues. Or without Netanyahu calling Barak a ''leftist'' or weak, as Netanyahu for a second time presents himself as the candidate best able to assure Israel's security. Both sides' attacks are the products of exhaustive surveys and focus groups. The orientation of Barak's campaign staff even includes a viewing of ''The War Room,'' the 92-minute documentary that glorified the tactical inner workings of the 1992 Clinton campaign; Carville flew in to officiate after the Barak war room opened in a nondescript office building in southern Tel Aviv.
Finkelstein, Carville, Shrum and Greenberg are treated as something of celebrities in Israel, almost as likely to end up on the front pages of the local newspapers as the candidates themselves. In this environment, should it really come as such a surprise to learn that the less-than-telegenic Ehud Barak has started to bring a makeup artist with him on his campaign trips? Or that in assailing Netanyahu, Barak has invoked the line ''too many lies for too long'' -- the very same slogan that Democrats in the United States used so successfully last fall against another Finkelstein client, Alfonse M. D'Amato?
In America, the notion of politics as spectacle may be distasteful and dispiriting to watch, but it is hardly a threat to the Republic. Israel, however, is a young and still somewhat tentative nation -- Arthur Finkelstein was 2 years old when the independent State of Israel was founded in 1948 -- and it is embarking on only its second direct election of a Prime Minister.
It's a place where teachers snap a gun onto their waistbands for protection before taking children on an outing in the country, and where shoppers carrying knapsacks are routinely searched going into a supermarket to make sure they're not about to deposit a bomb next to the cereal boxes. It's a place where citizens flick on the radio every hour to hear if a soldier they know has been killed in Lebanon, and animosity between Jew and Jew -- between the Sephardim and the Ashkenazi, between the secular and the religious -- can be as raw as that between Arab and Jew. In Israel, the pace of the impending election can be measured by the rise in random stabbings around the Jewish and Muslim quarters of Jerusalem.
Israel is, in short, a nation that passes most of its days right on the edge -- riding 4,000 years of religious, ethnic and tribal turmoil. The American consultants describe this overstimulated and chronically anxious environment as more intense than any they have worked in before. Elections here are literally fought over life-and-death issues, and so it is that many Israelis are coming to believe that something disturbing is happening to their political system this spring.
Yaron Ezrahi, a professor of political science at Hebrew University, says the new style of campaigning has created ''a distorted and irrelevant form of politics'' -- an unhappy and increasingly prevalent view of the new Israeli political landscape that would certainly sound familiar to anyone who has followed the evolution of American elections. ''Because of the Americanization of the campaign, it boils down to slogans instead of to substance,'' says David Bar-Illan, a former editor of The Jerusalem Post who is Netanyahu's director of communications. ''And nothing is more typically American than boiling down issues to slogans and really almost emptying them of meaning.''
Be happy, ladies and gentlemen!'' James Carville looms over his salad in a small Italian restaurant on a side street in Tel Aviv, swirling a second tumbler of Scotch. His audience is a table of Israeli and American political consultants working for the Barak campaign, and Carville has just learned that Netanyahu boasted on television the night before about a sunny new round of economic statistics.
"Mr. Netanyahu says it's over, we're all rich!'' Carville proclaims to the rather startled patrons of Pronto, his eyes wide and darting around the room, and his Louisiana accent stretched out by the fatigue settling in after 18 hours in the air. ''We're on Wall Street! Beverly Hills! The land of milk and honey! Moses has found it!''
Carville, in the fifth hour of only his third trip to Israel, paused to make sure that he had not crossed any lines, as Israelis turned in their seats to take in this uniquely American show.
"Milk and honey!'' he continues exuberantly. ''Netanyahu has willed it and deemed it. We are here -- finally. After all these years, 4,000 years. We're here now and Bibi has led us and we are fine. We don't have 12 percent unemployment, because he says we don't. We don't have a divided nation, because he says we don't. We don't have money going to yeshivas for the haredim, instead of schools, because he says we don't. IT [pause] IS [pause] ALL [pause] FINE.''
For a moment it seems like a late February night in 1992 at the Sheraton Wayfarer bar in New Hampshire -- except here James Carville is talking about yeshivas and ultrareligious Jews. These Tel Aviv diners have just heard a dress rehearsal of the campaign that Carville and Shrum will direct against Benjamin Netanyahu in the weeks ahead.
It is hard to imagine two more distinct and politically influential characters -- stylistically, personally and ideologically -- than James Carville and Arthur Finkelstein. Carville is delighted by the attention he has attracted in Israel, just as he has luxuriated in his celebrity since 1992, when the American television cameras first picked out his lanky figure and bizarrely expressive face in the entourage surrounding Bill Clinton in New Hampshire. Partly because of his continuing association with an American President, and partly because of his seemingly ceaseless presence on television, Carville is recognized in Tel Aviv almost as readily as he is in New York. The first time Barak appeared with his American team, the candidate was reduced to the role of onlooker at his own news conference by reporters clamoring for a word with the famous and funny friend of President Clinton.
Arthur Finkelstein flees public exposure just as surely as James Carville embraces it. A few hours earlier on the day Carville put on his impromptu show for those restaurant patrons, a very different scene had unfolded 30 miles to the east, at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. Arthur Finkelstein had checked in for a weekend of meetings with Netanyahu. The visit of the American whom the newspapers irreverently call ''the Mysterious Arthur,'' and who uses an assumed name when he registers at a hotel, was unannounced, as always. But this time, an Israeli photographer, tipped off to his presence, waited in the lobby for five hours until Finkelstein emerged from the elevator. The next morning, simple photographic evidence of Finkelstein's existence in Jerusalem merited a spot on the front page of Maariv, one of the nation's main newspapers.
Finkelstein has vigilantly fought public exposure since he entered American politics in 1964, working for a Republican Congressional candidate from Queens the year that Barry Goldwater lost to Lyndon B. Johnson, an outcome Finkelstein laments to this day. He resisted the curiosity that mounted after he helped direct D'Amato's election to the Senate in 1980 by disparaging Senator Jacob Javits, a venerated Republican from New York, as old and ailing. And he kept his enigmatic distance through the 1980's, as his reputation as a devastating strategist and pollster grew with each new victory -- before beginning to fade in the mid-1990's with a series of equally ignoble defeats.
At once brash and shy, Finkelstein craves recognition for his accomplishments, yet detests attention and resents the way he is depicted in the American press. ''I'm portrayed as a cartoon,'' he says. Yet he has not done much to counter that impression. He hates speaking in public and resists being photographed. At Finkelstein's insistence, his 1996 contract with the Likud Party reportedly included a provision that prohibited anyone from disclosing his position in the campaign, though inevitably, word of Netanyahu's secret American consultant leaked out. Despite his best efforts, Finkelstein has become an extraordinarily public figure. His name is even used as a verb to describe American campaign tactics. ''People in focus groups will talk about Finkelstein,'' says Stan Greenberg, a note of amazement in his voice. ''This is the only country in the world I've been to where they talk about the consultants by name.''
FINKELSTEIN: PERSONAL PRIVACY FOR HIMSELF
In the last election Netanyahu suggested that Finkelstein keep a low profile, but the Prime Minister has reconsidered matters in 1999. Netanyahu, who lighted up at the mention of Finkelstein's name as he sipped espresso in his office in Jerusalem a few weeks ago, said he had advised his American adviser to dispel his rather severe image by allowing himself to become better known. ''I thought it was important to demystify him,'' Netanyahu says, toying with a cigar on his desk that he chose not to light after he took note of the presence of a magazine photographer in the room. ''It's very funny: he's just a very nice and warm and actually very likable person, completely antithetical to this demonic, manipulative, craven personality that you see in the press.'' And so, Finkelstein has met with 10 or so of Netanyahu's cabinet ministers, and agreed to sit down with a tenacious 27-year-old Israeli journalist, Boaz Gaon, who had been lobbying him for three years for a meeting.
Not that Finkelstein is happy about it. He was smiling when he opened the door to his suite for an interview one Saturday morning, but he still had the look of a man who was about to settle into a dentist chair. ''I don't want this,'' Finkelstein says, gazing out his window at the mountains of Jordan in the distance, from a room in which he can hear the first Muslim calls to prayer before sunrise, relayed over the screechy speakers mounted atop mosques across the Old City. ''I'm shocked by your interest,'' Finkelstein continues. ''In fact, I am appalled.''
There are, Finkelstein's friends say, two reasons why he has chosen to remain behind the curtain.
The first is that Finkelstein, who has been running campaigns longer than any other national consultant working today, adheres to what has become an old-fashioned view of the business in the age of the war room and the Sunday-morning talk circuit. Consultants, he argues, receive too much attention and too much credit. ''I think I'm the playwright or the director, and not the actor,'' Finkelstein says, pouring a guest a cup of coffee. ''And the actors need to be onstage, not the director. And I think it's absurd that people who do what I do become as important, as celebrated, as the ones who are running.''
The second explanation for Finkelstein's reserve is that he is intent on guarding his private life. Three years ago, he agreed to what he now asserts was an off-the-record meeting with a reporter for Boston Magazine; the sessions produced a published account that Finkelstein, who has more than once represented clients who were against gay rights, is homosexual and lives with his partner in Massachusetts. The disclosure encouraged more unwanted scrutiny. For Finkelstein, who resists even simple questions about how many siblings he has (two brothers), the Boston Magazine story was, his friends say, mortifying.
FINKELSTEIN: BLAME THE ELITES for Arthur's DISRUPTIONS
In shunning attention, Finkelstein is apt to dismiss the notion that he altered the Israeli political terrain. In some of his more cantankerous moments -- there are many -- he even disputes the suggestion that he is one of the reasons that Benjamin Netanyahu is Prime Minister of Israel today. ''The elites were appalled that he'' -- Shimon Peres -- ''lost, so they needed a reason,'' Finkelstein says. ''It couldn't be that Netanyahu was good, or that people believed in the candidate, so it must be something ominous. Remember, Netanyahu won last time by what, three-tenths of a percentage point? Had the bob of a head been the other way, he would have lost, and the elites would have said how Finkelstein didn't know anything and he destroyed Likud, blah, blah, blah. It is so silly.''
What's a view of the last election that Finkelstein may be alone in holding. By almost every account -- including those of Netanyahu and Barak -- Finkelstein has had a profound effect on the way campaigns are conducted in Israel since he packed 32 years of American political skills and experience into his suitcase and flew into Tel Aviv airport three years ago. In the United States, he is known as a consultant who demands broad authority over the campaigns that seek his counsel -- ''I've got to act like chairman of the board,'' he tells his clients -- and the pattern has followed him across the globe. Finkelstein was hardly an incidental player in the 1996 campaign. ''Listen to him because he's talking for me,'' Netanyahu told his staff.
FINKELSTEIN & BIBI: REWRITING THE RULES OF THE GAME (POLITICS)
To appreciate the extent to which Finkelstein and Netanyahu rewrote the rules of Israeli politics, it is necessary to understand two central facts about the nation's electoral system. In 1996, for the first time, Israelis voted directly for Prime Minister rather than casting a vote for their preferred political parties. The person who became Prime Minister was generally at the top of a list of candidates prepared in advance by the party that wins the most votes. This switch from parliamentary to popular vote made the candidate for Prime Minister the focus of the election, and put a premium on personal appeal and television skills. By 1996, Netanyahu had appeared on ''Nightline'' virtually as often as James Carville; no other Israeli politicians could match his ease before the camera. It would have been hard to envision an electoral reform that played more to Netanyahu's strengths, or to Shimon Peres's weaknesses.
The other thing to keep in mind are the restrictions imposed in Israel on political advertisements. Television commercials are permitted only in the final three weeks of the campaign; before that, candidates and parties are restricted to a limited number of billboard and small newspaper advertisements. Once the television campaign begins, the ads are shown nightly, in a single block of varying length. Before 1996, the parties used this time for unhurried, literate advertisements, devoted to the issue of the day. The advertisements would usually appear exactly once, and every night, campaign staffs would head to the editing machines to produce a new ad for the following evening, often responding to what the opposition just said. Israelis settle in to watch this nightly block, which begins tomorrow, as eagerly as if it were, say, a season-ending episode of ''Ally McBeal.'' The process provided for what was, in effect, a rolling, nightly debate.
The custom struck Netanyahu as absurd. ''The way political campaigns were run in Israel -- including ones I took part in -- was bizarre,'' Netanyahu says, ''because we wasted a lot of energy to-ing and fro-ing and not getting the message through. And therefore I sought to bring in American professionals who could help focus the message.'' The American professional whom Netanyahu brought in was Arthur Finkelstein, who promptly decreed that the campaign would produce a handful of short, simple ads and broadcast them over and over, day after day and even back to back on the same night, just as it was done in the United States. ''Arthur used to hold a videocassette and say, 'We can win the election with this one only,''' says Ron Assouline, an Israeli who produced advertisements for Netanyahu in 1996, and is working for Barak this year.
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The ads were provocative and constructed on an unwavering message: that Netanyahu alone could guarantee the nation's security and survival, that peace could come only through strength, that ''Peres will divide Jerusalem.'' The most oft-repeated advertisement was only 15 seconds long; it displayed an animated glass wall which slowly shattered to reveal a film clip of Yasir Arafat leading Peres by the hand up a set of stairs. ''A dangerous combination for Israel,'' the announcer said. A second ad was 25 seconds long, and depicted the smoky aftermath of the bombing of the No. 18 bus in Jerusalem, one of a series of Palestinian terror attacks that set the stage for the election that followed the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. ''No security. No peace. No reason to vote for Peres,'' the announcer said over the chilling wail of police sirens. It was unlike anything the Israeli electorate had ever seen before; the ad seized on an event that had traumatized the nation, presenting a case for Netanyahu's candidacy in the most stark and arresting manner imaginable.
''Survival of Israel has always been the No. 1 concern,'' Finkelstein says, explaining the rationale of Netanyahu's candidacy and, really, his entire prime ministry. ''It has been since the very beginning of this country, and it still is. Because unlike in the United States, where we have a plethora of issues, here we have one core fact: That tomorrow they could cease to exist.''
Everything in the Netanyahu campaign reinforced that appeal. No matter what Shimon Peres said about Netanyahu, no matter the pressure from more traditional Likudniks, who every night questioned Limor Livnat, Netanyahu's campaign manager, about the unfamiliar tactics being dictated by an American political consultant 5,000 miles away. The campaign stuck to its script, confirming its progress with nightly polls that led Finkelstein alone to predict Netanyahu's victory almost by the precise margin. ''When he came to us with this idea, I said, 'Oh, my God, how come we didn't think about it before he came?''' Livnat says. ''It looks so obvious. But I had to struggle every night to convince them'' -- the other Likud leaders -- ''this was the right thing to do.''
Finkelstein asserts that the limits imposed by the Israeli system, which he curtly describes as ''a throwback to the old socialist world,'' made it impossible for him to do in Israel what he does in America. ''You can't bring American techniques to Israel,'' he says. ''It's a whole different field of play here.'' But that restrictive political environment, Netanyahu says, put a premium on Finkelstein's communication skills and made him central to the victory in 1996, and it is why he has kept the American so close at hand ever since. Netanyahu calls Finkelstein the ''needle'' that allowed him to thread his ''contrary message'' through the narrow opening left by a restrictive political system and a hostile press corps.
The ultimate proof of Finkelstein's influence would come after Labor absorbed the shock of its loss. There was no doubt how the party would approach a rematch with Netanyahu. It would start with American political consultants. ''In 1996 we were attacked and attacked and attacked and we didn't answer,'' says Tal Silberstein, a 29-year-old industrial engineer who is managing Barak's campaign, speaking from the Barak war room. ''It's not going to be that way any longer. We're not going to let them accuse us or General Barak without a very quick and harsh and blunt response.''
Jaunty and confident, Carville, Shrum and Greenberg settled in before the television camera to discuss the campaign with an Israeli journalist. It was mid-December, the first time the three Washington consultants to Barak had been in Israel at the same time, and the fact that they were about to discuss their roles on national television signaled how rapidly things had changed in Israel. Before this interview, American political consultants, mindful of Israeli candidates' sensitivities about being too closely associated with them, had lain low. Already, half a year before the election, Netanyahu advisers were implying White House meddling in an Israeli election, given the close ties between the United States President and Barak's three consultants. (Shrum was one of the main speechwriters for Clinton's State of the Union speech this year.) And Barak supporters were countering that Finkelstein had excessive influence on the head of government.
CARVILLE'S CALLOUS DISREGRAD FOR REALITY OF ISRAELI SOCIETY
But in a country where there is a Planet Hollywood overlooking the Mediterranean, and where Bruce Springsteen songs roar out of passing taxis in Jerusalem -- indeed, where American culture is far more celebrated than it is scorned -- how upset would the public really be over one more foreign import? So Carville, Shrum and Greenberg registered under their own names at their seaside Tel Aviv hotel. The Barak campaign invited a photographer to take a picture of Greenberg eating falafel. The trio even held a public seminar devoted to the subject of the modern campaign. There was calculation in all this openness. ''We sent them all over the place to do interviews,'' says Alon Pinkas, one of Barak's Israeli advisers. ''As opposed to the shadowy, back-room, smoke-filled Arthur Finkelstein.''
But that first television interview provided the Americans with a taste of the complexities inherent in their newest assignment. What, the television journalist Haim Hecht asked Carville as the cameras rolled, was his view of how Barak handled the military training accident at the Ze'elim training grounds seven years ago, in which five soldiers were killed by an errant missile? Newspaper accounts and Likud leaders had charged that Barak had fled the scene in a helicopter before the wounded were attended to, and Netanyahu supporters had been invoking the episode to portray Barak as weak. But Carville, one of the most nimble guests on the Sunday talk shows in Washington, was flustered by the query about his new client's record. He whispered a confused question to Stan Greenberg, seated at his side. ''It's an accusation that's been cleared,'' Greenberg said uncomfortably. (Actually, that response was perhaps questionable at the time, though the state comptroller's report issued three months later would exonerate Barak.)
Hecht, speaking in rapid English, pressed on: What did Carville think of Aryeh Deri, the head of the ultrareligious Shas Party, the nation's third-largest? Deri was under indictment in a case that had come to personify the deep, tribal animosity between Sephardic (and mostly religious) and Ashkenazi (and mostly secular) Jews. Carville, flummoxed again, shrugged and offered a weak smile. ''I don't know,'' he said. Bob Shrum intervened. ''I don't think we pretend that we're somehow or other experts on Israel,'' he said. ''We're here to help General Barak.''
There was, no doubt, a scent of a journalistic ambush to the exchanges. As Carville said later, recalling the appearance, it was his first trip to Israel, and he could scarcely understand what Hecht was saying. But while the questions were sophisticated, they were also central to the campaign, and the faltering performance caught many Israelis by surprise. Israel is a country that is captivated by public events in general and politics in particular: 80 percent of the voting population participates in national elections, compared with 49 percent of registered voters in the United States. In a country with a population significantly smaller than New York City's, there are four major daily newspapers. People read about and analyze their government and its leaders every day, so Carville's apparent ignorance was noted. ''It was not very impressive,'' says Shilo de-Beer, head of the news desk at Yedioth Ahronoth, the nation's largest newspaper. ''It was a very straightforward question, like, 'Who is the press secretary of the White House?' It was an embarrassing interview.''
The television appearance had been intended to show off Barak's American arsenal. Instead, it highlighted fundamental questions that have been raised about the transplanted American political talent. Are political skills transferable? Do tactics and strategies that work in New Hampshire work in Israel or, for that matter, in other countries where American campaign advisers ply their trade? Does a Carville or a Finkelstein really need to know who an Aryeh Deri is?
''The question is, does someone who comes from American political consulting, can he translate that to this?'' says Netanyahu. ''The answer is -- of course, if he's done enough of them. It's like a country doctor versus some guy in the Mayo Clinic. How many campaigns have consultants here done -- what, six, seven, eight elections at most? Somebody who has done hundreds of elections, a doctor who has performed hundreds of operations, he's better at it.''
Barak makes much the same argument. ''The Americans are good,'' he says, sitting at a table with Shrum and Carville. ''The American political culture, they have elections, you know, it's a continuing process of election. Here we elect a Prime Minister and members of Knesset. Over there you are electing sheriffs, judges, Congress members. So an expertise emerged of running a campaign. And we don't have too much experience here. And I'm hearing from our best strategists, and best media teams, and best pollsters, they are telling me, 'Compared to Americans, we are amateurs.'''
FINKELSTEIN: More attuned to psychology than Carville?
When Finkelstein arrived in Israel in 1996, his knowledge of the country's politics amounted to ''what the average readers of The New York Times would know in New York,'' says Eyal Arad, who was a senior Netanyahu adviser at the time. It is an assessment that Finkelstein neither disputes nor apologizes for. ''Look, it doesn't matter if I get it or not,'' he says. ''If I go to Iowa, they'll say: 'How can you understand Iowa? You're from New York.' And I'll say: 'I don't need to understand Iowa. That's not the point. That's not what I do.' You find the intersections of interests -- you take a survey, you find out what people care about, you find out what your candidate cares about, you find the intersection of those two points, and that's what you talk about. What difference does it make if I understand it or not?''
That said, Finkelstein did spend five weeks of his 18th year working on a kibbutz near Jerusalem and shares the emotional identification many American Jews have with the country's struggle for existence. ''I understood that being Jewish meant that we were always at the edge of extinction as a people,'' Finkelstein says. ''And survival was a fundamental quest in the Jewish person. The reason that Israel was important was because it was a place for Jews to survive. It was a place for Jews to go. And remember, I'm very much a product of the postwar mentality, of the movie 'Exodus': there needs to be a place to go. And this was the place.''
By contrast, Carville is Roman Catholic and has not, he says, made any particular effort to tutor himself on Israel's history and politics in preparation for this job. ''The Israelis understand their history better than anyone else,'' Carville says, settling in for a nightcap by the dying embers of a fire at his Virginia farmhouse one January evening.
''No one is going to say, 'Give me a 500-word essay on the causes, the strategies and the long-range results of the '67 war, the '73 war.' That's just not what's important. I mean, it's important but it's not important to my role. They are not looking to me for advice on Israel. They are looking to me for advice on communications, on organizations, on how to set things up, on how to respond.
''You've got to be careful,'' Carville adds. ''I think in a campaign or a situation like this, when everyone else knows so much, I think there's a point in politics where knowledge becomes a burden.''
STRATEGY: Doesn't Finkelstein's micro-targeting require knowledge of society?
And yet there is a case to be made that in Israel, knowledge is the most important, if not the only, tool for unraveling the tangle of religion, culture, tribes, politics, tradition and animosities that provide the backdrop for the nation's everyday existence. Carville, for example, was surprised to discover that candidates avoid campaigning on the Sabbath so as not to offend observant Jews.
Finkelstein, meanwhile, got an unexpected lesson when he helped Netanyahu come up with the slogan, ''A Strong Leader for a Strong Country.'' It was tame stuff by American standards.
But the Prime Minister was accused of invoking language reminiscent of Fascist propaganda, a demonstration in how memories of World War II remain vivid across much of Israel.
When Carville and Shrum referred to their candidate as General Barak -- an elementary tactic designed to remind voters that Barak's military career argues against the portrayal of him as weak -- they, too, hit a cultural wall. ''I'll take the chutzpah to give you advice, and I won't charge you for it,'' Haim Hecht told Shrum, Carville and Greenberg at the end of their televised discussion about ''Ehud,'' as Hecht called the candidate. ''Drop the 'General' bit. It won't fly here.''
HEBREW LANGUAGE BARRIERS / LITTLE TIME IN COUNTRY
None of the American consultants speak Hebrew; in fact, only Greenberg and Finkelstein are Jewish, though some Israelis incorrectly assume that Shrum is, because of the sound of his name. ''It's not a problem, except Carville is Southern,'' says Doron Cohen, Barak's brother-in-law and senior adviser, joking away the whole issue. ''His Southern accent is almost non-English to us.'' But as a practical matter, the language difference creates a constant barrier between the consultants and their clients. A translator attends the focus groups organized by Labor pollsters. Shrum and Finkelstein tap out advertising scripts in English, which are then translated into Hebrew. The Americans awake to daily English translations of the Israeli newspapers and morning radio reports, and they each have a full-time, Hebrew-speaking American assistant on the ground to monitor events. Although Israeli firms make the actual nightly polling calls, it's Finkelstein and Greenberg who analyze the (translated) results -- an expertise that, they and their clients maintain, crosses language barriers and is one of the reasons they are considered valuable in Israel.
Yet inevitably, despite their best efforts, the Americans are working behind glass, unable to absorb street chatter or appreciate the stray magazine headline, the ambient clues that might signal the changing dynamic of a campaign. ''I really don't see how someone who does not know the language and does not know the people can give advice,'' says Mina Zemach, an Israeli pollster. When Carville met with a group of Israeli political reporters the other day, he sat back in his chair, his eyes rolling in his head, as the reporters and Barak advisers argued in Hebrew over the ground rules of the briefing, one another's questions and even about Carville's responses.
The consultants also are not around all that much. Finkelstein came to Israel about six times in 1996, usually staying for two or three days on each visit, which amounts to barely twice the hours he spent on his commute. Carville has spent far less time in Israel than his Barak employees would like, as he juggles a presidential race in Argentina, a demanding television and speech schedule and rearing two young children with his wife, Mary Matalin, the Republican consultant -- who is, yes, a Netanyahu supporter.
Greenberg, meanwhile, is swimming in the transcontinental demands of his political portfolio. ''I have the Scottish elections on the sixth of May,'' he said over breakfast after arriving in Tel Aviv from London in late February. ''I've got this election on the 17th of May. I've got the South African elections, whose date is not firm, but whose date is either May 23 or May 29. In Britain, I've got the European elections and local council elections on June 1. And I've got the runoff here.''
By American standards, the consultants are not paid a huge amount of money considering the time it takes just to get to work. In the United States, consultants typically get a percentage of campaign money expended on television advertising, a figure that in a big race can amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars. In Israel, Finkelstein says, he is paid $4,000 a month; Barak's campaign manager, Tal Silberstein, says the three American consultants will collect $400,000 among them for their work in Israel.
The traveling-salesman image of these consultants shapes the way they are perceived in Israel, and not necessarily for the better. ''I am amenable to any questions, to whatever the campaign wants me to do,'' Carville said as he opened a news briefing one Sunday morning.
''As long as you are on your plane in two hours,'' responded a political correspondent for Yedioth Ahronoth, Nehama Duek, casting a pointed grin in his direction. Even James Carville was silenced by that remark; Duek was off by only 10 hours.
The American consultants have spent four months preparing for the 22 days leading up to the May 17 election, as well as the subsequent weeks before the likely June 1 runoff. Benjamin Netanyahu and his advisers have tried to turn the election into a referendum on who can best protect Israel's security, suggesting that Barak cannot stand up against a peace process that threatens to place a Palestinian state on Israel's eastern border. ''Netanyahu: A Strong Leader for Israel's Future,'' asserts what will presumably be the Prime Minister's main re-election slogan, unveiled after Finkelstein visited Jerusalem just before Passover.
Barak and his advisers are trying to turn the election on Israel's sluggish economy. ''I say to Netanyahu,'' Barak declared to an exuberant crowd of supporters late last month, ''you haven't given a decent living -- you won't get votes. You haven't given housing -- you won't get votes. You haven't given education -- you won't get votes.''
To critics of the Americans' role here, these last three weeks will be the climax of the conversion of a crucial electoral process into a political version of the Coke and Pepsi taste-off, a generic clash of American weapons and tactics, staged on foreign soil. The candidates and their consultants dispute this, of course, and there's no question that all parties believe in something more than victory for victory's sake. From the fiercely ideological Finkelstein, a libertarian who warmly recalls his tutelage under Ayn Rand, to the staunchly liberal Bob Shrum, a longtime friend of and speech writer for Ted Kennedy, the American consultants have strongly held political views. Throughout their long careers, each has worked only for candidates who will advance those views in government. For his part, Carville lets a look of total incredulity answer an Israeli reporter's inquiry as to whether he could see himself advising Netanyahu someday.
Finkelstein passionately advocates the Likud ideology, tying it to the conservative views he preached to his surprised Democratic parents over the dinner table, growing up in Brooklyn and Levittown, N.Y. ''Netanyahu represents, in my view, a movement into 20th-century freedom concepts, as opposed to big-government concepts,'' Finkelstein contends. ''Labor is the party of the old socialist wing. Likud represents the breakaway from the old socialist views.'' He adds: ''I would not be good if I did this without some passion. I have to care about either the person I'm dealing with or the issues I'm dealing with.''
But is this really the discussion Israeli voters have heard this spring? Do the tactics that the American consultants have grafted onto the Israeli political system allow for even a semblance of reflective debate? The spectacle of Americans in Israel has provided an entertaining story line for the election, shaped by Finkelstein's reclusiveness and Carville's antics (''Bring me some water and I'll turn it into wine!'' the Louisianian instructs an Israeli waiter). But at what cost?
In the final days of the 1996 campaign, after Finkelstein's polling of the few remaining undecided voters found that the margin for Netanyahu's victory rested on a strong turnout among religious Jewish voters, Likud rolled out one more campaign slogan: ''Netanyahu Is Good for the Jews.'' It was a sophisticated and precisely targeted variation of Netanyahu's security argument, a tribute to Finkelstein's keen ability to construct, in an unusually stratified electorate, a 50-percent-plus-1 margin of victory. It was also -- in the words of an American Republican consultant who admires Finkelstein's skills -- blatantly playing to near-primal tensions among Arabs and Jews, and secular and orthodox Jews, in Israeli society.
The future of Jerusalem is among a host of profoundly serious issues facing the country today. But that would be hard to tell from the campaign. Aware of how Netanyahu marshaled the issue last time -- ''Peres will divide Jerusalem'' -- Barak took the subject off the table virtually before the first campaign poster was printed, pledging never to accept a peace plan that partitioned the city that Israel calls its capital. And Barak's pledge to withdraw troops from Lebanon -- the promise that so annoyed Finklestein -- was notable for its presumably deliberate vagueness. Would he also yield the Golan Heights to Syria? Would he allow the Israelis in the north to be subject to missile attacks from Hezbollah guerrillas who operate along the Lebanon border once Israeli troops quit Lebanon?
In this new kind of campaign, such questions do not count for much. What matters is that Barak has forced Netanyahu to respond to him -- precisely the tactical advantage a campaign consultant seeks out at the start of work each day. ''One of the keys to our success will be taking the initiative, independent of substance,'' Greenberg says. ''Appearing to drive things is very important to establishing the leadership qualities that people seek in an Israeli leader.''
There is a limit, finally, to how much anyone can adopt to a new environment, and Arthur Finkelstein and James Carville are nothing if not creatures of habit. Finkelstein is a man who would happily order the same supper at the same restaurant every night: steak, cooked blue-rare; fried onion rings; an Absolut gimlet. He approaches his campaigns the same way: his American candidates have run identical campaigns for the past 10 years, attacking Democrats for being, variously, liberal, ultraliberal, too liberal, embarrassingly liberal and unbelievably liberal. And he has stuck to this menu despite evidence that its time has passed, as Al D'Amato might attest from his private office in New York. Netanyahu this spring is assailing Barak, not surprisingly, for being too smollani for Israel -- that is, too left for Israel.
For Carville, it's the economy, of course. Barak is talking about jobs and health care, just the way another famous Carville client did back in 1992. ''Right now, my guess is that economic considerations will be a bigger factor in this election than any election before,'' Carville says, an assertion that even some Barak supporters say ignores the reality of what ultimately drives every Israeli election.
No one would suggest that Israel is above the intellectual compromises and ideological shortcuts that are arguably the price for democratic elections. But David Bar-Illan, Netanyahu's director of communications, recalls campaigns framed by ''hourlong lectures in stuffy town-hall meetings, or long harangues to public-square crowds'' involving the major candidates for Prime Minister. ''This almost doesn't happen anymore,'' he continues. ''Now it's sound bites on television.'' While noting that his position in Netanyahu's Government prohibits him from commenting directly on the campaigns at hand, Bar-Illan suggests that sound bites and slogans often ''catch an essential truth, the quintessence of your point,'' but inevitably discourage nuanced discussion. ''If your slogan is, 'My rival will divide Jerusalem,' and it catches on and it stigmatizes your rival, you have achieved your purpose. It's not really a discussion of what should be done with Jerusalem or how am I going to keep it together and how is he going to split it.''
Such tactics obviously work, says Uri Dromi, who was the chief spokesman for the Rabin and Peres Governments. But, he adds, they inevitably worsen the daily struggle to govern a nation ''where the issues are so crucial, where everything is so serious, where everything touches the existence of the country. It is bad for the kind of discourse we have in this country.''
Nevertheless, Israel has crossed a threshold this spring, and it is not likely to abandon the television screen to return to the stuffy meetings and public harangues of a few years ago. ''I think the market for American consultants will expand before it contracts,'' Netanyahu says; it is a future that both he and Barak say they applaud. For now, anyone who finds this observation distressing can console themselves with the thought that one way another, a prominent American consultant will lose an election in Israel next month.
A version of this article appears in print on April 25, 1999, Section 6, Page 42 of the National edition with the headline: Sound Bites Over Jerusalem. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
https://www.nytimes.com/1999/04/25/magazine/sound-bites-over-jerusalem.html
