Party-hopping MKs mixing up Israeli political landscape

JERUSALEM -- If politics is truly Israel's national sport, then the athletes that Knesset members most closely resemble are American baseball players.

For it is pro-baseball players who have, over the last two decades, earned a reputation for jumping teams without any semblance of loyalty to one city or the other.

There was a time, nostalgic sports fans often complain, when a player would play his whole career with the same team. No more. With the advent of free agency, players team-hop with ease, following the biggest paycheck.

As in sports, so too in Israeli politics. No fewer than 29 MKs from the outgoing Knesset have switched allegiance to rival parties vying for seats in the next Knesset.

"This number is astounding," said outgoing Labor MK Shevah Weiss, former Knesset speaker and a political scientist widely considered an expert on parliamentary systems.

Weiss is one of only a few MKs who gracefully accepted the decision of voters not to send them back to the Knesset, and did not scamper about in search of a new political home.

The number of MKs who have switched allegiance this time is unprecedented in Israel, Weiss said. "I don't think there is anything like it in the world. We are talking about a fourth of the Knesset!"

The norm in elections past, he said, was five to seven MKs switching sides.

Unlike athletes, the lure for MKs is not so much the money as a higher slot on a rival party's list.

For instance, when Hanan Porat finished in an unrealistic slot in the National Religious Party central committee balloting, he jumped ship and joined Tekuma, where he was given the top slot. With him he took Zvi Hendel, who was equally unhappy with his placement on the NRP list. (Tekuma subsequently joined the United National Party, a right-wing bloc.)

Meretz's Dedi Zucker finished near the bottom in that party's internal election, so he turned around and found a slot atop the fledgling Green Party.

Adisu Messele didn't make it in Labor, so he went with Amir Peretz in his new Workers' Party. Eliezer Zandberg left Tsomet and joined the Center Party, but when he saw he wasn't going to secure a realistic slot there either, he found a place with Shinui, itself a breakaway from Meretz. And so on.

Of the 32 MKs who ran on the joint Likud-Tsomet-Gesher list in 1996, 14 have flown the coop. Five of 34 Labor MKs have left in search of greener pastures, as have two of nine Meretz MKs, two of the nine NRP representatives, two of seven Yisrael Ba'aliya MKs, two of the five Hadash-Balad MKs, and half of the four-person Third Way Party.

Each MK inevitably couches his defection in ideological terms.

"My fight with Meretz was completely ideological and serious," Zucker insisted on a recent television news show. "The fight was on how we live here together. I thought it was necessary to talk to haredi Mizrahim [Jews of North African or Asian origin], because without them there would not have been Oslo, or many other things.

"Once or twice in life you need a major disagreement to rethink what you have done until now."

The MKs can claim whatever they want, Weiss said. In his view, the mass migration from party to party is nothing less than "sweeping political opportunism."

The glaring exception, he said, was Ze'ev "Benny" Begin, who left Likud to found the new Herut.

Another major difference between the politicians and baseball players is that while the baseball players leave one team looking for more money on another, the politicians leave one party for another and -- in most cases -- bring a substantial "dowry" with them. This dowry includes $350,000 in campaign funding, and three minutes of valuable air time for the televised election ads.

But this, pointed out Knesset spokesman Giora Pordes, is only if the MK leaves his party as part of a faction of at least two. If one person bolts his party alone, he isn't entitled to the air time or the money.

As a result, both Zucker and Emanuel Zissmann, Pordes said, aren't bringing any campaign "goodies" to their new homes.

But the rest of the wandering MKs are. And for a party like Yitzhak Mordechai's Center Party, this dowry is substantial -- as much for the TV time as the money.

All parties, including new ones, receive 10 minutes of TV time.

They then receive three more minutes for each party MK. The Center Party, which picked up six defectors from other parties -- Mordechai, Dan Meridor, David Magen, Haggai Merom, Nissim Zvilli and Alex Lubotzky -- is registering a net gain of 18 minutes of time. They will be getting more television exposure than United Torah Judaism and Yisrael Ba'aliya, and almost as much as Meretz and the NRP. Not bad for a new party.

"It is political chaos," Weiss said of the mass migrations. "This phenomenon represents political privatization -- the idea that if I don't get on the list I'll just go elsewhere, and take my three minutes and [$350,000] with me. It's a disgrace."

Haifa University political scientist Asher Arian, an authority on Israeli elections, said one cause of the phenomenon is direct election of the prime minister.