Rival's Ad Puts a Personal Spin on Sharon
The sorrowful mandolin music is meant to evoke the theme from "The Godfather," but the pale face on the television screen resembles no Corleone. It is that of Ariel Sharon, Israel's prime minister.

In case anyone misses the point of the new commercial, by the left-of-center Labor Party, its candidate in the coming elections, Amram Mitzna, materializes to declare, "Sharon is behaving like the Godfather, and the government and state are being run by the Famiglia." The commercial shows a fake movie poster titled "Sharon and Sons."

Until Sunday night, the political advertising war between the major parties here was consumed by boasts over which one would most swiftly complete a new separation wall between Israelis and the Palestinians in the West Bank. Now, for the first time, Labor is attacking the prime minister's character — and Mr. Sharon's party, Likud, has been forced to defend it.

"It's already destroyed the image of the giant," said Benyamin Elon, a leader of a small faction to the right of Mr. Sharon. "I can't say he lost everything, but he lost a lot, a lot."

Like many other politicians and analysts, Mr. Elon predicted that Mr. Sharon would survive to form the next Israeli government, but that, because of the continuing investigation, any new coalition would be far less stable, and even more right-leaning, than his old one.

Surveys published today suggested that Mr. Sharon's fortunes had rebounded a bit. The reason appears to be that those members of Mr. Sharon's party who might have pondered supporting another faction are rallying to protect their embattled leader.

Last week, during a televised news conference to address the accusations, Mr. Sharon was yanked off the air when the chairman of Israel's Central Elections Committee determined that he was using the time illegally to spread "election propaganda." The Likud Party has seized on that event to hint that Mr. Sharon is the victim of a Labor conspiracy.

A week ago, the Likud Party was using Mr. Sharon for its own defense, against a separate scandal involving charges of vote-buying in the party's primary. Likud had been advertising not itself, but Mr. Sharon — plastering his name rather than its own on the sides of buses and, in its television and radio advertising, playing the jingle, "The people want Sharon." In Israel's parliamentary system, voters now cast one ballot for a party, not a particular candidate.

A key to Mr. Sharon's political metamorphosis — from pariah for the early conduct of the Lebanon war to place-holder candidate in the last elections to seeming colossus — has been his skillfully cultivated image as a non-politician: Rumpled and portly, he has presented himself as a grandfather summoned to serve his people, benevolent and straightforward with his own, but ferocious toward those who might threaten them.

Criticism of his tactics from abroad has only reinforced his stalwart image and his popular support by feeding Israelis' belief that they are misunderstood, or deliberately maligned, overseas.

Those tactics have not produced the peace and security Mr. Sharon promised in his last campaign, though. In new violence today in the Gaza Strip, Israeli soldiers shot two Palestinians to death after one of them threw a grenade at an armored bus near the Israeli settlement of Netzarim, the army said. It said both men were armed.

Although Mr. Sharon has not delivered on his central campaign pledge, Israelis generally blame the Palestinians for the lapse. In what they increasingly regard as an insoluble conflict, most of them put their trust in Mr. Sharon as an old warrior who told them hard truths, rather than in doves who disappointed them after envisioning a new Middle East.

The political scandal, based as it is on accusations that Mr. Sharon lied to advance himself and his immediate family, has shaken this trust for the first time, in the view of politicians of the right and left and of political analysts.

A prominent Labor politician said the party's polling indicated that Mr. Sharon was vulnerable over corruption. "It's a crack in his holiness aura," he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/14/international/middleeast/14ISRA.html