In a last-ditch effort to pass the 2-percent electoral threshold and enter the
next Knesset, Kadima unveiled a new strategy at a sparsely attended Tel Aviv
press conference on Wednesday, rebranding itself as a party focused on
security.
In its campaign advertisements, Kadima will highlight the
military expertise of party chairman Shaul Mofaz and MKs Yisrael Hasson, Yohanan
Plesner and Doron Avital. The party will call for equalizing the salaries of IDF
soldiers, who make NIS 352 a month, with those of kollel students, who the party
claims can make up to NIS 3,400 from governmental benefits.
“Until the
burden of service is equalized, we can equalize the public funding and stop this
humiliating situation,” said Plesner, who wrote two controversial reports over
the past two years on how to draft yeshiva students.
Plesner said the
issue was uniquely Kadima’s because it was not a priority for Labor, while Yesh
Atid focuses on a five-year exemption for haredi service in a plan written by
Elazar Stern before he decided to run with The Tzipi Livni Party.
Mocking
the seven Kadima MKs who left for The Tzipi Livni Party, Plesner said that “the
job-seekers and opportunists” had left the party and only the “real people”
remained.
“We have heard too many eulogies lately,” said Hasson, who
chairs the campaign.
“We are alive and kicking and predictions about us
have been wrong before. We know nothing about frustration or giving
up.”
Hasson blasted the press for not taking the party
seriously.
“If I was a member of the press, I would look at myself in the
mirror and be embarrassed at what I did to a former IDF chief of general staff
who has done so much for this country,” he said.
The new campaign
replaces Kadima’s negative advertisements, which warned that Prime Minister
Binyamin Netanyahu could bring about Israel’s destruction by attacking Iran.
Kadima strategist Moti Morel, who once worked for Likud, took credit for
Netanyahu not raising the Iran issue in the campaign for months after Kadima’s
ads ran.
Morel said Kadima’s new campaign was not anti-haredi because it
does not call for taking money away from haredim.
“It says pay soldiers
like the haredim, not instead of them,” he said.