Lieberman in Russian

State prosecutors are preparing to announce if the FM will be indicted for corruption. What does the Russian constituency think about that?

By LARRY DERFNER
lieberman_521 (photo credit: Marc Israel Sellem)
lieberman_521
(photo credit: Marc Israel Sellem)
Asked what they thought of Avigdor Lieberman and the corruption indictment he may soon face, most shoppers in a busy Russian minimarket in Ashdod said they didn’t speak enough Hebrew to be interviewed or didn’t want to talk about politics. But among those who did offer a word or two in response to the question, nearly all said they supported the embattled foreign minister and Israel Beiteinu leader.
“I don’t understand the investigation against him, but I support him; and if he is indicted, I’ll continue to support him,” said Larisa Syomin, 46, a medical secretary in the city, which is home to some 60,000 Russian immigrants, while scanning the produce section last Friday.
Lieberman, 52, is easily the most controversial politician in the country, the leader of its third largest party and a serious contender for prime minister. But as much heat as he generates in ordinary times, within the next month he is likely to be making international headlines: After 13 years of investigation, state prosecutors say they will announce by the end of February whether they’ll indict Lieberman or not. The decision will be crucial to the direction of Israeli politics in the coming years.
Police recommended in 2009 that Lieberman be indicted on a series of charges connected with his alleged acceptance of NIS 10 million in bribes from foreign businessmen – charges that carry a maximum 31-year prison sentence. Lieberman has said that if he is indicted he will immediately resign his cabinet post.
But he has also said, “The more political power Israel Beiteinu and I gain, the worse the attempts to force me out of public life.”
Early in the investigation, he charged that Israel is a “police state” whose law enforcement authorities serve at the whim of the political elite and cast Russian immigrants, along with religious Jews and right-wingers, as persecuted minorities.
Thus he has laid the groundwork for a public defense in case of his being indicted – by portraying himself as a right-wing, Moldova-born Dreyfus in the Jewish state. His electoral base is the 1.2 million immigrants who came here from the former Soviet Union in the last two decades. This community, while integrating into Israeli society as no immigrant population ever did before, still lives much of its life in Russian and views Lieberman – and the investigation against him – differently than does Israel at large.
If Attorney-General Yehuda Weinstein decides to indict him, Lieberman could well be finished. If Weinstein decides against it, Lieberman’s chances of becoming prime minister will receive a tremendous boost. He’s a villain to the world and to the Israeli Left; he’s the nemesis of this country’s justice system; he’s accused of massive corruption – and as he approaches his do-or-die moment, his base is sticking by him.
Why?
“He’s a very talented politician, and he’s a chauvinist – I’m not ashamed to use that word – who speaks loudly and clearly about our right to this land. It’s no secret that the Russians tend to the right,” said Yosef Begun, one of the pioneer generation of Prisoners of Zion, who now lives in Jerusalem. “Like us, he had to make it on his own, without a network of ready-made connections, and he did it. He’s our man, a man of our community.”
“People who say Lieberman dictates to the Russian immigrants what to think don’t know what they’re talking about. The opposite is the truth – he expresses what most Russians already think,” said Dr. Ze’ev Khanin, a leading expert on Russian immigrant opinion and chief scientist at the Immigrant Absorption Ministry.
“What accounts for Lieberman’s magic with the Russians? I don’t know. I just know that his brutishness embarrasses me,” said Alla Shainskaya, a Meretz activist in Tel Aviv and probably the most prominent figure in the very narrow Russian immigrant left.
Lieberman, who left the Likud and his boss, Binyamin Netanyahu, to found Israel Beiteinu in 1999, is a rising power nationally, but in the Russian community he is a league of his own. During the 1990s there were other Russian parties and political leaders, most notably Natan Sharansky and Yisrael B’Aliya, but since then they’ve all left the field to Lieberman and Israel Beiteinu.
“Lieberman is the only serious politician who’s seen on the Russian street as being of national caliber. For the moment, all the others are viewed as local leaders,” said Khanin.
In a poll of 504 Russian immigrants taken by Mutagim last November, Lieberman outdistanced Netanyahu as the first choice for prime minister by 27 percent to 21%. A year earlier, Netanyahu had led Lieberman 35%- 25%, and a year before that, Netanyahu received more than 50% of the Russian vote, while Lieberman received less than 20%.
In terms of party preference, Israel Beiteinu got the nod from 34% of those polled last November, compared to 14% for Likud, 6% for Kadima and 1.5% for Labor.
Although Israel Beiteinu is no longer seen as strictly a Russian party and has Sabras such as Danny Ayalon and Orly Levy in its Knesset faction, it still gets two-thirds of its votes – or 10 of its 15 Knesset mandates – from Russian immigrants. While it might be expected that older-generation immigrants might be more inclined to vote Israel Beiteinu, with the younger generation leaning more toward Likud or Kadima, Khanin said this is not so, and that the only demographic divide when it comes to voting is along economic lines. “The poorer Russians tend to vote in larger proportions for Israel Beiteinu, mainly because they see it as representing their social needs, while the more prosperous are more likely to vote Likud,” he said.
Asked about young leaders coming up behind Lieberman, most observers cited Ze’ev Elkin, the Likud’s coalition leader in the Knesset, followed by Tourism Minister Stas Meseznikov.
In the dairy section of the Ashdod minimarket, Alexander Vinokovsky, 54, a factory worker, said he didn’t know enough about the investigation against Lieberman to voice an opinion on it. But he said he kind of liked Lieberman’s style. “He talks straight, he doesn’t hide what he thinks like most politicians.”
As for Lieberman’s views of Arabs, especially his intent to transfer Israeli Arabs to the Palestinian Authority, Vinokovsky didn’t take this seriously. “He is just trying to get the votes of extremists; he knows transfer is impossible.”
Asked whom he voted for in the last election, the veteran immigrant said, “Kadima. Tzipi Livni seems very intelligent, professional, and I liked the idea of a woman becoming prime minister. I want to see something new.”
On the spectrum of Russian immigrant opinion, such views put Vinokovsky on the Left. The breakdown between Left, Right and Center among Russians is similar to the split among Israelis as a whole. “You have 12%- 15% saying they’re on the Left, 25%-30% on the Right and 55%-60% in the Center, whatever that means,” said Khanin, adding that “the [Russian] Center has moved to the Right, along with all of Israeli society.”
The left-wing opposition to Lieberman can be seen on Internet blogs, said Shainskaya, but they are politically “homeless.” Russian politicians are nearly all in right-wing parties, she noted. To her, though, Lieberman is “very dangerous. He doesn’t know what democracy is; there’s no democracy in his party. Like a lot of Russian immigrants, he brought with him the ideology of the Bolsheviks, which is that the end justifies the means, and that the minority has to go along with the view of the majority.
“Personally, I think his recent political statements are geared to the decision on whether to indict him. He’s preparing public opinion – when he attacks the human rights organizations, he’s preparing to blame his indictment on persecution by the Left.”
And she thought he will have company. “There haven’t been that many stories in the Russian media about the investigation, but if the decision is positive – meaning if the decision is to indict – then the attacks in the media on the prosecutors will begin. It’s guaranteed. The Russian media are entirely negative not only about the Left but about the law enforcement agencies as well. The level of attack is so low, it’s embarrassing to read,” she said.
Because Russian immigrants are naturally, with time, moving toward Hebrew-language media and because of the move from print to Internet, newspapers such as Vesti are not as influential as they were in the 1990s. Asked who the leading voices in the Russian media were, no one interviewed for this article could offer a single name.
But all agreed that all Russian media outlets, to the extent that they cover politics, lean to the Right and are pro-Lieberman.
“I may have missed an item, but I don’t remember seeing any serious criticism of Lieberman in the Russian media,” said Marina Neznik, a lecturer on the Russian language at Tel Aviv University. She named Vesti as still the most popular newspaper, followed by Novosti and Globus, with Channel 9 on television, Reka on radio and a wide range of websites, blogs and LiveJournal postings dominating the local Russian-language Internet map.
Boris Brestovitsky, a veteran immigrant who discusses politics among other subjects on LiveJournal under the name “tomcat61,” said Lieberman and Israel Beiteinu were “very close to my opinions. His party represents the Russian middle class.” He said approvingly that Lieberman was the “leader of a party with no factions. Israel Beiteinu is the most monolithic party, the politicians in it are the closest to each other economically, there are no differences of opinion among them. I see this as positive. The leader of a political party has to be a dictator or the party falls apart. When I say dictator, I mean a dictator like Ben-Gurion, Begin or Rabin.”
So what do the Russians think of this 13- year investigation? Do they have faith in Israeli law enforcement, or do they believe this is a “police state” as Lieberman has infamously charged?
Only one person interviewed for this article – Brestovitsky – went so far as to flatly accuse state prosecutors of framing Lieberman for political reasons, to say there’s a high-level conspiracy against him. But with the exception of Shainskaya, everyone who had an opinion said there was something fishy about it all.
Most people don’t understand how a criminal investigation can take so long without bearing fruit, and the explanation that it’s politically motivated seems to be the simplest one. Khanin noted that Gregory Lerner and Arkadi Gaydamak both mounted media campaigns to convince the Russian public that their corruption prosecutions were aimed at them because they were Russians. “These stories didn’t go over on the Russian street at all, according to polls,” he said.
Brestovitsky, while saying he didn’t know the facts of the case against Lieberman, suspected the investigation was the expression of “the wealthy families’ defense of their own interests, of their intention to go on ruling. Lieberman is the No. 2 politician in the country, and they don’t want to let him stay there. Not because he’s a Russian immigrant – there’s no more discrimination against us, we’ve proven ourselves – but because he doesn’t serve their interests. Their families are afraid of him. He’s too new.”
Begun also acknowledged that he didn’t know all the facts of the case. “But as a simple Israeli citizen, I know one thing – highranking officials in this country are always facing these kinds of accusations, and the people who benefit from it are their opponents, so it seems that as Lieberman gains more and more influence in Israeli politics, the main objective behind these accusations is to stop him in his political career. For an investigation to take so many years, it gives the impression that there’s nothing substantial to it. It leaves a bad smell.
“But I don’t agree that Israel is a police state. It’s a free country. I’ve lived in a police state,” said Begun, who spent 10 years in Soviet prisons for his Zionist activities.
Asked what effect he thought a decision to indict Lieberman would have on his political support, Begun replied: “The people who oppose him politically will believe he’s guilty.
The people who support him politically will believe he’s innocent.” On that basis, Lieberman can count on a lot of support from the Russian street next month, no matter what Attorney-General Weinstein decides.