Israeli politics has entered the home stretch before the January election mired in muck. The opening phase of election season ended extremely unpleasantly with the submission of 34 party candidate lists last week. Shelly Yachimovich claimed that Amir Peretz's departure from the Labor party violated all ethical rules. This is true. It is not right for someone to leave at the last minute after competing in a party's primary, being elected to a high spot on a party list and recognizing the legal validity of the primary results. This is similar to what Shaul Mofaz did when he said, "you don't leave your home shortly before abandoning Likud for Kadima before the 2006 election. But Peretz does not owe anything to anyone. Yachimovich is going to teach Peretz lessons in ethics? She was the person who, as a Channel 2 reporter in 2005, conducted an interview with Peretz and then went straight to a restaurant in Abu Ghosh with him, Peretz claims, where she asked him to help her join the Labor party ahead of the 2006 election. The Yachimovich camp claims that this is nonsense and that meeting happened two weeks after the legitimate media interview with Peretz. She claims that Peretz was the one who proposed the restaurant meeting to Yachimovich. The Yachimovich camp says that she quickly called her supervisor at Channel 2, Shalom Keitel (who, coincidentally, is now Yachimovich's media adviser), to inform him of the possibility that she would jump into the political pool and that he gave her a week to decide. Peretz is daydreaming, they say. Who to believe? Perhaps Peretz and Yachimovich should take a polygraph test to determine who is telling the truth. To be honest, the timing of the meeting between Peretz and Yachimovich about her possible entry into politics doesn't really matter. But if the meeting was arranged before the media interview took place, as the Peretz camp has suggested, this was an ethical violation. Also, even if Peretz's version of the story is correct (which would require a meticulous investigation to determine), it does not exonerate him for his problematic choice to join Tzipi Livni's Hatnuah ("The Movement") party after having already been elected to the third spot on the Labor list. Peretz's act was unpleasant. So was the ousting of Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon from Yisrael Beytenu. Was it the humiliation of the Turkish ambassador to Israel? Was it leaks to the media? Was it public statements he made that Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman disagreed with? It does not matter, because this is not how a deputy should removed. Too much time has passed for Ayalon to be ousted for those incidents now. It appears now that the first wave of individual shocks has passed, unless a dramatic investigation pops up or Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein decides to indict Lieberman on thin charges. Yachimovich said on Saturday that she would focus on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and not on her rivals within the center-left bloc. She wants to do this in order to put the embarrassment of her dispute with Peretz behind her and bring attention to the fundamental struggle between the two main parties in this election Likud and Labor.
