TEL AVIV
Though he has opened up a healthy lead in the polls ahead of Monday’s vote for Likud Party chairmanship, former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s biggest headache may be from within his own party.
Mr. Netanyahu and Likud elders are desperately trying to quash Moshe Feiglin, far-right candidate for the Likud leadership who says Israeli sovereignty should cover the entire West Bank.
The fear is that a Feiglin victory would erode the Likud’s support in the Feb. 10 general election by undermining its claim to being a center-right party.
“He and his group are very different from the Likud,” said Yuval Steinitz, a Likud Knesset member and a candidate for a top Cabinet post should Mr. Netanyahu regain the prime ministership. “Their positions are very much to the right of the Likud, and we think it will do damage to the Likud image.”
But with Likud poised to triple the number of its parliamentary deputies in the general election, Mr. Feiglin might have built enough support in the party to succeed.
Mr. Feiglin, 46, first came onto the national stage during the early days of the Oslo peace accords with the Palestinians in the 1990s, when he spearheaded a protest movement, Zo Artzeinu, that advocated civil disobedience and clashed with the police.
Mr. Feiglin’s Jewish Leadership Movement staunchly opposes any territorial concessions to the Palestinians and has been trying to set up a beachhead in the Likud for the past five years.
A spokesman for Mr. Feiglin, Amnon Shomron, insisted that the candidate represents the essence of the Likud platform: opposition to a Palestinian state.
But Mr. Feiglin has taken some provocative stances, such as encouraging Israeli soldiers to refuse orders during the 2005 evacuation from the Gaza Strip.
After the evacuation last week of a settler outpost in the West Bank city of Hebron, Mr. Feiglin wrote an opinion article in the right-wing Mekor Rishon newspaper that “the main objective of the government mechanism today is the destruction of all the settlements.”
The candidate said Jews should have the right to settle anywhere they choose in the Palestinian territories and that Israel should exercise its sovereignty everywhere in the West Bank.
“[Sovereignty] should be over all of Judea and Samaria,” Mr. Shomron said, using the Hebrew word for the areas corresponding to the West Bank.
In a recent speech to the Likud Central Committee, Mr. Feiglin denounced previous Likud leaders such as Ariel Sharon as carrying out the “expulsion” policies of the left.
The Likud establishment is so concerned about Mr. Feiglin that it has paid for billboard advertisements that warn Likud members that Israeli left-wingers are rooting for the far-right candidate.
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