ISRAEL:The two frontrunners for the Labor Party leadership could know their fate as early as next Monday's primary, writes Peter Hirschbergin Jerusalem
They are both former generals and the race has been dubbed "the battle of the generals", but Ami Ayalon and Ehud Barak - the two frontrunners ahead of the Labor Party leadership primary next Monday - have adopted vastly different strategies. One has come out guns blazing; the other hopes to conquer the party by stealth.
Ayalon has been outspoken, his campaign highly visible, his message to Labor members clear: I am the most popular candidate among the general public. Only I can win the next election. Ehud Barak cannot.
Barak, not wanting to increase opposition to him among the general public, has been understated, shunning the limelight, preferring off-the-record meetings with senior journalists. His message: Only I have the experience required to lead the country. Ami Ayalon does not.
The opinion polls favour Ayalon, giving him a five-point lead over Barak in the first round of voting. In a second round - a candidate needs to garner over 40 per cent to win in the first round - most polls show Ayalon with an even bigger advantage.
But pollsters have often found it extremely difficult to gauge the outcome of party primaries.
With the publication earlier this month of a highly critical interim report on the government's conduct during last summer's war in Lebanon, the Labor leadership race has largely focused on whether the winner on May 28th will lead the party out of government - a move that would be likely to precipitate an early election. If he wins, Ayalon has pledged to abandon prime minister Ehud Olmert, who was criticised by the war report for a "severe failure" in judgment, and lead Labor into opposition.
But Barak, perhaps more attuned to the party faithful, has adopted a more nuanced position: he will push for early elections if Olmert does not step down, but he is prepared to serve as defence minister in an interim government, under Olmert, until an election is held.
The former prime minister understands that while many Labor voters would like to see the back of Olmert they don't want to find themselves languishing in the political wilderness.
With polls giving former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu's centre-right Likud party a healthy lead, Labor members are worried they could find themselves in opposition if elections are held soon.
The 61-year-old Ayalon, a former navy chief, who was brought in to rehabilitate the Shin Bet internal security service after the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, is considered more dovish than Barak. In 2003 he launched a peace initiative called "The People's Voice" with moderate Palestinian professor Sari Nusseibeh, calling for a two-state solution to the conflict, but without the right of return for Palestinian refugees.
But closer inspection seems to reveal that Barak and Ayalon are not far apart on the Palestinian issue. When Barak met Yasser Arafat at the ultimately abortive Camp David talks in 2000, he was ready to make far-reaching compromises based on the idea of a two-state solution, including concessions in Jerusalem.
While Ayalon's image as a no-nonsense, straight-talking politician has worked in his favour, his main weakness is his lack of experience - he has never held a ministerial post.
Experience, by contrast, is the 65-year-old Barak's strongest card. A former prime minister, Barak was chief of the army in the 1990s and has served as defence minister, foreign minister and interior minister. But his term in office, from 1999-2001, is widely perceived by Israelis as a failure: the second intifada uprising erupted just weeks after the talks at Camp David collapsed.
Whether the primary goes to a second round - it would be held in mid-June - depends largely on whether two of the other candidates in the race, Labor lawmakers Ophir Pines-Paz (8 per cent in the polls) and Danny Yatom (4 per cent), go the distance.
Party leader and defence minister Amir Peretz, who has been badly tarnished by the war in Lebanon, is unlikely to pull out.
But, with Peretz hovering around 10-15 per cent in the polls, if Pines-Paz and Yatom exit the race, Labor could well know the identity of its new leader come Monday night.