A LITTLE before five o'clock yesterday morning, Mr Arthur Yarusky and some Labour Party colleagues were pasting up the election campaign posters of the Prime Minister, Mr Shimon Peres, on a billboard in Herzliya, north of Tel Aviv, when a car pulled up and four men proclaiming themselves activists of the opposition Likud suggested that they stop what they were doing.
Mr Yarusky and his colleagues took no notice. A knife was brandished. When even that failed to produce the desired effect, one of the Likud quartet pulled a gun, and shot Mr Yarusky twice in the leg. The foursome then sped off in their car.
Mr Yarusky was taken to hospital and as news of the shooting broke, Likud officials tried first to brand the incident as some kind of clash between criminals, nothing to do with the elections at all. But by last night, three of the four alleged suspects had been apprehended, and identified as Likud party activists. Some of them, moreover, were said to have been involved" in violence surrounding local council elections in 1993.
Coincidentally or not, Herzliya is the very town that, six months ago," produced a right wing extremist, Yigal Amir, ready, willing and all too able to take opposition to the Labour government to the ultimate extreme, by assassinating Mr Peres's predecessor, Yitzhak Rabin.
And for any deluded optimists who dreamed that the effects of the Rabin assassination could somehow heal the rifts and moderate the radicals in Israeli society, yesterday's shooting was an unwelcome reawakening. It was not the first violent incident of this campaign - rival activists have traded light blows and heavy insults at various sites in recent days - but it was the first resort to live fire, and polling day is still two weeks away.
To their credit, Mr Peres and his Likud rival for the premiership, Mr Benjamin Netanyahu, have conducted a noticeably clean campaign. The Likud even chose, commendably, not to try to make much political capital out of the killing by Palestinian gunmen of a Jewish student outside a West Bank settlement earlier this week.
Pressing the flesh yesterday in the working class town of Ashdod, solid Likud territory, Mr Netanyahu issued a renewed call for calm, civilised behaviour - a plea echoed by Mr Peres. For Mr Netanyahu, violence by those who call themselves his loyalists could prove costly at the ballot box - reminding Israelis of the Rabin assassination, and of Mrs Leah Rabin's subsequent allegation that the Likud bore partial responsibility for the climate of extremism that provoked it.
(David Horovitz is managing editor of The Jerusalem Report)
. Israeli diplomats and sailors abroad are entitled to vote in the elections and will be voting today. The Israeli embassy in Dublin has set aside a room for voting today for the eight people entitled to do so.
. PLO police arrested dozens of militant Muslim Hamas members throughout the West Bank in connection with a drive by shooting that killed a US born Israeli, a senior Palestinian security official said.