Spinning 'Israel's Watergate'
Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu cried foul on Wednesday in a whodunit over two burglaries at the Washington offices of a U.S. pollster working for his main election rival Ehud Barak.
"There is something very, very curious here," Netanyahu told Israel Radio after intruders broke into the offices of political pollster Stanley Greenberg for the second time in a week. Barak's camp says the burglars made off with campaign material.
"And I hope for the future of Israeli politics that we are not witnessing an act of political provocation whose purpose is to issue false accusations," he said.
Netanyahu stopped short of explicitly accusing Barak's Labor party of staging the burglaries, but his right-wing Likud party claimed the case smacked of a political sting.
"This looks like a cheap provocation by our enemies whose purpose is to invent false accusations against the Likud in some sort of poor man's Watergate," party spokeswoman Ronit Eckstein said.
Labor has studiously refrained from pointing a finger directly at Likud in the Greenberg mystery, deepened by what it says has been a chain of break-ins at the homes of Barak aides in Israel.
But the party has lost no time in trying to turn the affair to its political advantage in the run-up to voting on May 17.
"I don't believe that some failed government... could benefit from the fact that somebody broke into some office and took documents," Barak said on Wednesday.
"But I really have the impression that somebody is in a serious panic if he is willing to pay money, maybe a lot of money, so that people will carry out criminal break-ins in foreign countries."
Opinion polls show Barak running neck-and-neck with Netanyahu in a race defined by exceptional mudslinging, even by Israeli standards. Both contenders have hired American "spin-doctors" to help steer their campaigns.
Netanyahu's campaign aide, Republican consultant Arthur Finkelstein, has been hammered by the Israeli press as a symbol of political decay, but many credit him with having engineered Netanayhu's startling come-from-behind victory in his 1996 race against the dovish incumbent Shimon Peres.
Israeli media have dubbed the burglaries "Israel's Watergate" after the 1972 break-in at U.S. Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate complex in Washington that ignited the scandal which toppled President Richard Nixon in 1974.
The first break-in at the offices of Greenberg Quinlan Research Inc took place last week, when the burglars stole petty cash, office supplies and a computer diskette.
Greenberg vice-president Jeremy Rosner said the company had installed an improved security system after that burglary but that the intruders bypassed it late on Monday night in what he called "a pretty sophisticated job."
Barak's campaign manager Tal Silberstein said in Jerusalem that the burglrs knew precisely what they were after.
"They apparently focused this time on research material relating specifically to our campaign," he said.
Labor says the homes of five Barak aides in Israel were broken into over a single week although nothing substantial was taken.
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