** Yisrael Beiteinu (Israel Our Home), headed by former Netanyahu-aide Avigdor Lieberman, will be choosing its list of Knesset candidates this week. It will not hold primaries, but its leaders will rather interview some 175 potential candidates at a week-long convention in the Golan town of Katzrin this week, and then determine the list. The views of Yisrael Beiteinu, which has 11 seats in the current Knesset, are generally more hawkish than those of the Likud.
** Moshe Feiglin, who refuses to appeal the decision to drop him from #20 to #36 on the Likud list of Knesset candidates, has turned down an offer by MK Aryeh Eldad to head the HaTikvah party. Feiglin says that the Likud "does not belong to [Binyamin] Netanyahu," who apparently orchestrated the reshuffling of the list, and that "the Likud is my home." Eldad, formerly of the National Union, now heads the breakaway HaTikvah party, which is not expected to win any seats in the coming election.
** Labor Chairman Ehud Barak advises the public not to vote for Kadima. Speaking over the weekend, Barak said, “Kadima is a party that when you vote for it, you don’t know if you’re giving your vote to Livni, Dalia Itzik and Meir Sheetrit [on the left], or to Sha’ul Mofaz, Tzachi HaNegbi and Otniel Shneller. Some of Kadima are right-wingers who might easily wake up the day after the elections and join the Likud.”
** Orli Levy, daughter of colorful former Foreign Minister David Levy, announced that she was entering politics and would seek a seat in the Yisrael Beiteinu party. A 35-year-old wife and mother of three, Levy has a law degree, has been a model, and now works mainly in the media.
** Some 1,000 members of the ultra-left Meretz party’s Central Committee are choosing their party’s candidates today (Sunday). Vying for places on the list, after party leader Chaim Oron’s reserved #1 place, are MKs Zahava Gal’on, Avshalom Vilan, and Tzviya Greenfeld, as well as former Peace Now chief Mosi Raz, and others. Meretz is then expected to add to its list members of a new left-wing movement headed by former MK Naomi Chazan, and those of an environmental party known as the “Green Movement.”
** Kadima will hold its primaries this week as well. Former party leader Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was questioned under caution on Friday for the 11th time by police investigators. The case in question involves suspicions that he arranged many political appointments for his cronies when he was Minister of Industry and Trade in the second Sharon government.