Smiling broadly at each other, shaking hands over and over until the photographers were sated, the four leaders of Israel's new centrist alliance last night highlighted a single theme as they presented their political platform to the Israeli public: the desperate need to rid the country of Mr Benjamin Netanyahu's divisive leadership.
Mr Yitzhak Mordechai, the new party's leader, who was sacked as minister of defence by Prime Minister Netanyahu on Saturday night, promised to work towards an Israel that resolved its conflicts through "tolerance, mutual respect, freedom of choice and no coercion", and last night pledged he would stand for the premiership against Mr Netanyahu.
Mr Amnon Lipkin-Shahak, the former chief-of-staff and number two in the party, pledged to revive the "positive spirit of the country". The two other members of the leadership quartet, Mr Netanyahu's former finance minister, Mr Dan Meridor, and the ex-Tel Aviv Mayor, Mr Roni Milo, also spoke of steering Israel to a better future. A better Israel, all four made clear, than the one Mr Netanyahu had shaped over the past 21/2 years.
Mr Netanyahu, who was last night heading to victory in a halfhearted contest for his Likud party leadership with the veteran Mr Moshe Arens, was quick to deride the new grouping as "a party of slogans that will fall apart". Its leaders, he claimed, were motivated by personal ambition, and had no shared vision. In fact, he said, they had "no path at all".
Sometime before the May 17th elections, he asserted, the centrists would join forces with the established Labour main opposition party, but even that coalition of forces would not bring him down. "The people will choose us," he predicted, "because they want strong leadership."
The centrists, however, are banking on the public desire for unity - for a concerted effort to heal deep rifts over peacemaking, over religion and over social issues - sweeping them into power.
Mr Mordechai, like Mr LipkinShahak a former senior army officer, offered to make "reasonable compromises" for peace with neighbouring countries, including some kind of land-for-peace deal with Syria involving the Golan Heights. And he and the other candidates also spoke of finding solutions through consensus to disputes involving ultra-Orthodox Jews and on-going discrimination faced by Israel's Sephardi (North African and Middle Eastern-born Jews) and Arab citizens.
The effort, throughout their well-attended press conference, screened live on national television, was to plot a reasonable, middle path, to woo the Israeli mainstream, to antagonise only the far-right and far-left.
Reporters tried to trip up Mr Mordechai and Mr LipkinShahak, referring to dust-ups in their military past, including the occasion when Mr Lipkin-Shahak declined to appoint Mr Mordechai as his deputy chief-ofstaff. But both men easily wriggled clear and Mr Lipkin-Shahak insisted that, although he would
have loved to be party leader himself, he was happy to work with Mr Mordechai, if that was the best way to ensure victory.
Mr Netanyahu will doubtless try harder to find critical chinks in last night's wall of centrist unity. And he does have almost four months until polling day to do so.