PM's promises demand closer scrutiny

Mr Benjamin Netanyahu rose from his seat on the podium, and sat down on the edge of the stage, touching distance from the front…

Mr Benjamin Netanyahu rose from his seat on the podium, and sat down on the edge of the stage, touching distance from the front row of his audience. "I'm hurting just like you're hurting," he declared solemnly to the gathering, which was supposedly constituted of jobless residents of Ofakim, a southern town with the country's highest unemployment. Then he listed all the local factories which, he assured them, were about to offer new employment opportunities in the town - some 270 jobs in all.

The prime minister's visit to Ofakim yesterday - on the back of worsening figures that show nationwide unemployment at 8.1 per cent - was intended to reassure working-class Israelis that their plight was his prime concern.

But, as with Mr Netanyahu's international pledges on the peace process, his promises in Ofakim, though initially persuasive, proved less substantial on closer inspection.

That the community centre in which he spoke was filled with carefully selected locals, while the angrier unemployed were forcibly kept out, was a minor detail. More sobering was the revelation that of those 270 promised vacancies, 150 were not new jobs at all - but jobs guaranteed long ago, when the government gave grants to ECI Telecom to open up in Ofakim.

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Management at one of the other factories said by Mr Netanyahu to be imminently announcing new vacancies, Bagir, insisted this was not the case. And the gap between Mr Netanyahu's upbeat promises and harsh reality was underlined when, before the prime minister had even left town, one of Ofakim's biggest employers, textile firm New Horizons, announced 100 layoffs, saying it could get its work done more cheaply in Jordan.

The economic slowdown is a direct consequence of falling international investment because of the collapse of the peace process. And even though many working class Israelis share Mr Netanyahu's mistrust of the Palestinian Authority, their personal financial welfare tends to take firm precedence over their politics. Rising unemployment, in short, equals falling support for Mr Netanyahu.

His fast-fading popularity is again fuelling talk of his being ousted by his own Likud party, with Jerusalem's mayor, Mr Ehud Olmert, emerging as the most likely candidate to lead the putsch.