The rightwing Tehiya party moved further to the right by assigning presumably safe seats on its Knesset election list to three uncompromising hard-liners in balloting Wednesday.
Elyakim Haetzni, Benny Katzover and Avi Farhan were given the fifth, sixth, and seventh spots respectively.
Tehiya, which holds five seats in the present Knesset, expects to win at least two more seats 2ultrain the Nov. 1 elections. Opinion polls predict an especially strong showing among younger voters, both soldiers and civilians.
The party stands to benefit if the courts bar Rabbi Meir Kahane’s extremist Kach party from running in the elections, which is now considered likely.
The first four Tehiya slots were filled by the party’s founding leaders in an earlier ballot. They are Yuval Ne’eman, Geula Cohen, Gershon Shafat and Rabbi Eliezer Waldman.
All are outspoken ultranationalists, but the new candidates are, if anything, more militant.
Haetzni, a lawyer, has waged legal battles against Palestinian nationalists appealing arrests or deportations to the high court and is a bitter foe of the news media.
He lives in Kiryat Arba, the religious township built adjacent to the Arab town of Hebron in the West Bank.
His most recent success was the deportation of Jerusalem-born Mubarak Awad, an American citizen who advocates non-violent civil disobedience to further the Palestinian cause.
Haetzni had led a public campaign against him for three years.
Katzover, a leader of the Gush Emunim, heads the organization of Jewish settlers in the Samaria region of the West Bank.
Farhan endeared himself to Greater Israel advocates by leading violent resistance to Israel’s withdrawal from Sinai in 1982 under the terms of the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
