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In Dimona, a town often dismissed as a dust bowl, Abraham Rabinovich discovers an eloquent community well able to size up the main contenders. (May 13) - With his ability to coin a phrase that resonates, Danny Taib could hold his own at power brunches in Tel Aviv with the smart copywriter set. But after delivering up the punchiest line of the current political campaign, Taib is spending his days - and nights - in a tent in Dimona, taking his meals off plastic dishes with down-and-outers like himself and contemplating the vagaries of life and the lengthening days of May while reclined on a mattress. Taib is the most famous anonymous person in Israel. He soared into the national ken two months ago as the stall vendor in the Dimona souk heard on the evening news shouting at Center Party candidate Dan Meridor: "The Likud would win the elections even if [PA Chairman] Yasser Arafat headed the ticket." Two weeks ago, the line, and a still-nameless Taib, were immortalized in Israeli political history by actress Tiki Dayan when she delivered her famous "rabble" speech in the presence of One Israel leader Ehud Barak. As an example of marketplace rabble - to whom she suggested Barak address his message in easy-to-understand language - she cited the vendor who had shouted the Arafat line. When accused later of ethnic slur by imitating a Moroccan accent, Dayan replied that that was the accent of the man seen on television. A conversation with Taib this week in Dimona revealed that the actress had got the accent right but that she, and presumably most everyone else who had heard the line, had misunderstood, and underrated, the man who composed it. IT had been perceived as a shout of defiance by a blindly loyal Likud follower shunning reason in the name of some primitive tribalism. However, in an interview in his tent - where he has been living for the past week opposite the Amidar office to dramatize his demand for a larger apartment - Taib revealed himself to be a political thinker unafraid of the jagged edges of irony. The 32-year-old ex-drug addict was, in fact, not praising loyalty to Likud in his remark to Meridor but bemoaning it. "People are fanatics," he said to a visitor. "That's what I meant when I said that people would vote for Likud even with Arafat. Till when are we going to vote Likud? What has Likud done for us? I am fanatic now for my wife and kids and nothing else." Taib proved capable of pursuing irony to its poignant end. If Center Party leader Yitzhak Mordechai faded from the scene, he said, then he, Danny Taib, a confessed ex-Likud fanatic, would in the end have no choice but to vote Likud again. Dimona, which is associated in the public mind with both the nation's listless urban periphery and its ultimate military power, can serve as well these days as a political metaphor. Its largely gray-collar Sephardi population symbolizes a sector which is agonizing at election time over choices that are far less black and white than those confronting the "elite" with their well-formed world views. Apart from marginal knee-jerk reactions, there is widespread willingness in Dimona to examine thoughtfully both sides of the issues and admit to doubt, even though this does not necessarily presage a change in voting patterns. "BIBI'S A liar and a rogue - but maybe that's what's needed to score goals," said Michael Weizman, a grocer who has been living in Dimona since his family came from Morocco more than 30 years ago. "Barak has credibility and he's served the state more than I have. But he lacks a strong hand with the Arabs and he's never been a national leader." Weizman said he had not yet decided how to vote. "I may yet hear something before election day that will make me decide for one candidate or the other. If only Barak had Bibi [Netanyahu's] toughness he would be for me the perfect candidate." Former prime minister Shimon Peres is not a popular figure in Dimona, but the grocer had no hesitation in pointing to him as the one "genius" among Israeli politicians. Albert Azulai, an unemployed truck driver who had stopped by to chat with Weizman, a childhood friend, said he had been active in the Likud campaign in 1996 but was feeling "indifferent" now. "I would like to vote for [National Union candidate Ze'ev] Benny Begin. At least he's real. If he says he won't give up territory, he won't. But then there won't be peace, and I'm for peace." Netanyahu talked tough but compromised at Wye; Azulai favored compromise and liked the tough talk too. "Even if Netanyahu isn't credible about anything else I feel I can trust him on security and that's the most important." MORDECHAI'S claim that his public support is much higher than the polls show was given credence by interviews with close to a score of people in Dimona, most of whom said they liked Mordechai best. Most of these, however, said they would not vote for him because he had little chance of winning. Of all the Mordechai supporters, the most enthusiastic was Taib, who had cornered the candidate during a campaign visit to Dimona last month and shared with him his plight - an unemployed, ex-addict with a wife and two small children in a 42-square-meter apartment. "He looked me in the eye and he shed a tear, a real tear," said Taib. "He was able to feel the depth of my pain together with me. "I favor him not because he's a Kurd but because he's a ben adam [mensch] who can give respect to former drug addicts who have established families with their own strength. Bibi and Barak can't look me in the eye like that." According to one of the ex-addicts offering support outside Taib's tent, the souk vendors, unamused by the Arafat-Likud remark, had thrown Taib out of the marketplace. Taib, who is on the unemployment rolls, hastened to point out to a visitor that the vegetable stall he was manning that day was not his own but that of a friend he was helping out. AMONG those outside the tent was Eliahu Azulai, a man with a saintly face that looked like it had traveled down roads best forgotten. He said he had spent 15 years as an addict, including prison time, and has been in a rehabilitation program for the past five years. "I hate to think what my life would be like without it." He offered to take a visitor to his neighborhood, where drug packets are lowered by dealers from upper-story windows by rope - "the elevator" - to runners below who pass them on to random customers for cash. "This way," explained Azulai, "the dealers don't have to worry about detectives coming up as customers and grabbing them red-handed. If the police try running up the steps, by the time they break through the metal door the drugs are down the toilet." He was a "disappointed Likudnik" and so were most of the people he knew, said Azulai. Disappointment, however, was over unemployment and welfare deficiencies and the incomplete battle against drugs. He would vote for Mordechai, said Azulai, but if Mordechai fell away he would return to Likud. "Peace? The Palestinians talk about peace but what they want is more territory, and what they have in their head is jihad. Like Danny said, we're fanatic on Likud," he said. "It's difficult for us to understand the normative world.... I'm more worried about what drugs might do to my children than I am about war. "I've got nothing personal against Barak but it would be too difficult to vote Labor. We weren't brought up that way." Yafit Sabah wasn't either, but the attractive 22-year-old behind the counter of the Paris, Paris dress shop - a classical ballet student in Beersheba for 12 years - said she intended to vote for Barak and for Yosef (Tommy) Lapid's anti-religious Shinui Knesset list. "Bibi is shocking; a liar, deceitful, awful," she said. She was not crazy about Barak's phlegmatic personality either, but at least he projected credibility, she said, and would make peace. "The Palestinians were here before us," she said. "Any nation that is conquered will rise up. Their time has come. They deserve a state the way we did." IN the flat, late-morning light, Dimona looks like a town that has come to terms with desperation. It lies somnolent under the sun, offering nothing attractive upon which to rest the eye. Stark desert hills press all around as if waiting patiently for Dimona to be covered again by sand. Invisible to the naked eye, however, there is a web of human relationships in Dimona that evokes repeated expressions of attachment. "This is an excellent city to live in, excellent," said Shimon Algaliyahu, 32, proprietor of a kiosk in the town center. "I was born here and we moved to Netanya for 10 years, but then we moved back. There are good people here and warm relationships. Housing is cheap and the weather is wonderful - dry, and the nights are cool." Algaliyahu intends to vote for Netanyahu as "the least bad" of the candidates. He accepted territorial compromise if it did not endanger security, which was Netanyahu's line. He admitted to being troubled, however, by the character issue. "I didn't like seeing all those people close to him - Meridor, Benny Begin, David Levy and the rest - leaving him. I said to myself that either he's no freier [weakling] and he has a goal he's sticking to and those who are not with him can leave, or that in fact he's a liar and not real," said Algaliyahu. Which did he believe was true? "Naturally, since I support him I prefer to think the first is true, but I'm aware of the other possibility." Would it matter? "Of course it would. A man holding that kind of position needs integrity." YA'ACOV Ben-Yishai, an unemployed phosphate worker having coffee at a kiosk in an outlying neighborhood, had, as a young immigrant from Algeria, known Dimona almost since its bleak beginnings. "When the first residents were brought here by truck in 1955, they were dropped off in the desert in the middle of the night and told that they were just 10 minutes from Tel Aviv." He now found Dimona, he said, a pleasant enough place to live. He had voted for former prime minister Menachem Begin twice but then returned to the Labor fold. "Bibi has no credibility and he incites," he opined. "I accept a Palestinian state, but within boundaries we agree to. The Golan? The Syrians say they want it all, but when two sides sit down to negotiate they compromise." Some 10,000 Russian-speaking immigrants have been settled in Dimona in the past decade, constituting almost a quarter of the town's population. Particularly happy to receive them were the few thousand Romanian and Polish Jews among the veteran residents. "They've brought Yiddish and some theater and some business," said Shimon Marcelle, a downtown shop owner who immigrated from Romania in the 1950s. He voted for Netanyahu in 1996 but will vote for either Barak or Mordechai this time. "Bibi lies to everyone. The peace process has stopped. He preaches hate." At Barak campaign headquarters, the local chairman, Nissim Peretz, said that Netanyahu received 72 percent of Dimona's vote three years ago. "I think we can make it 50-50 this time," he said. His hopes rested on a strategic alliance with the Russians of Yisrael Ba'aliya. "[Absorption Minister] Yuli Edelstein is giving a talk here this week," said Peretz. "We agreed with them that our people will be outside the hall giving a rose and a copy of Ehud Barak's biography in Russian to everyone going in." SHOP owner Dina Harel, another former Romanian who has lived in Dimona more than 40 years, cited warm human relationships and cool nights as reasons she never left. Two of her children, with advanced degrees, are now in the US but have affectionate memories of Dimona. "The people here are not a herd," she said. "They're intelligent, they know more or less what they want and they treat you with respect. Despite the high unemployment, there's also a lot more money than there used to be. People earn well at the Dead Sea Works and elsewhere, and nowadays the wives work too. Many people have cars and nice homes." Harel suggested a visit to one of the attractive new neighborhoods on the fringe of the city. There a foreman from the Dead Sea Works readily showed a visitor around his handsome, four-room house which he had purchased for $150,000. By late afternoon, the city had become animated, almost attractive, under a golden sun and cooling breeze. The coffee shops in the center filled. At one long table sat a group of elderly persons, evidently Russian-speaking immigrants, attentively shepherded by two younger women who seemed to be social workers of Moroccan origin. If so, it was a neat reversal of roles from the early days of Dimona, when the Moroccan immigrants came under the care of European minders. There was time enough for a final call on Taib in his tent. A never disappointing fount of insight into the incongruities of the human condition, Taib revealed that he was, or had been, a desperate fan of Tiki Dayan. "I was crazy about her. She's so funny. [Like in] Krovim, Krovim [a television series in which Dayan starred]. Now, I have no desire to see her." What did he think about her? "I first of all respect her as a bat adam [person] and not as an animal, which is the way she sees me." How did he think she related to him? "Like a criminal, like someone dangerous to get close to. We're all Jews. You don't have to say things like that." When his visitor noted that Dayan had apologized for using the word asafsuf (rabble), Taib said that the apology had not been to him. "I do request that she apologize to me personally," he said, in a tone almost plaintive. It was a message from one social observer to another: Rabble have feelings too.
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