Monday, 2 January (85 days to election day)

There were those who called him a fascist before they even knew his name.

There are others who believe him to be the Second Coming of the Israeli Right.

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The second group may well include the man himself.

He is Moshe Feiglin, tranquil of voice, unbending of stance, the Great Unknown of Israeli electoral politics. If there is one politician who has struck fear into the stout heart of Benjamin Netanyahu, it is not campaign front-runner and the Likud's I-made-you-and-I-can-break-you nemesis Ariel Sharon, but Feiglin, the unlikely loose-cannon who has managed to set the Likud's current agenda, against its will.

Feiglin, for his part, is transparent regarding his aim in founding and fostering the growing Jewish Leadership faction of the Likud.

He wants to be Israel's prime minister. For starters.

Feiglin first rose to prominence as leader of Zu Artzeinu (This is our Land), a group that organized fierce protests against the then-Labor government's peace moves prior to the 1995 assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. Some on the left have pointed fingers at Feiglin as having helped created an atmosphere of hatred that led to the killing, a charge Feiglin and the right as a whole vehemently reject.

In recent years, promoting an "alternative peace plan" he called the Jewish Road Map, Feiglin wrote that although law-abiding Palestinians would be tolerated in a future Jewish state, "Transfer [expulsion] is a just solution, and it is likely that sometime in the future it will be foisted upon us, whether we like it or not."

After serving a prison sentence for sedition over his Zu Artzeinu activities, Feiglin launched an intensive campaign to register thousands of rightists, many of them recent immigrants with little background in politics, as members of the Likud.

Unlike the wider Likud, which has accepted certain aspects of ceding West Bank and Gaza land in the past, the Jewish Leadership group rejects all territorial compromise. Its platform includes such proposals as construction of a synagogue and a study hall for the Sanhedrin on Jerusalem's Temple Mount.

Before long, his people had made a significant dent into the Holy of Holies of the Likud, the influential Central Committee, long the closed province of the "Polish princes" and the Mizrachi apparatchiks who had forever controlled the Likud.

As Feiglin's support within the party grew, his platform became more mainstream, emphasizing family values and Jewish sources and making no further public mention of transfer, which is anathema to the Likud.

Through it all, Feiglin remained the consummate outsider, set apart even from the Likud rebels with whom he shared much of his ideology.
Two weeks ago, after Ariel Sharon led his Kadima counter-rebels out of the party, senior Likud figures were clearly aghast at the power base
Feiglin had managed to construct.

An agitated Education Minister Limor Livnat called Feiglin and his followers a "foreign implant into the Likud."

"They are not the Likud, they are not the flesh of our flesh, the blood of our blood," Livnat told a national television audience. "We will find a way to oust them."

Feiglin fired back the next day, saying he sensed a certain anti-Semitism in Livanat's remarks about his platform, which strongly favors an injection of Othodox Jewish sensibility into the workins of the state of Israel.

"I am not an extremist. I am, in fact, bringing to the center of the political map the only political solution to our existence here,? Feiglin said adding that his campaign "was the precise expression of the vast majority of Likud members.

"This is the exact stance of the Likud in its platform and its constitution. It is not extremist. This is the center. This is what is sane."

Feiglin said Livnat's remarks were motivated by her poor showing in the early stages of the Likud leadership race. He said she viewed him and his support as a threat.

"With all due respect, I also think that there is a certain small element of anti-Semitism here. I have been in the Likud for eight years already, and I haven't seen any such demonization efforts directed at any other element. We are all loyal members of the Likud, and renew our membership every year.

"Let's put the cards on the table: I believe that if I didn't have a kippa and beard, this demonization would not exist, and it's about time to put an end to this nonsense."

When Netanyahu took over the Likud two weeks ago, his first challenge was clear to him: demonstrate his strength by convincing the party to pull its ministers out of the cabinet immediately.

Sure enough, from the moment he took office, Netanyahu has been bogged down with the issue of Feiglin and if he should be, or even could be, thrown out of the party.

This week a compromise was reached that pleased no one, but left Feiglin feeling both vindicated and victimized - from his standpoint an optimal position.

In a bitter last laugh, Feiglin compared the Likud's treatment of him to the actions of the rabidly anti-Revisionist left of the 1940s, when the Palmach turned in members of Menachem Begin's Etzel underground to the British in what was called the Saison, David Ben-Gurion's new army shelled the Etzel arms ship Altalena in 1948, and Ben-Gurion's Mapai (forerunner of the Labor Party) found every means possible to ostracize leaders of Herut, forerunner of the Likud.

"It was sad to see how a group of heirs of the persecuted people of the Saison, the survivors of the Altalena, and those boycotted by the historic Mapai, are working against me, using the exact same methods by which their parents were persecuted."

In one stroke, Feiglin had also hinted that an entire generation of Likud leaders, a group that includes Netanyahu, Livnat, Uzi Landau and a host of others, may have owed some of their prominence to a toch of nepotism, as their parents were proteges and lieutenants of the founders of right-Revisionist Zionism.

Some of his followers have been less charitable, suggesting that it is not Feiglin who is anti-democratic and in favor of the ways and means of fascism, but rather his political opponents.

In any event, Feiglin has served notice that if there's anything wrong with the present Likud, he can put it Right.

"The leadership of the Likud, and of the nation as a whole, and of its elites, has taken the country and run to the farthest left of extremes, he said recently. "The Likud is, in fact, a centrist party, and we are people of the center."

Say what you will about Feiglin, he has no doubts about where he's headed. "We are coming with an idea," he said last year.

"We're saying that we want to lead this party. It may take a year, or 20 years, it makes no difference. Certainly, we are aiming to lead."