If it were two or three burglaries, you might speak of coincidence. But when the homes of seven staff members of a prime ministerial candidate are broken into, within the space of a fortnight, suspicions are bound to be aroused.
And when it becomes clear that nothing has been stolen from these homes, despite the presence in at least one of them of a considerable amount of cash, suspicions harden.
Israel's opposition Labour Party, hoping under its leader, Mr Ehud Barak, to oust the Prime Minister, Mr Benjamin Netanyahu, in elections this May, is doing its best not to look paranoid. It is making the minimum of fuss about the seven break-ins this month to the homes of some of Mr Barak's advisers and activists, the latest illegalities in what is quickly becoming a particularly unpleasant election campaign.
Its spokesmen profess themselves hopeful that the police and FBI will find no connection between the Israeli break-ins and the burglary last week at the Washington offices of Mr Stanley Greenberg, the veteran Clinton pollster hired by Mr Barak.
Labour has, however, called in the police. And it has ordered its own security officer to investigate the local break-ins - he has reported apparent attempts to tamper with phones, computers and documents - and, last night, to fly out to Washington to learn what he can from the Greenberg Quinlan Research firm burglary, where Labour-related diskettes were reportedly removed.
Mr Netanyahu's Minister of Science, Mr Silvan Shalom, has scoffed at the notion that the Likud party would stoop to such crimes, which the local media have cheerfully nicknamed Israel's Watergate, and there have been suggestions from government benches that Labour is staging the burglaries itself.
Political analysts note that, while the burglaries seem to suggest merely some kind of pattern of intimidation, the theft of diskettes from Mr Greenberg's offices could be helpful to Labour's rivals if they provided an insight into the key policy areas on which Mr Barak will try to focus in the campaign, or if they included details of Labour's planned slogans.
Mr Greenberg and his colleagues, Mr James Carville and Mr Robert Shrum, have used short, sharp oft-repeated slogans to help President Clinton, Mr Tony Blair and Mr Gerhard Schroder, among others, to victory. And Mr Netanyahu demonstrated the value of a good slogan himself in 1996, when his flat claim that "[Shimon] Peres will divide Jerusalem" proved particularly effective in helping him win over Israeli voters.