Labor’s Primary Surprise

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The surprise Labor Party primary victory of Amir Peretz, the head of the Histadrut, Israel’s national labor federation, has given Israeli politics a shake-up and made early elections by the late winter or early spring of 2006 a near certainty. When everything jolted falls back into place, however, the ironic result is likely to be that Mr. Peretz’s triumph will have averted the real shake-up that Israel has, with a mixture of hope and trepidation, been waiting for.


Mr. Peretz was able to pull off his surprise for a number of reasons. He had the well-oiled machine of the Histadrut behind him – an invaluable asset in getting out the votes on Election Day. Born into a poor family from Morocco that immigrated to Israel when he was a small boy, he also had, with his anti-establishment message and ethnically accented Hebrew, a strong appeal for those “Sephardic” and lower-class voters who did not long ago desert Labor for the Likud. And not least of all, his main opponent, Shimon Peres, was an 82-year-old perennial loser who, in the course of a long and distinguished public career, had managed to win the respect of Labor voters but never their affection or enthusiasm.


Mr. Peretz is something of a paradox. On the one hand, he is said to be a fresh breath of air in Israeli politics: Brash, irreverent, tie-less, and sporting an out-of-date broom-bristle mustache, he is a self-made politician who has retained the image of an outsider even while scaling the inside heights. Although there is no longer anything unusual in Israel about the children of immigrants from Muslim lands reaching top positions – the country has by now had a “Sephardic” president, chief-of-staff, defense minister, and two foreign ministers – no such person has become prime minister. As Labor’s candidate in the next national election, Amir Peretz stands the best chance yet.


And yet Mr. Peretz is in other ways an atavism, a throwback to an Israel that was just the other day considered to have vanished forever. An old-style labor-unionist who professes to yearn for the high taxes, comprehensive welfare state, and centralized economy of the Labor governments of the Ben-Gurion years, he makes one wonder whether the resemblance of his mustache, not only to a 1950s kibbutznik’s, but also to Joseph Stalin’s, is a coincidence. If elected prime minister, the “breath of fresh air” threatens to roll back much of the progress that an increasingly freer Israeli economy has made in recent years.


On the Palestinian issue, too, Mr. Peretz is out to revive positions of the Left that have long been discredited. When he speaks of abandoning the unilateralism of the disengagement from Gaza and going back to the negotiating table with the Palestinian Authority, he sounds as if he has learned nothing from the failure of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations between 1993 and 2000. Here, too, the fresh air has a stale smell.


And because of this, Mr. Peretz’s ultimate effect will be to retard political change rather than to encourage it. This is especially true in regard to the so-called “big bang” scenario, the much-talked-of idea of Ariel Sharon pulling out of the Likud, in which a strong minority faction has been in open rebellion against him since he broached his unilateral disengagement plan for Gaza, and founding a new center party that would give him the freedom to carry on with disengagement in the West Bank, too.


Although the polls have shown a Sharonist party doing well and winning up to 35 seats in a new Knesset (the Likud currently has 40) by picking up middle-of-the-road support, the logic behind such a step has rested entirely on the assumption that the new party would get the 61 seats needed for a parliamentary majority by reforming the coalition between Mr. Sharon and a Shimon-Peres-led Labor Party that has governed Israel for the past year.


Now that Amir Peretz has replaced Mr. Peres at Labor’s helm, however, the chances of such a coalition are nil. Mr. Peretz’s positions are simply too opposed to Mr. Sharon’s to make a partnership possible. And without it, the “big bang” goes bust, since a new party that cannot pick up the Knesset votes it needs from the Left will have to get them from the Right – that is, from the same Likud rebels, and their ultra-nationalist and religious allies, that the “big bang” was supposed to free Mr. Sharon of a dependence on. Why leave the Likud before elections if he will just have to come crawling back to it after them?


The most likely scenario for Israel’s immediate political future is therefore this: Ariel Sharon will remain in the Likud. National elections will be scheduled for March or April. Before then, Mr. Sharon will either have to run against Benjamin Netanyahu in a Likud primary that he will win, or else he will be spared this by Mr. Netanyahu’s withdrawal from the race. He and Amir Peretz will then square off in the elections – and the Likud will win handily, since even if Mr. Peretz manages to steal some “Sephardic” votes from it, not many Israelis want to go back to the “good old days” of a socialist economy and Oslo.


The Likud will then have to turn to the religious parties and the far Right in order to form a government, which will make further unilateral disengagement from the West Bank impossible. Time will pass. Another Intifada will break out in the West Bank. Labor will languish in the Opposition. Eventually it will hold a new primary – and Mr. Peretz, having accomplished nothing, will be replaced in turn, hopefully not by an 85-year-old Shimon Peres.


Maybe then we’ll see some fresh air.



Mr. Halkin is a contributing editor of The New York Sun.


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