Old Labour?

Israel

Nov 17th 2005 TEL AVIV
From The Economist print edition

Amir Peretz's election as Labour leader has upset but also normalised politics

ON A night when speakers including Bill Clinton competed to utter the most moving tribute to Yitzhak Rabin, it was a mark of Amir Peretz's rhetorical skill that his were the words that led the news reports afterwards. Mixing memories (“I am the child who came to Israel 50 years ago”), melodrama (“violence has become rooted among us”) and Martin Luther King (“I have a dream [that] our children and the Palestinians' children will play together”), the new Labour leader ended by addressing the fallen prime minister, assassinated ten years ago, on November 12th, by a Jewish extremist: “You were murdered (nirtsakhta), but you won (nitsakhta).”

A lot of the crowd in Tel Aviv's Rabin Square would, once the sniffly fog of nostalgia had cleared, disagree. According to October's monthly Peace Index poll by Tel Aviv University, only 39% of Jewish Israelis believe that the Oslo accords, which Rabin signed in 1993 with the Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat, would have led to a final peace deal even if Rabin had lived. But Mr Peretz is hoping to take over Rabin's legacy. Two days earlier he unexpectedly beat Israel's elder statesman and Rabin's erstwhile lieutenant, Shimon Peres, in Labour primaries. This week he and Ariel Sharon, the current prime minister, agreed to hold an early election, in late February or March. Had there been no deal, Mr Peretz said he would have pulled Labour out of the coalition government immediately.

Mr Peretz's victory also means a comforting return to normalcy. Since Mr Sharon's decision to withdraw Israeli settlers and troops from Gaza, Israeli politics has been like a small ecosystem thrown out of kilter by poisonous waste. The right-wing Likud, having tried to swallow what was originally a leftist idea (though Mr Sharon, unlike the left, may have intended the Gaza pullout to be Israel's final withdrawal from occupied territory) was near fission. Labour, with its agenda appropriated by its opponents, was shrivelling up. Pundits had pronounced the party to be at the edge of the grave, into which the 82-year-old Mr Peres, who led it in five elections and never won outright, would surely tip it. Smaller parties on both right and left, which have to win only 2% of the total vote to win seats, had grown fat on the detritus of the two main ones and were throwing their new weight about in Israel's parliament, the Knesset.

Now Likud can go back to being its hawkish self, while Labour can go back to being Labour in a way it has not been for decades. Mr Peretz, chairman of the Histadrut, the main trade-union federation, is a clear-eyed leftist on all fronts. He says he would start final-status talks with the Palestinian Authority (PA) immediately, which Mr Sharon refuses to do until it brings terrorist groups under control, and has proposed a bill to give any Israeli settlement in the West Bank the same compensation as the Gaza settlers if 60% of its residents agree to be evacuated. He also wants to raise the minimum wage by a third, lower the retirement age, increase government subsidies for pensions, and make various other welfare and tax changes to benefit the poor.

That guarantees him many votes of Israelis who have lost out in the free-market reforms introduced by Mr Sharon's erstwhile finance minister, Binyamin Netanyahu. Moreover, the Moroccan-born Mr Peretz is from a part of society that has always been under-represented in the Israeli elites and harboured a special grudge against Labour—the Sephardim, Jews of mainly Middle Eastern descent. These two bases mean that Labour will take back voters from the parties that had become havens for hard leftists disgusted with Mr Peres (and whose doveish leaders, such as Yossi Beilin, an architect of one of the most recent bilateral peace plans, now look even more marginalised than before), as well as some traditional Likud supporters. Even so, according to opinion polls, Labour will still come up a good ten seats short of Likud in the 120-seat Knesset.

A lot more guesswork

But there are still plenty of unknowns between now and the election. The consequences of the Gaza disengagement—will terror attacks increase or will improved access for Gazans to the outside world bring some calm and stability?—will affect Mr Sharon's rating. How well the Islamist party, Hamas, does in Palestinian elections in January, and how it comports itself afterwards, will also do much to determine Israeli voters' hawkishness. And maybe the scandal surrounding Mr Sharon and his son Omri, which was held in abeyance during the Gaza pullout, will return. The young Sharon this week pleaded guilty to breaking various campaign-finance laws during his father's Likud leadership campaign in 1999. As nobody foresaw Mr Peretz's victory over Mr Peres last week, nobody now dares make a prediction for the showdown to come—or how the result may affect the chances of peace with the Palestinians.

Copyright © 2005 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.