LONDON, 18 December 2004 — It is a gruesome spectacle watching an old friend preparing to commit suicide. Yet the Israeli Labor Party’s decision to take part in talks to join Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s extreme right-wing coalition could be the end of the party as a force in Israeli politics.
Sharon needs Labor, after the withdrawal of the Shinui party from his government. The last thing needed by Labor, with only 19 members in the 120-member Parliament, is Sharon. Yet, so desperate is the party for a taste of office that it is ready to sacrifice its identity, policies and what remains of its ideals.
For the first 30 years of Israel’s existence, Labor dominated the country’s politics. Its leaders, including David Ben-Gurion, Golda Meir, Shimon Peres, Yitzhak Rabin and Ehud Barak, with the eloquent foreign minister, Abba Eban, form a rollcall of the most distinguished Israeli politicians.
Complacency, petty corruption and miscalculations that led to near-catastrophe in the 1973 Yom Kippur war — but, above all, failure to understand social trends — led to Labor’s first defeat in 1977 at the hands of Menachem Begin, leader of the Likud Party that Sharon now heads. Labor’s bases combined the eastern European pioneers, the European intellectuals who fled from Hitler and the socialists who set up the kibbutzim. It ignored the immigrants from Arab countries, who became a vast reservoir of urban poor ready for exploitation by Likud.
That 1977 defeat was not the end of Labor as a party of government — although as leader, Peres never led Labor to electoral victory; Rabin won in 1992 and Barak became prime minister in 1999. When Sharon became prime minister in 2001, Labor entered a so-called government of national unity, with Peres as foreign minister. It is said that, when the then Labor leader, Benyamin Ben-Eliezer, withdrew from that government the following year, Peres was deeply reluctant to go.
Now 81, Peres is anxious for a final savor of office. It is thought that, if the coalition happens, he will be foreign minister again. Why? What good will come of the Nobel Peace Prize winner propping up the ruffian Sharon?
Labor’s presence is needed in government because, without it, Sharon’s disengagement plan would founder. But it is not a peace plan. It involves withdrawing illegal settlements from the Gaza strip, together with departure from three settlements in the north of the West Bank. But Israeli occupation of almost all the West Bank would continue indefinitely.
Peres claimed his party’s presence in a Sharon government could lead to further withdrawals. Pull the other one, Shimon. Sharon has long shown an ability to manipulate, as when he conned Begin into invading Lebanon.
A gullible octogenarian should be easy meat for him. Entering Sharon’s coalition would be a sad ending for Labor. A party whose originators founded a state against enormous odds and realized that Israel would never know peace without a genuine Palestinian state is planning to enter a government that has created record unemployment and poverty and has turned a respected democracy into an international pariah.
— Gerald Kaufman is Labour MP for Manchester Gorton.
