MIDEAST : Big Win Puts Israeli Union Chief on Every Dance Card

Defeated by labor-union bureaucrats on reform of Israel’s health insurance system, Haim Ramon quit as health minister, challenged the old guard in union elections and this week won a victory likely to shape Israeli politics for the next decade.

Expelled last month by the governing Labor Party as a traitor for challenging its control of the Histadrut, the union federation, Ramon found himself being courted Thursday by Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, wooed by other politicians as the country’s new powerbroker and described by commentators as the person who will set the country’s future agenda.

Although he campaigned for less than a month, Ramon’s ticket managed to win 47% of the votes in the Histadrut elections, overwhelming the Labor candidates who received only 33% and lost control of an institution the party had led since its founding 73 years ago.

So stunning was his victory over the Labor Party in the union elections that Ramon, 44, immediately emerged as the leading candidate for the premiership when Rabin, 72, steps down, perhaps in two years and certainly in six. Labor scrambled quickly to bring him back into the party ranks.

“Haim Ramon will return to his natural place, the Labor Party, but it will be a completely different party as a result of his victory,” said Avraham Burg, a leading liberal in the party. “A new revolution has started in Labor . . . and there is a new agenda in the state of Israel--a social one.”

The implications of the Ramon victory are far-reaching:

* To take on the Labor Party leadership--Rabin, Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and even old friends such as Burg--Ramon drew support from the leftist Meretz Party and the religious party Shas in a coalition.

* Some Labor leaders fear Ramon might be tempted to form such a coalition for the next parliamentary elections if he is not readmitted to the party or if Labor fails to change to his liking. Some triumphant Ramon supporters assert that this is precisely what he should do--form a new party focused on new issues.

* A new generation--men and women, like Ramon, in their 40s--are preparing to assume leadership of the country, pushing aside what is now called the “lost generation” of politicians who have been waiting for a decade and longer for Rabin, Peres and others to retire.

* A prominent dove when he was in the Labor Party, Ramon demonstrated that more than 80% of the country--the combined total of votes for his ticket, the Labor Party and the Communists--favor Israel’s efforts to reach peace with its Arab neighbors. The opposition Likud Party and its right-wing allies polled only 18% of the votes, down from 27% at the last union election.

* Likud Chairman Benjamin Netanyahu will face new challenges to his leadership within his party, not only because it has lost much of the ground it had gained in previous Histadrut elections, but also because it has not been building the broader electoral support that would return it to power.

“We saw an amazing thing--the whole nation standing up together, religious and secular, Jews and Arabs, intellectuals and working people,” Ramon said of his victory. “It was a development I could not have imagined. . . . This is the coalition the Labor Party has dreamed of for years.”

Ramon, a lawyer by training, will become secretary general of the Histadrut. With 1.6 million members, it represents about 67% of Israeli workers. More than that, it owns many of Israel’s major companies, runs its largest health care and sports programs and provides so many services that it is almost governmental in character.