TV Fiasco Shatters Israel Opposition’s Diversity Theme

The prime-time broadcast of the Labor Party convention was supposed to showcase the opposition party’s newly diverse list of candidates for the May elections and its new, unifying theme.

Instead, just as party leader Ehud Barak and supporters gathered Tuesday night to launch Labor’s “One Israel” slogan of unity, an angry lawmaker grabbed a microphone from Barak and denounced him and the rest of the party as racist.

The emotional, televised attack by Addisu Messele, Israel’s only Ethiopian member of parliament, may have done incalculable harm to Labor’s efforts to shed its historic elitist image and broaden its appeal to voters, political analysts said Wednesday.

Commentators were scathing, saying the episode could cost Barak and Labor a chance to defeat Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Likud Party in the national elections May 17.

Labor, “like an errant whale, insisted on beaching itself in order to die, in front of the entire nation, on prime-time television,” columnist Hemi Shalev wrote in Wednesday’s mass-circulation Maariv newspaper.

Another popular columnist, Nahum Barnea of the Yediot Aharonot newspaper, called the event a “show of collective suicide.” He and others said Barak never should have allowed Messele to take the microphone and harangue him on live television, and they cited numerous mistakes leading to the fiasco.

Netanyahu, no slouch when it comes to campaign tactics, was quick to seize the advantage Wednesday. “The Labor Party’s campaign was supposed to project unity,” he told Israel’s Army Radio. “But it has become a party that divides the people rather than unites them.”

Later, as Netanyahu answered questions about Wednesday’s deadly shooting of Kurdish protesters at the Israeli Consulate in Berlin, he stood against the backdrop of a new Likud campaign banner. “Barak is too weak to unite the people,” it said.

Communications Minister Limor Livnat, a Likud leader, told reporters after the televised episode that it illustrated that “there is no leadership” in Labor.

Although popular Moroccan-born history professor and former diplomat Shlomo Ben-Ami topped the candidates list and many Labor leaders had expressed pleasure with the results, Messele was angered by his poor showing and launched his attack during the televised celebration. He had expected to secure a slot that was reserved for new immigrants but was beaten out by Sofa Landver, a Russian-born candidate supported by Barak.

Messele, 37, accused party leaders of rigging the primary vote to yield political benefits in May. Israel is home to 700,000 Russian immigrants and 75,000 Ethiopian immigrants, making the Russian candidate a much more valuable political commodity.

Messele offered no evidence for his accusations, and a recount ordered by Barak on Wednesday yielded the same results as the night before, showing that Landver defeated Messele by about 1,800 votes. But the image of the legislator being hustled away by beefy security guards before he was allowed back in to speak is likely to remain with voters for some time.

Labor is traditionally a bastion of Ashkenazi Jews--those of European or North American origin. The party remains tarnished by the complaints of many Sephardim, or Middle Eastern and North African Jews, that Labor governments mistreated the thousands of immigrants from those regions arriving during the Jewish state’s early years. The new arrivals suffered bias in housing, education and jobs and were usually settled in desolate towns far from thriving population centers.

Soon after Barak assumed leadership of the party, he issued a historic apology to the Sephardim on behalf of his party. Last year, however, the effort to build bridges faltered after a senior Labor legislator, retired Maj. Gen. Ori Orr, told an interviewer that Israel’s Sephardic population exploits its history of discrimination.