Israeli Labor Party Votes to Join Unity Government

Israel’s largest political party tore itself to pieces Monday and then voted reluctantly to join the incoming government of Prime Minister-elect Ariel Sharon.

Made after a raucous six-hour convention, the decision of the center-left Labor Party to ally itself with Sharon removed the most important obstacle to the formation of a “national unity” government. It will allow the right-wing leader to broaden his power base and achieve a measure of stability.

But the spectacle leading up to Monday night’s vote raised serious questions about the future of the Labor Party and whether it will be an effective coalition partner. The debate during the last three weeks over whether to enter Sharon’s government threw the party into a chaotic and very public free-for-all as senior members fought over Cabinet posts, ideology and self-preservation.

A casualty of both a failed peace process and fundamental changes in Israeli society, Labor--the political faction most intertwined with the history of the Jewish state and the Zionist movement--will be forced to undergo a major overhaul or perhaps face dissolution, analysts said.

The party’s crisis intensified with the Feb. 6 election, when Labor Prime Minister Ehud Barak lost to Sharon by the largest margin in Israeli political history. Barak toyed with accepting Sharon’s offer to join his government, then abruptly reneged and quit politics, leaving Labor leaderless.

Although polls show that the Israeli public, traumatized by five months of Israeli-Palestinian bloodshed, overwhelmingly favors a national unity government, opponents within Labor argued against hooking up with right-wingers determined to slow down the pursuit of peace. Better to remain in the opposition, they said.

But advocates such as Labor elder statesman Shimon Peres eventually won the day. In an impassioned plea to Monday’s meeting of the party’s roughly 1,700-member central committee, Peres said he was convinced Labor would be an effective restraint on Sharon.

“The people want a unity government. For once, listen to them!” said Peres, who probably will serve as foreign minister in the new government. “This party will not cease to exist,” he added, raising his voice and pounding the lectern.

Members voted by a two-thirds majority to join Sharon’s government. But less than half the total membership of the central committee participated in the vote.

Later, the 77-year-old Peres said the decision was good for both Israel and the party.

“The country now has a chance for peace,” he said, “and the party has a chance to renovate itself.”

Throughout the meeting in a Tel Aviv movie theater, Labor activists shouted down speakers and then shouted down one another, leaping to their feet and jabbing their fingers in the air.

Outgoing Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami led the charge against uniting with Sharon.

“We are on the verge of deciding whether to be or not to be,” he said. “A unity government will be a death sentence for this party. Only as an opposition force can we remain intact. Joining this unity government will erase our identity as a party and as a movement.”

Ben-Ami and outgoing Justice Minister Yossi Beilin, the party’s most enduring dove, have suggested that Labor will split irreparably if it enters the new government. That may eventually happen, but on Monday both said that for now they will remain with Labor.

Haim Ramon, who has been in the center of some of the nastiest internal party strife, struggled for nearly 10 minutes to be heard over boos and catcalls.

“Traitor!” many in the crowd chanted, apparently in reference to unkind comments that Ramon has made about Barak.

Many of the party’s top leaders sat grim-faced in the front row of the auditorium as the hall erupted repeatedly around them.

“People are looking at us in disgust,” another member of Barak’s Cabinet, Yuli Tamir, told the audience. “They cannot believe their eyes that this is happening.”

Labor has 23 seats in the 120-member Israeli parliament, or Knesset, making it the largest faction--and critical to Sharon’s ability to muster a majority. Yet at least half of those Knesset seats are held by party activists opposed to joining Sharon, who heads the Likud Party, the second-largest grouping.

Led by David Ben-Gurion, the Labor movement originally combined a centrist view of security through strength with socialist-inspired views on housing, welfare and other domestic issues. It was also the domain of Israel’s early, European Jewish elite, alienating many of the lower-class immigrant populations who arrived later. In more recent years, it took up the banner of land-for-peace as the solution for the conflict with the Palestinians. The party’s critics say it grew increasingly out of touch with voters.

“The crisis of the Labor Party is the crisis of the society,” said political scientist Zeev Tzahor, an expert on Labor. “The ideology of the Labor Party is no longer relevant. It needs a new ideology. Crisis can lead to rebirth, but we cannot know how long it will take.”

Labor and Likud have long been the major parties in Israel. But their size and influence have been eroded by more than a dozen small special-interest or ethnic-based parties.

Sharon has promised Labor seven or eight slots in a Cabinet that might number up to 30, giving the party little chance to shape the government agenda. In addition to foreign affairs, Labor will have the defense portfolio. But in a last-minute twist, the party decided Monday that instead of allowing leaders to negotiate about who will fill the slots, as Sharon assumed would happen, Labor’s central committee will vote on names. That might not be acceptable to Likud.

Outside Monday’s convention, where young activists scuffled with police and three ambulances waited nearby, Labor veterans agonized over what to do.

Arieh Keren, 65, who fought in four Israeli wars and rode tanks into the Gaza Strip, Syria, the Sinai peninsula and Jordan, said that he was ready to visit neighboring countries in a car and that joining Sharon’s government was the only chance to make peace.

“This may not be good for the party, but it’s what the country needs,” Keren said.

Sixty-eight-year-old Dora Levy said she was afraid Sharon is using Labor to enhance his own legitimacy at the expense of the party she has been a member of for as long as she cares to remember.

“This is very painful,” she said of Labor’s dilemma. “It breaks my heart.”