Labor Members Vote on New Leader in Bid to Revive Party

Even as Israeli commentators chiseled the epitaph of this nation’s once glorious Labor Party, whose history is intertwined with the history of Israel itself, members made a stab at resuscitation today by voting for a new leader.

Depending on whom you talked to, the center-left party either was taking a step toward an eventual comeback--or hammering another nail in its coffin.

Labor has been dealt numerous body blows in the past year. Its prime minister went down to a defeat of historic proportions seven months ago. It has lost much of its traditional constituency, and new voters, such as the Russian immigrants who flocked to the party in 1999, want nothing to do with it.

And the peace process that had been Labor’s bailiwick for most of the last decade has collapsed, burying many a Labor politician.

For months, the party wandered with no one officially at the helm. Early today, with nearly all of the vote counted, party veteran Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, a hawk who serves as defense minister in the coalition government led by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of the right-wing Likud Party, was in a dead heat with Avraham Burg, the dovish speaker of parliament, according to Israeli radio.

For most party activists, the choice was between two candidates who inspired little excitement. Polls conducted before the vote showed more than half of Labor’s members disliking both candidates. And most top leaders of the party refused to endorse either man.

Moreover, the new leader will have little maneuvering room to recast the party at a time when the nation is on a virtual war footing--and when few Israelis have much interest in what Labor has to say. Public opinion has swung overwhelmingly to the right amid nearly a year of bloody battle with the Palestinians, and it is generally thought that Labor stands no chance of winning the next national election, scheduled for 2003.

So it is against very long odds that the party’s new chief will have to rebuild the party from the ground up. Going into the vote, which got underway Tuesday, Burg said he would resign his parliamentary post to do so, but Ben-Eliezer insisted that he could somehow continue to run Israel’s war against the Palestinians while running the party.

As the conservative Jerusalem Post put it in an editorial Tuesday, “The victor in today’s Labor primary faces the unpleasant task of heading a party that is battered, internally divided and lacking a coherent agenda that it can offer the electorate.”

The Iraqi-born Ben-Eliezer, 65, is a portly, gruff former career soldier and skilled party apparatchik who has consistently taken a hard line on the Palestinians. Burg, 46, is a well-spoken Orthodox Jew, a jogger and a scion of one of Israel’s most prominent families. He more readily advocates negotiation with the Palestinians.

Burg--who squandered a huge lead before the party vote--argued that he offered the clear alternative and that under him, Labor could eventually reemerge as a formidable opposition party. Ben-Eliezer, Burg charged, would make Labor a “cheap imitation” of the Likud Party.

“Partnership, yes. Self-destruction, assimilation into Likud, no,” Burg wrote earlier this week in the daily newspaper Yediot Aharonot.

Ben-Eliezer Is Believed to Favor the Status Quo

Ben-Eliezer, by contrast, pointed to Labor’s participation in a still-popular Sharon government as evidence of the party’s role as a player. It is widely believed that Ben-Eliezer would be more likely to maintain the status quo, while Burg would push to part company with the government if it failed to make progress with the Palestinians.

Trying to distance himself ever so slightly from Sharon, Ben-Eliezer told Israeli radio Tuesday, “For me, reducing violence is the starting point, the beginning of a breakthrough on the road to a peace process.”

But Ben-Eliezer, known as Fuad, his original Arabic name, is seen as a traditionalist unlikely to oversee innovations in policy or political structure. Burg, on the other hand, emerges from Labor’s newer generation of leaders.

Whoever wins, the real power in Labor will remain in the hands of the party’s elder statesman, Shimon Peres, who is serving as foreign minister in Sharon’s government and who, almost singularly, is seeking dialogue with Palestinian leaders.

Shlomo Avineri, professor of political science at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University, said Labor’s downfall came with its commitment to making a historical compromise with the Palestinians in the interest of peace. Few Israelis now believe that peace is possible, and Labor, in its recent past, has had nothing else to offer.

Barak Was Crushed Over Concessions

Ehud Barak, the former party leader and prime minister, was crushed in the February election by Sharon, in large part because of Barak’s willingness to grant major concessions to the Palestinians. The approach failed and was followed by more violence instead.

“You cannot be a party based on the peace process, especially when the peace process isn’t working,” Avineri said. “What Labor has to do is take the long way, reconstitute the party, reform its [internal election] procedures and focus on social and economic issues. A right-wing party can live by slogans, but a social democratic party has to have a social agenda.”

Many Labor activists said Ben-Eliezer, if he wins, will be nothing more than a caretaker party leader, keeping the chair warm until another Labor figure with more clout and appeal decides that the time is right.

“There’s no doubt that the collapse of Barak did big damage to the image, policy and attraction of the Labor Party,” said party veteran Uzi Baram, who quit politics earlier this year in disgust over Labor’s direction. “But Israel needs a strong Labor Party. We have to produce and create alternatives to the policies of Sharon. The romance between Peres and Sharon cannot continue more than a few months.”