Peres Defects, Backs Sharon in Election

Breaking from the Labor Party he helped found nearly four decades ago, Israeli elder statesman Shimon Peres threw his support Wednesday to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in coming elections.

Peres’ widely expected defection was the latest act in a political drama that has transfixed Israel for three weeks. It began with the 82-year-old Peres’ loss of his left-leaning party’s leadership to an upstart trade-union leader in an internal vote and was followed by Sharon’s break last week with the conservative Likud Party he helped found in the 1970s.

The sweeping political realignment is being called the “big bang” by commentators in Israel because Labor and Likud have dominated the nation’s politics for much of its history.

Peres’ decision, and the events leading up to it, provide a piercing glimpse into the intimacy of political life in this country, with its now-dwindling generation of founding fathers whose personal histories mirror that of the nation.

It also illustrated the venerable Israeli political tradition of reinventing oneself late in life -- a pattern perhaps best illustrated by Sharon himself, and by hawk-turned-peacemaker Yitzhak Rabin before him. Rabin was assassinated in 1995 by an ultranationalist Jew after he declared his willingness to make territorial concessions to the Palestinians in exchange for peace.

Sharon’s new centrist party -- called Kadima, or Forward -- is in a commanding position heading into general elections planned for March 28, eight months ahead of schedule.

The 77-year-old Sharon is running on a platform calling for a negotiated solution that will bring about the creation of a Palestinian state in the Gaza Strip and most of the West Bank. Peres, who has served in Sharon’s governing coalition as vice premier since January, said he believed Sharon was the figure best able to achieve that goal.

“I asked myself how I may contribute in the coming years, and the answer is, in promoting the peace process,” said a somber-looking Peres, speaking to reporters at his Tel Aviv office with blue-and-white Israeli flags as a backdrop.

“I cannot imagine that promoting the peace process is at all possible in the present political structure other than in a coalition for peace and development. And I believe the right man to head such a coalition is ... Arik Sharon,” he said, using the prime minister’s nickname.

Sharon and Peres, close in age though very different in temperament and personal style, have known each other for virtually all their adult lives. Sharon, the architect of the movement to settle Jews in the West Bank and Gaza and a driving force behind Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, was for decades the bete noire of the Israeli left, with which Peres has long been allied.

Peres, at the time Israel’s foreign minister, won the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize along with Rabin, then prime minister, and PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat for helping craft the Oslo peace accords, which Sharon opposed.

Yet Peres and Sharon have maintained a warm personal relationship throughout the years, even when their political views were at odds. Over the last two years their positions converged, as Sharon championed Israel’s landmark relinquishing of Gaza and removal of settlements from a small slice of the West Bank. During that time, the two became ever closer confidants, each facing heavy pressure from within his own party.

In the months leading up to the Gaza withdrawal, Sharon’s shaky government was shored up by its alliance with Labor, enabling the prime minister to carry through the politically costly pullout of Jewish settlers and Israeli troops from the coastal territory in August and September, respectively.

But Sharon was forced to agree to early elections when Amir Peretz wrested the Labor leadership from Peres on Nov. 9 and swiftly announced that the party would no longer remain a coalition partner. Elections had not been scheduled to take place until November 2006.

Peres stopped short of formally announcing his resignation from Labor, saying only that his “activities in the party have come to an end,” but it was clear that his move to support Sharon would leave him ostracized by those remaining behind.

Some Laborites were clearly embittered, attributing Peres’ decision more to the personal sting of being unseated by a relative neophyte like Peretz than to any compelling ideological motive.

“There is no real reason for Shimon Peres to leave the Labor Party and join a rival party.... I could understand if he was leaving because we fundamentally changed our stripes, but to leave only because he lost an election?” senior Labor lawmaker Ophir Pines-Paz said on Israel’s Channel 10.

Although Peres gave no indication that he would run for parliament on the Kadima ticket, Israeli media reports have said he would secure a senior post in a new Sharon administration, most likely as a peace envoy.

It was unclear to what extent Peres’ support for Sharon would translate into votes for Kadima, though his presence in a prominent post would undoubtedly lend a new Sharon government added prestige in the eyes of the international community.

Electoral politics has always been a luckless pursuit for Peres, who has twice served as prime minister but lost no fewer than five elections for the post. As a Nobel laureate, he commands enormous prestige abroad, but though respected at home, he has always displayed an inability to attract votes.

Peres had telegraphed his decision well in advance; Israeli media predicted it for days. Speculation was heightened when two prominent Labor politicians close to Peres, Dalia Itzik and Haim Ramon, defected to Kadima. Those moves were seen as having Peres’ blessing.

A party confidant of Peres, Shmuel Rifman, told Israel Radio shortly before the announcement that the “degradation” Peres had suffered in losing the leadership played a role in the decision. But Rifman insisted that peace considerations were paramount.

“A statesman of Shimon Peres’ stature can help Ariel Sharon promote peace,” he said.

Peres himself described the decision as a wrenching one.

“This is a most difficult day for me,” he told the news conference, which was timed to precisely coincide with the start of Israel’s main evening news broadcasts. All the channels carried it live.

Though his demeanor was calm and quiet, Peres took some hard swipes at Labor and its new leadership. Peretz has said he wants a peace settlement with the Palestinians, but he has also suggested that domestic social issues and an easing of hard-edged economic reforms would be his top priority.

“I found my party to be at odds with the current political reality, and without making light of my emotional attachment to the party’s historic path, to its thousands of members, I must defer to larger and more pressing considerations,” Peres said.

In his remarks, Peres cited Israel’s revered founding prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, whom he served as an aide. In 1965, the two of them worked together in founding one of Labor’s precursors.

“I learned from my teacher and mentor ... to place the country above the political party,” said Peres, who did not take reporters’ questions after his statement.

The Labor leadership race laid bare a long-standing rift in Israeli society: that between the European-descended elite and the once-downtrodden Jews of Middle Eastern and North African descent.

Peres himself said nothing about the racial component of the contest, but his brother Gigi launched an angry attack on North African immigrants like the Moroccan-born Peretz, accusing them of having hijacked the Labor movement.

Some Israeli commentators took a cynical view, repeating the often-voiced accusation that Peres simply could not face the idea of being a marginal figure in Labor, relegated to a political Siberia.

“Peres always aspires to a position of power,” commentator Sima Kadmon wrote in the daily newspaper Yediot Aharonot.

“Although he likes to grumble that he isn’t looking for a job, that is exactly what he is looking for.”

Palestinians were careful to characterize the development as an Israeli matter, but several top officials, speaking privately, seemed buoyed by the prospect of Peres’ continued involvement in a policymaking position.

“It is my hope that when the voting is completed, Israeli voters will have picked a government that is committed to once again engaging in a meaningful peace process that will bring the conflict, and the occupation, to a close,” said Saeb Erekat, the senior Palestinian negotiator.