Former Prime Minister Shimon Peres disclosed this week that he had communicated with Syrian President Hafez Assad before deciding earlier this year to advance the date for Israel’s national elections.
Speaking Thursday at Labor Party headquarters in Tel Aviv, Peres said he had sent a message to Assad, asking whether Israel and Syria could reach a peace agreement by October of this year.
Assad responded that he would be willing to meet with the Israeli prime minister, but gave no date, Peres said.
The meeting of Labor Party members came a day after senior party officials declared that the May 29 election should be invalidated because of fraud.
National elections were originally scheduled to be held in October. But Peres, who assumed leadership after the November assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, moved them forward.
Some observers have said two factors played into the decision to move the elections – expectations that Peres could win from a sympathy vote resulting from Rabin’s assassination and the assessment that Syrian peace negotiations were dragging, and could hurt Peres’ chances if elections were held as scheduled.
But after choosing May 29 as election day, four terrorist suicide bombings in February and March for the most part erased Peres’ lead in opinion polls over Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu.
Labor Party members also have accused each other of causing the defeat of Peres by failing to come up with an effective response to the Likud campaign and a clear message for immigrant and religious voters.
At the Labor Party meeting, Peres refrained from revealing his future political plans. But he said the party should still hold its internal leadership elections as scheduled next year.
Meanwhile, three senior Labor members said they would request that 6,700 ballot boxes he checked on the suspicion that they had been subjected to tampering.
One of the protesters, Knesset member Raanan Cohen, submitted a petition to the Jerusalem District Court this week, asking that the election results for prime minister be disqualified.
He said that a sample check of 100 boxes found signs of tampering, including one box in which 304 ballots were cast in a voting district with only 274 voters.
Some of the boxes examined revealed that people who did not exist, were abroad or dead had been registered as having voted.
Cohen’s would be the second try to disqualify the election results.
The High Court of Justice already threw out three petitions challenging the election results.
The petitioners had argued that blank ballots should have been counted as valid abstentions – which in turn would have altered the results in the vote for prime minister with neither candidate winning the necessary majority of more than 50 percent.
Netanyahu defeated Peres by just less than 1 percent, or 30,000 votes.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
