Behind the Headlines the Labor Party in Crisis

Four months after its devastating defeat in the Knesset elections the Labor Party seems in danger of losing its way and perhaps even disintegrating. Labor leaders Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres and Yiga’ Allon openly and publicly question each other’s competence to lead the party. Labor has not been able to adjust to its role in the opposition, partly because most of the new government’s decisions in domestic affairs are the direct results of earlier policy decisions taken by the Labor government. Thus Labor’s criticism of those decisions has an unconvincing ring.

Even with regards to foreign affairs the Labor Party is having a hard time winning public sympathy. The Begin government deliberately strives to focus its foreign policy on those issues in which Labor shares almost the same views, such as the complete negation of the PLO as a negotiating partner, the absolute rejection of an independent Palestinian state and the firm refusal to withdraw to the 1967 lines.

Labor’s ideological and personal problems are endangering its continued role as a major force in the Israeli political arena. The personal problems derive from the bitter rivalry between Rabin, Allon and Peres over the party leadership. Though Peres was elected almost unanimously as Labor chairman before the elections he is not supported by Rabin or Allon. Rabin recently accused Peres publicly of having undermined him as Prime Minister. The former Premier declared flatly that he does not consider Peres as his leader and Allon expressed the same view. The Achdut Haavoda faction in Labor, from which Allon derives his main support, asked, with bitter sarcasm, why Peres should lead the party while most of the ex-Rafi faction–which is considered Peres’ constituency–has found its place in the Likud bloc. The reference is to the La Am (State List) faction in Likud, which is comprised mostly of ex-Rafi men, including Foreign Minister Moshe Dayan.

But the sharp differences between the three central figures in Labor are not the sole manifestations of the party’s personal crisis. Most of its veteran and most prominent politicians are nearing the end of their political careers. People like the former Finance Minister Yehoshua Rabinowitz, the once influential Minister-Without-Portfolio Israel Galili, former Histadrut Secretary-General Yitzhak Ben-Aharon, and former Justice Minister Haim Zadok are men in their sixties who lack the enthusiasm, the ambition and the capability to pull the party back onto the high road to power.

The ideological crisis of the party is reflected in its almost frantic casting about for a stand whenever a controversial political issue arises. The Labor Party has no united approach towards the Palestinian problem, territorial compromise or West Bank settlements. One faction of which MK Yossi Sarid is an authentic representative, champions the creation of a clearly ideological party of the left, while another group represented by former Transport Minister God Yaacobi advocates the formation of a party of center and dreams about eventual unification with the Democratic Movement For Change (DMC). A third section represented by MK Amos Haddor, brother of Commerce Minister Yigal Hurwitz and a cousin of Foreign Minister Dayan, urges the establishment of a government of a national unity under Menachem Begin.

The Labor Party also suffers from severe financial problems, a legacy of its election route. It has organizational difficulties too and as a result morale at the grass roots level is at its lowest ebb.