In Labor’s Loss, Some Analysts See Signs of Historic Power Shift

“Historic” may be a term that is used too often, but respected Israeli political analysts believe the Labor Party’s electoral debacle last month was a watershed in the balance of power between left and right in Israel.

Labor Party Chairman Amram Mitzna believes the decision to join Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s previous national unity government was one of the main reasons for the crushing defeat Labor suffered at the polls on Jan. 28.

Mitzna hopes that leading Labor into opposition will allow him to rebuild the party and quickly turn it into a credible government alternative.

“Our stay in opposition will be short,” he promised party faithful in his concession speech.

But experts aren’t so sure. Ephraim Ya’ar, head of Tel Aviv University’s Steinmetz Center for Peace Research, argues that the decline in support for the Labor Party and the left in general stems from deep and possibly irreversible changes in Israeli voting patterns.

In 1992, when Yitzhak Rabin came to power, Labor and its more dovish ally Meretz won 56 seats in the 120-member Knesset. Last month, they polled a combined total of just 25.

In other words, in just over a decade the left has lost more than 55 percent of its parliamentary strength. Ya’ar contends that this is part of an ongoing, long-term trend.

In a forthcoming article entitled “Toward the Third Era of Israeli Democracy,” Ya’ar divides Israeli politics into three periods: The hegemony of the left from the 1930s to the mid-’70s; a shifting equilibrium between left and right from 1977 to the turn of the century; and the hegemony of the right for the foreseeable future.

Ya’ar contends that the new trend already was evident in the summer of 1999, shortly after Labor’s Ehud Barak was elected prime minister.

Ya’ar’s “peace index,” a monthly measure of public support for the Oslo peace process with the Palestinians, reached record highs at the time of Barak’s election, but within months it began to slide.

“The general public sensed there was something wrong with Oslo before the leaders did,” Ya’ar says. “And their doubts were confirmed first by the failure of the July 2000 Camp David peace summit and then by the eruption of the Palestinian intifada two months later.”

The left was accused of naivete for believing peace with the Palestinians was possible and was blamed for the horrific wave of terrorism that followed the collapse of the peace process, Ya’ar says.

Ya’ar sees another deep attitudinal change, also related to the intifada, working to the left’s detriment: the strengthening of what he calls “the particularist Jewish component of the collective identity.”

His peace index surveys indicate that the terrorist threat has made Israelis more insular, identifying more with the right’s nationalist and traditional Jewish values rather than with the cosmopolitan, universal values of the left.

Even many left wingers now advocate Palestinian statehood as a means of preserving Israel’s Jewish character, not as an expression of the Palestinians’ right to self-determination, Ya’ar says.

But there is a paradox at the heart of Ya’ar’s analysis: He finds that the public still accepts many of the left’s key ideas on peace, including an independent Palestinian state, the evacuation of settlements, and the pre-1967 borders as the basis for future peace negotiations.

“The public accepts the left’s message but wants the messenger to come from the right,” he says, “because the left is not trusted, seen as not skillful enough and as too eager to advance the process.”

Journalist Ruvik Rosenthal, another longtime observer of left-wing affairs, adds two more reasons for the left’s decline: its lack of a distinctive socioeconomic policy and the loss during the 1990s of its huge Histadrut Trade Union power base.

“These elections,” he wrote in the Israeli daily Ma’ariv, “are the fault line in the transformation of the Israeli left into an historic episode which has ended. The political system will now reflect a profound rejection of the left and its culture.”

As a result, Rosenthal foresees dire consequences for Israelis’ attitudes about education, democracy, freedom of expression, the independence of the judiciary and minority rights.

However, not all analysts agree that the left’s decline is irreversible.

Yaron Ezrahi, a political scientist at the Hebrew University and the Israel Democracy Institute, accepts Ya’ar’s thesis that the political argument between left and right in Israel has been almost exclusively over peace and security. But voter behavior depends on the state of the peace process at any given time, he says.

“If there is real hope for peace and a reasonable leadership on the other side, that will revive the left,” Ezrahi declares.

He also has a different explanation for the apparent contradiction between support for the parties of the right but the positions of the left.

The elections reflected a dissonance between what many potential left-wing voters see as the pressing need of the moment — fighting terror — and what they see as Israel’s prime long-term interest in making peace, Ezrahi says.

“They have no faith in the Likud’s long-term prescriptions,” he says. “But they don’t trust Labor and Meretz on what needs to be done in the short term.”

But Ezrahi doesn’t underestimate the difficulties the left will face in making a comeback. He notes that Labor and Meretz are struggling to make inroads in several key constituencies, including Sephardim, Russian immigrants and young people.

For example, Labor and Meretz together polled just 16 percent among young first-time voters in the January election, while the secular, centrist Shinui Party got 16 percent and the center-right Likud Party won 34 percent.

In 1996, in contrast, the Labor-Meretz share of the young, first-time vote was a staggering 46 percent.

Mitzna now is promising a nationwide effort to reverse public attitudes.

“We will be present in the development towns and the villages,” he says, “in the cities, the kibbutzim, and the poor neighborhoods, in the Galilee and the coastal plain and the Negev.”

But the question is whether, given changing attitudes and the new demography in Israel, the public will be in any mood to listen to the historic party’s new messages.