Labor Looks About to Fracture; Chair Asks Break with Histadrut

The Labor Party, whose convention opened with explosive dissension Tuesday, may lose some of its brightest young members before it closes at the end of the week.

Haim Ramon, chairman of the party’s Knesset faction, touched off a rhetorical storm when he offered a series of motions aimed at severing the party’s intimate links to Histadrut, the all-embracing trade union federation, which date from the pre-statehood era.

But Ramon’s proposals were all voted down by a large majority of the nearly 3,000 delegates to the convention, leading political observers to predict significant defections among the reform-minded minority.

Ramon and Yossi Beilin, another of Labor’s rising young stars, proposed that membership in Kupat Holim, Israel’s major health care agency, no longer be contingent on Histadrut membership.

That would strike a massive blow at one of Histadrut’s main sources of power. Ramon and Beilin also urged that Histadrut’s economic empire, Hevrat Ovdim, be sold to its members.

Considering the negative reaction to his ideas, Ramon seems ripe for departure, a blow to Labor, which has slumped badly in the most recent opinion polls.

Ramon is considered one of the party’s most promising politicians, a match for the Dan Meridors and Ehud Olmerts who are ascending in the ranks of Likud.

Labor faces an even more fundamental split, as doves and hawks battle over the party platform.

The party’s platform committee has produced a draft advocating territorial compromise on the Golan Heights and other positions unpalatable to the hawks.

Informed sources told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that if the platform is defeated, leading doves will walk out of the party with Ramon, among them Ezer Weizman, Uzi Baram and Amir Peretz. They are likely to align with the opposition peace bloc consisting of the leftist Citizens Rights Movement, Mapam and Center-Shinui.